In 1948, Rudolf Dassler established a sports shoe factory in a small town in Germany with just a few employees. In the decades to follow, his company PUMA grew into one of the world’s most important sports and lifestyle brands. Illustrated with selected objects and images from the corporate archives, this book visually chronicles for...

In 1963, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, ZDF for short, was launched as a new public TV broadcaster in West Germany. With a program offering news, sports, culture and entertainment, it would become one of the country’s most influential media institutions. The TV station’s multifaceted design history began with a logo competition in the year before it went...

Japanese happiness is not the happiness of the Japanese. It is open to all cultures. However, it is Japanese aesthetics that have devoted more attention and dedication to the reconciliation of human beings and nature with the cycle of life than Western aesthetic theory that focuses on disinterested pleasure. It therefore opens up a particularly...

Félix Beltrán, born 1938 in Havana, Cuba, is one of the most important Latin American graphic designers. He studied at the famous School of Visual Arts in New York in the 1950s and was influenced by mid-century modernism. For more than six decades, he has shaped a conceptual approach to graphic design that emphasizes simplicity...

After the end of the Second World War, it becomes clear that the victorious powers cannot agree on a joint future for Germany. The Cold War begins. Germany is divided into two separate states. In Berlin, the division is carried out on a small scale. In 1961, the East builds a wall and turns the...

In 1949, the competition »Die besten Plakate des Jahres« (The Best Posters of the Year) took place for the first time in the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany. Designers could enter poster designs from the past year, a jury of experts awarded prizes for the best works. From 1966 onwards, there was such an...

Between 1954 and 1974, Hans Hillmann designed over 150 film posters for masterpieces of cinema — including films by Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa. In the early 1950s, while still a student, Hillmann began designing posters for the newly founded film distributor Neue Filmkunst Walter...

How do we define or measure luxury? Not with money or time, but diversity. Yet contemporary modes of living luxuriously have lost sight of this reality. This is why theory is needed to provide a course correction. As in evolution, luxury drives both diversity and a variety of forms in the history of individualism, too....

Modern graphic design has existed for more than a hundred years. In an exciting history of evolution, the discipline has evolved and established itself worldwide. The fact that we can trace this development in detail today is largely thanks to archives and collections that preserve posters, logos, book covers, design manuals, and small printed matter....