Herbert Matter was born in Engleberg, Switzerland on April 15 1907. He studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-art in Geneva from 1925-27 and continued his study at the Academic Moderne in Paris under Fernand Leger and Ozenfant. Then he started working with A.M Cassandre on poster design and Le Cobusier on architecture and exhibition. He also learned photography and typography under Deberny and Peigot in Paris.
In 1932, he returned to Zurich to work as a designer and photographer for the Swiss National Tourist office. During this time he created a number of remarkable posters by using photomontage technique. He modified the scale of the images and the placement of typography, creating a highly contrasted design. Today these posters are about 75 years old but they still look fresh, strong and current. Fifty years after the creation of Matter's posters, Paula Scher used them as her inspiration for designing swatch poster. You can tell how good Herbert Matter was.
Matter married Mercedes Carles in 1941 and worked for Container Corporation of America (CCA), where he designed a lot of posters and advertisements. He still used photomontage technique for the example of the advertisements ( see under). Even though the design coordination hasn't developed yet surely the advertisements gave a lot of attention.
In 1946, he went to New York City after he had an exhibition of photography at Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1943. He was then hired as designer and advertising consultant for Knoll. His strength for playing with scale can be seen in many of Knoll's advertising. His sense of color is also very strong, but elegant.
It seemed that he liked slab typeface when he was making logos. Please see his trademark and logo under. He was truly a great photographer and typographer. I do really enjoy seeing his work. Too bad in 1959 his early works were destroyed in a fire. But even so, the remainder of his works are very inspiring.