Today marks of the birth of Yves Jose Zimmermann. Born in Switzerland and studied at Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel. In 1957, he went to New York to work under Will Burtin at Studio of Visual Research and DesAll Postsign and did corporate image design at Franzen studio of architecture. He worked for Geigy Chemical Corporation in New York. Later, he became an art director of Geigy S.A in Montreal. In 1961, he moved to Barcelona as an art director at Geigy S.A until 1966. He was invited to be a teacher at Elisava, the first design school in Spain. He set up his own studio in 1968
He initiated the collection edition of books on design to the publisher Gustavo Gili in 1975. They published wide range of subject such as architecture, art, aesthetics, cinema, design, visual communications and many others. Since 1979, the collection was distributed throughout the world. (Spanish Edition)
In 1988, Yves Zimmermann and Ana Alavedra established Zimmermann Associates in Barcelona Spain with speciality of corporate identity, editorial design and packaging.
Yves Zimmermann designed Typographische Monatsblätter's cover for several issue in 1958
Magazine covers for TM Typographische Monotsblatter. The controversial covers (only the first one was actually used) are an attempt to create the words new by designing them new, by printing words as they are spoken, not as they are usually written.
"Humans should be free to create and transmit their own expression in writing. They should look at the old signs in a new way" Yves Zimmermann
(Typography Today pg 64)
"To us the task of graphic design consists in understanding thoroughly a client’s problem related to visual communication and offering him the best possible solution to that problem."