I know a lot has been written about this…
Twen's Art Director, Willy Fleckhaus 1925 - 1987
The ground-breaking 1960s German magazine Twen, including on this blog. But then again, you can never get enough of a good thing.
When I first got into this funny old business of graphic design way back in the ‘60s, the high point of the month was picking up a copy of Twen magazine from the international newsagents in Old Compton Street, Soho. I couldn’t speak a word of German but that didn’t stop me from shelling out a not insubstantial amount for a mint copy of Twen. Apart from the visual delights of much nudity (it was the ‘60s, after all), along with Willy Fleckhaus’s dynamic layouts, there were two other important dimensions for me. The first was this typeface…
It is called Schmalfette Grotesk and was designed by Walter Haettenschweiler in
1954, a Swiss typoholic. Willy Fleckhaus used Schmalfette Grotesk as the main
headline face for Twen and it worked wonderfully.
Many designers in the UK at the time wanted to use it, but couldn’t as it wasn’t available here, even via the early iterations of photo setting. So, what to do? Easy: I’d have line photo prints made of the blocks of copy as they appeared in Twen and, with my trusty scalpel, cut the individual letters out for my own use.
Here is a book cover I designed in 1965 that uses cut-up Schmalfette for the
title.
Such innocent, hands-on days.
The second aspect of Twen that gave me a very big buzz was the work of Heinz Edelmann. His illustrations peppered the magazine more than any other illustrator’s. Fleckhaus’s art direction and Edelmann’s illustrations made for a startlingly fresh look for the time. Here are some examples of what made it great…
Heinze Edelmann 1934 - 2009
Twen also released albums graced with Edelmann’s work…
And of course it was Edelmann who created the look of The Beatles’ 1968
animated film, Yellow Submarine,
for which Edelmann was not only art director but also created a myriad of exotic characters, including the Blue Meanies…
Above Edelmann’s Blue Meanies
I am pretty sure that Ridley Scott must have been taken by them, as his coterie
of characters in his 1982 film Blade Runner had very similar traits…
Looking at Edelmann’s and Fleckhaus’s work, now some five decades later, one
can see the influence that the US creative powerhouse Push Pin Studios must
have had. Especially their late 1950s The Push Pin Graphic newspaper, which was an
experimental treasure trove of techniques and visual ideas.
Above The Push Pin Graphic newspaper from 1957. Below spreads for Twen 1960's
It is always fascinating to see how the inspiration of others filters through the creative bloodstream to resurface through the generations. Anyway, here is more of Edelmann’s wonderful later work from the 1980's for Theater der Welt…
You can see a very short interview with Heinz Edelmann here