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Herbert Matter. Der kleine Schweizer Führer. Zürich: Schweizerischen Verkehrszentrale, 1935

“Red, blue and black were his preferred colours. These he employed for tourist brochures and posters in careful montages and superimpositions of cut-out photographs which often give the effect of full colour. Unlike the montages of Heartfield or the Soviets, there is no dramatic conjunction of images; instead Matter contrives an artificial, seamless space. These posters were printed like illustrated magazines, by the gravure process, which deposited a dense weight and ink on the paper. Their lettering, always in a drawn sans serif, was overprinted to allow for titling in different languages. In leaflets advertising holiday resorts Matter used similar techniques but he stretched the limits of letterpress printing -overlapping images and allowing them to fade at the edges through grey to the shiny white of the paper, like images dissolving on a cinema screen.”

Richard Hollis. Graphic design: a concise history. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994 (p. 78-79)

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