Swiss in CSS – Homage to the International Typographic Style | Hacker News Reader

Swiss in CSS – Homage to the International Typographic Style

swissincss.com

107 pointsRaSoJo16 comments

This is great. Really nice work. There's something restful about the animations.

What I find amazing about this kind of design is how 'digital' it looks – years before computers were powerful enough.

He's Dutch not Swiss, but designers like Wim Crouwel[0] were hand-drawing pixel fonts in the 60s, and pretty much all of his work from then looks just as fresh today. And you've got to love his 60's modernist designer space suit[1].

[0]http://www.iconofgraphics.com/wim-crouwel/

[1]https://www.flickr.com/photos/eyemagazine/5881716772/

Love the suit. He looks like a Fred Armisen character.

Maybe it is the physical proximity to artistic Italy. I don`t understand how a clearly Alemanni / Germanic culture like the majority of the Swiss managed to get world-wide known for things like "Helvetica" or the "Swiss Railway clock".

Besides my main job as a software engineer, I work as a tech-recruiter in Zurich and I observe that the more work is frontend-heavy the less it is subject to being outsourced as it is usually closer to the client.

If you look for a tech-job in Switzerland, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... or send me a mail to the address in my HN-profile.

Those same things have a very utilitarian, engineered flavor to them, that's a major part of the appeal. Instead of over-decoration and serifs, they carry clean, minimal lines and optimize for clarity and readability. That is, in some ways, a centerpiece of Swiss (and Germanic) culture.

Also, you need to remember that germanic cultures gave us all the Dutch Old Masters, Bauhaus, not to mention Mozart, Beethoven & co.

Great blog post with a lot of information I was wondering about.

In Zurich at least there are many big companies (Google, ibm, banks) which recruit engineers and most of them do not do front end work.

At Google (Zürich) there is for sure some frontend work; if you're unlucky it is GWT, if you're lucky it is Typescript.

I live in Switzerland. I am so much tired of this particular style. :)

What alternatives have caught your eye and been the most refreshing?

Small note: the original posters of Müller-Brockmann for “musica viva” are actually set in Akzidenz-Grotesk and not Helvetica.

I'm impressed how the author managed to make them all work as intended without Javascript.

These days, in modern browsers, you won't need JavaScript for 95%[1] of animations.

[1]: Pulled that number out of my ass

It looks off somehow, but that may be because of the lack of @font-face. I have no Helvetica on my computer, so some fall-back font is chosen instead.

This is really beautiful and impressive. I only wish the text was a little more highlightable.

Extremely nice portfolio and the art object by itself. Disclosure: I am Helvetica fan.

Awesome. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to get better at CSS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com