- Weingart was born near the Swiss border of Germany, in the Salem Valley, in 1941.
- He enrolled in a two-year course in applied art and design at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart in 1958.
- There he discovered the school printing facilities and, at the age of 17, set metal type for the first time.
- After graduating, he undertook a rigorous apprenticeship as a typesetter at Ruwe Printing in Stuttgart, where he met house designer Karl-August Hanke, a former student at the Basel School of Design.
- It was Hanke who became a mentor to the young Weingart, introducing him to design being done outside of Germany, particularly in Switzerland, where Ruder, Armin Hofmann and Karl Gerstner were making work that would come to be referred to as International Style.
- Although strong evidence of Swiss orderliness could be seen creeping into the simple letterheads and business cards that Weingart designed during his time at Ruwe, his work possessed a spontaneity and deliberate carelessness that transcended the precepts of Swiss design of that period.
- Even at this early stage in his professional development, Weingart’s innate understanding of the limitations of perpendicular composition in lead typesetting, coupled with the strict technical and aesthetic discipline of his apprenticeship and his inherently rebellious nature, drove him inexorably to pursue a more experimental approach.
- A dropped case of six-point type served as the basis for his round compositions. He scooped the type up from the floor and tied it up to form a disc. By printing both the faces and the bottoms of the bodies of the metal type sorts, he achieved the illusion of depth. The discs became spheres.
- At the end of his three-year apprenticeship, Weingart had developed a keen sensitivity to the relationship between printing and the act of designing.
- Hanke encouraged him to attend the Basel School of Design, and Weingart travelled to the city in 1963, where he met with Hofmann and Ruder and applied to the school in person. The following year, he enrolled as an independent student.
- It wasn’t until 1968 that Hofmann and Ruder realiSed their ultimate goal of creating an advanced graphic-design program for postgraduate professionals at the Basel School, in which a select group might engage in intensive multidisciplinary projects intended to further hone their skills and re-energise their intellectual engagement with design.
- In a bold move, Hofmann invited the 27-year-old Weingart, who was then virtually unknown, to conduct the typography class, as designers from all over the world flocked to the program.
- Weingart felt right at home in the type-shop at the school—it served as his laboratory as well as his classroom, and it was in this space that he executed his magic. The experiments he had begun during his apprenticeship intensified.
- He used curved metal rules, creating circular compositions embedded in plaster. He experimented with interwoven geometric text composing influenced by ancient stone construction in the Middle East, where he had first travelled in the early 1960s. His classes themselves became workshops to test and expand models for a new typography.
- While teaching, Weingart continued to produce a formidable body of experimental work in his own right: posters as well as cover designs and call-for-entry designs for Typographische Monatsblätter magazine, where he served on the editorial board from 1970 to 1988.
- A 1976 poster he designed and printed for photographer John Glagola includes wide silver bars printed across the artist’s name, heralding the decline of foundry type as a viable commercial means of printing.
- Weingart insistently sought new ways of creating images, adopting the halftone screens and benday films used in photomechanical processes as his new tools beginning in the mid-1970s.
- He used the repro camera to stretch, blur and cut type—a radical new approach for marrying continuous-tone images and letters.
- He would boast that his design process relied solely on these film manipulations and overlapping colours, seen perhaps most strikingly in his work for the Basel Kunstkredit—black-and-white world-format posters designed between 1976 and 1979 and a series of color posters made between 1980 and 1983.
- Through his experimentations, Weingart was inventing his own visual language. As former teaching colleague Gregory Vines once wrote: “He pursues an idea until he is sure if it works or not. In the manner of Gutenberg, typesetter, printer and inventor Weingart realises his publications or posters from beginning to end by himself.
- He chooses to be involved in the entire process, from the concept to preparation of the film montage for the printer....When looking through the copy camera or while developing film, new ideas and possibilities become evident, even mistakes trigger fascinating possibilities.”
- Lloyd Miller, who studied with Weingart in the early 1980s, notes, “He is a master and pioneer in this field....Weingart’s working method was very much a precursor to the layering capabilities software programs like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop would eventually offer.”
- Still, Weingart never forgot his intensive training and experience in the intricacies of hand-setting type. He brought fascinating clarity and structure to dense, complex information found in the 1974 Creative Jewellery brochure and the 1980 catalog for Art Basel.
- Through his investigations, he even sought to capture the spontaneity and vigour of his own deliberately distorted handwriting as a form of typography, in posters announcing his 1990 retrospective exhibition at the Institute for New Technical Form in Darmstadt, Germany.
- While working on the weekends in the type-shop at the school, Weingart often wheeled out a reel-to-reel tape player, and the music of German composers—Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart—would accompany his labour.
- One of his favourites was a recording of legendary orchestra conductor Bruno Walter rehearsing Mozart’s Linz Symphony in which Walter implores his musicians to share his grasp of a particular passage as “shimmering.” The same could describe Weingart’s body of work. His typographic vision embodies a similar vitality and richness. It shimmers.
Example work shown below:
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