A bursary and publications programme for applied arts in Basel. The identity is built from layered offset type: each successive word or rule steps exactly one x-height below the previous and shifts no more than five degrees from horizontal. The step and the angle are the only inputs. All other decisions follow from them.
Three layers of the same word, each offset by one x-height, each tinted differently. The stagger is the logo. No single layer is the mark alone.
Primary (3 layers)
Monochrome (2 layers)
Single rule
Set the step height and the angle. Every layer shifts by exactly that step, at exactly that angle. The composition builds itself.
The grid overlay and dot screens are constant. Only step, angle, and count change.
Two process colours over warm white. Overlap is intentional: pink and blue multiply to produce a dark violet wherever they cross. The halftone black is never solid; it is always a screen.
Haas Grotesk Neue (here Archivo as a working equivalent): one weight family, always uppercase for identity marks, always tracking out. Body text is set in the same face at 9–11pt, no italics.
Display — 800 weight, uppercase, tracked
KUNSTKREDIT
BASEL 1978
Body — 400 weight, mixed case, 16/26
The bursary awards grants to artists and designers working in the applied arts. Applications open each February. Results are announced in April at the Kunsthalle.
Reference / mono (IBM Plex Mono)
Grant ref. KB-78-004
Awarded: Fr. 4.000–
Period: 01.03 – 31.08.1978
The layer-offset system applies intact to any format. Posters carry four to six layers; correspondence carries two. The dot screens and colour-box are optional at A5 and smaller.
Raster
Typo
Grafik
AUSSTELLUNG
KUNSTGEWERBEHÄUS BASEL
3.–30. APRIL 1978
78
The copy mirrors the visual logic: short, measured sentences, each beginning where the previous finished. No flourish. No rhetoric. The work speaks; the text marks time.
Apply the rules. Show the work.
Tagline used on all open-call materials. Lower case, tracked, no period.
The rule has exactly two inputs: step size and angle. Alter either independently on different layers and the composition stops being a system and becomes a collage.
Centring the layers removes the diagonal cascade. Without the directional stagger, the three repetitions read as emphasis (shouting) rather than structure (stepping).
Introducing a third input—say, a different typeface on one layer—breaks the single-voice constraint. The system claims only one rule. A second rule introduced silently is a lie in the work.
Solid fills instead of multiply blend modes kill the overlap. The collision of two colours producing a third is not a side effect; it is a colour in the palette.