In 2006, Benji Wiedemann joined forces with Alex Lampe to open their new design consultancy, that would later become Wiedemann Lampe.
He found, running his own business, he was more in control of his own schedule. And that gave him time to indulge his new passion – hunting down examples of designer Otl Aicher’s work on eBay.
Posters featured in Otl Aicher: The Legacy Archive at Wiedemann Lampe
Drawn to Aicher’s work, which included identities for Braun, Erco, Lufthansa and the Munich 1972 summer Olympics, it was a bit of a homecoming for Wiedemann.
He had spurned his native German culture when he first moved to the UK to study. But as his taste in music and design had “matured” he found himself returning to work that felt “true to him.”
“What is so beautiful about Aicher, he’s incredibly analytical, while also being an artist at heart,” Wiedemann says. But, compared to other names of 20th Century design, Aicher’s works could also be snapped up for a few Euros. “For me, that entry point is thrilling,” he adds.
Almost 20 years later, having built relationships with collectors Bernd Brandt and Stefan Haberl, and made visits to Aicher’s former studio in Rotis, Wiedemann Lampe has now been entrusted with the Aicher archive, from which the new LDF show has been curated.
The Rainbow Olympics
Much of what Wiedemann found on eBay were posters and ephemera from the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Arguably the project he is best-known for today, Aicher led a large and capable design team to produce an identity remembered for its colour – it was dubbed the Rainbow Games – as well as its innovative sporting pictograms, and its breadth and detail, consistent and considered across the enormous scope of its output.
The designer Jack Renwick first came across Aicher’s work via one of these posters in the local gymnastics club she attended as a child.
“I remember seeing it – not having a clue that people design these things – and having such a motivating feeling to it,” Renwick remembers. “It was just so striking on this wall, and I looked a bit like that gymnast with short brown hair. I thought, ‘God, I could be her’.”
Renwick did not become an Olympic gymnast, but did end up following in Aicher’s design footsteps. She remembers at art school realising that Aicher was the person who designed that poster she had loved as a youngster, and being “blown away by this whole epic identity system” she discovered.
While the visual output of Aicher’s work is compelling for Renwick and many others, it’s the thinking behind the visuals that has been most influential.
“An amazing strategist”
Designer Mark Holt first became interested in Aicher’s work around the same time as co-founding studio 8vo in the early 1980s. Pushing against the British design scheme of the time, he found in Aicher’s work a similar ideology he says, where design was “a conscious, reasoned act, an objective one, never to be aesthetically-led.”
Holt, who in 2019 published Munich ’72 The Visual Output of Otl Aicher’s Dept.XI, explains that many of the celebrated design elements were the work of the other designers working for Aicher: Gerhard Joksch drew the pictograms, Elena Winschermann created the mascot Waldi the dachshund, and Rolf Müller, Aicher’s deputy, was responsible for advertising and publications – as well as bringing much of “the sweetness on the eye,” Holt suggests.
Mark Holt’s Munich ’72 The Visual Output of Otl Aicher’s Dept.XI
Holt was compelled to create the book to document “easily the most far reaching brand identity, or corporate identity, as it was back then, ever produced.”
For Aicher to win this work at the age of 33 was evidence of the designer’s persuasive vision. “He could tell very good narratives,” Holt explains. “He could bring people along with him, get their empathy.”
Above all, Holt says, Aicher was “an amazing strategist.”
Meaning and social responsibility
Born in Germany in 1922, Aicher’s outlook was shaped by his experiences of Nazi Germany. In 1946, with activist Inge Scholl, later his wife, he co-founded a school for adult education in Ulm (vh Ulm).
It was built around the idea of freedom through education, and built on the White Rose resistance movement that Scholl’s siblings had participated in, and been executed for.
In 1953, he also set up a design school, the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, founded with Swiss polymath Max Bill.
Inspired in part by the Bauhaus, and employing designers such as Josef Albers, it carried the vh Ulm’s ethos of social responsibility through a holistic design curriculum, encompassing politics, philosophy and science.
From the school’s visual communication department, Aicher led influential graphic design projects for clients such as Braun, (then working with new designer Dieter Rams), and Lufthansa.
Posters featured in Otl Aicher: The Legacy Archive at Wiedemann Lampe
It was a crucial period of rebuilding in Germany, and Aicher, “took on a very societal role – he was very much interested in design serving a purpose,” Holt says. “You know, he had no time at all for embellishment.”
The Olympics work, “demonstrates Aicher’s philosophy to understand the current state of the world and recognise a need to create a positive impact through this global opportunity,” Renwick says.
Alongside the great designs, she wants more people to appreciate this “moral responsibility in action” that characterised Aicher’s approach. As design feels the pressure from the rise of AI, she thinks we need to be thinking about, talking about, and educating new generations in developing these ways of thinking.
“You can just ask AI to come up with a design for you. But AI can’t do the philosophical understanding of our society, and people’s mindset; of why it would be creating something,” she says.
Thinking and making: a human touch
For Bob Young, creative partner at Alphabetical, it is easy to “take for granted the complexity and visual impact of Aicher’s work in modern society.”
“Our daily lives are oversaturated with creative imagery that are basically assimilations of each other, that feel familiar and comfortable and fit into a genre so that audiences understand precisely what they are.”
There was a bravery to Aicher’s work, he argues. “Admittedly, many of Aicher’s typographic approaches would not pass accessibility standards today.
“However, as much as you have to admire the control and clean grid systems he regularly used, there are wildly experimental type treatments that often responded to unique compositions and ideas within his work that still inspire, and may never be seen again in such wide-reaching public-facing designs.”
Otl Aicher: The Legacy Archive at Wiedemann Lampe, part of the London Design Festival
Compared to the present day – where “we’ve reached peak mock-up” as Wiedemann puts it – the new show features Aicher’s laboriously-made ‘logograms,’ where he would present hand-cut elements of the design system on one page.
It is this human touch that Wiedemann wants to share with visitors to the exhibition.
“To look at something that is so striking, so considered, it’s so beautifully reduced, but it’s so warm and human, for me, it’s disarming,” he says.
Posters featured in Otl Aicher: The Legacy Archive at Wiedemann Lampe
Posters featured in Otl Aicher: The Legacy Archive at Wiedemann Lampe
Posters featured in Otl Aicher: The Legacy Archive at Wiedemann Lampe
Posters featured in Otl Aicher: The Legacy Archive at Wiedemann Lampe
Posters featured in Otl Aicher: The Legacy Archive at Wiedemann Lampe