Otl Aicher's Isny
Content
How a German town defied the postcard mentality
Otl Aicher's Isny
Content
How a German town defied the postcard mentality
Over the course of ten years, Otl Aicher distilled a verdant tourist town in Germany into a system of 128 pictograms: stark, reductive and entirely black and white.
For London Design Festival, we hosted an exhibition and published a book that chronicles his boundary-pushing body of work.
Uncovering Otl Aicher
Otl Aicher’s Isny celebrates the work iconic 20th century graphic designer Otl Aicher produced for the German town Isny im Allgäu. Aicher is well known internationally for his work on the ’72 Munich Olympics, but this story remains untold to English-speaking audiences.
A book celebrating Aicher’s rare works
We went on a road trip through southern Germany to visit Isny, the Ulm School archive and Aicher’s former home and studio in Rotis. The resulting book is more than 100 pages of original editorial content and rare works from the archive. This was the inaugural book by DNCO’s sister publishing company, Place Press.
Exhibition of original posters
More than 40 original posters were displayed at Ground Floor Space, DNCO’s in-house gallery — the most comprehensive exhibition of Otl Aicher’s work for Isny to be exhibited in the UK. It was covered globally by Dezeen, Monocle, Wallpaper*, Creative Review and Idea Magazine.
