Geigy Group Presentation

A group presentation was done which we had to base it off "What is Good Design?" So in groups of four, we gathered information on the internet to find a decent artist/company that showed this interest. Below is the presentation notes we presented to the class.

Geigy were a Swiss pharmaceutical and company primarily active from the 1940’s to 1970’s founded by J.R. Geigy who’s in-house design shop (Also known as the Geigy propaganda department) was headed by Max Schmid which employed and was associated with many big freelance designers of the day such as Armin Hoffman, Jorg Hamburger, Karl Gerstner, Herbert Leupin, Toshihiro Katayama and Gottfried Honegger, among many others. The working environment was fantastic for these designers, as the design team were supplied with a constant stream of new products and given free reign over the copy and concepts, ignoring any conventions of what had come before. This resulted in original artwork that stood out from anything else on the shelf.

Geigy’s design team wanted to avoid a too narrow idea of style, and so focused on the idea of “corporate diversity” as the basic principle of the brand’s corporate identity, As art director Max Schmid defined the visual style of the company. Schmid’s emphasis was always on the use of strong visual images. He made use of black and white photography and even X-rays to condense a subject to its most elemental; and used stylised depictions of pests or body parts in focused treatments. The use of strong colours and clever design concepts on the packaging symbolised what treatment would be inside, for an example On this packaging of ‘Petrofran’, a ball and chain runs around all four sides of the package – when the perforated strip in the middle of the box is torn open, the links in the chain are broken, symbolising liberation.

Geigy’s medical packaging of the 50’s is some of the most recognized and iconic design work of the era. The design packaging is very typical modernist but is unique in its approach, the packaging uses type hierarchy, organising information while highlighting what’s most important keeping the balance instead of being top or bottom heavy. This was very different to the style at the time as varying types were used as well as decorative elements.  Also their use of strong identifiable colours really stood out at the time and indicated what was soon to follow. Geigy’s medical packaging design still influences packaging today as the clear, clean and simple approach to displaying information is still what is needed and preferred.

The designers were encouraged to reject the tired design concepts and visuals present in much of the competition and were instead required to engage in aesthetic exploration. Geigy sold medical products, chemicals and pesticides all with a distinctive but diverse visual approach, their minimalist graphic design in the 40’s and 50’s harkens back to a time when product design, even medical packaging looked both aesthetically stylish, and utilised a kind of 'minimalist cool' seen much less frequently in most modern packaging design. The chemical products and scientific subject matter lent itself to a high degree of visual abstraction and clinical reduction. Geigy were known as unique because they completely melded design for products with product manufacturing.