Swiss graphic designer Lora Lamm (born 1928) is best known for her ten glorious years of work in Milan, from 1953 to 1963, when she designed packaging, posters and invitations for La Rinascente department store, Pirelli, and Olivetti.
Lora Lamm, image via Archivio Grafica Italiana.
Lamm’s own style mixes typography with illustration, organising the space in an uncluttered, rigorous way, where everything serves the purpose of clarity.
Occasioni di gennaio poster, 1962. Design: Lora Lamm.
In 1958, Lamm headed the creative department of La Rinascente department store, where she worked until 1962. In 1963, Lamm returned to Zurich to become a member of Frank Thiessing’s design agency. Today her work is stored and curated by the Museum of Design in Zurich. Lamm made a very personal mark on the advertising style of Pirelli, using collage and photomontage and communicating with a quintessentially feminine touch.
Rolles poster advertisement for Pirelli tires, 1961. Design: Lora Lamm. © Pirelli Foundation.
Poster advertisement for Olivetti Summa 15 typewriter, 1962. Design: Lora Lamm.
American artist, designer, and writer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (1928–2024) was the first to fuse Swiss Modernism with the West Coast aesthetic.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, 1955.
The result is formal but fun, modern architecture reshaped by color and form. In the 1960s, Barbara created Supergraphics mural at the Sea Ranch community in California, featuring huge stripes, arrows, and letterforms that fly across the room, becoming art that people can walk into. “I was a Californian. I went back to San Francisco and I broke all the rules. My designs were bigger and bolder than my Swiss classmates' solutions had been. Give me a big white wall and I covered it with big red stripes,” Barbara sums up her philosophy.
Sea Ranch ram's head logo designed by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon.
Stauffacher Solomon’s first major job as a designer was to develop the corporate style of the Sea Ranch—a community in California devised in 1964 by a group of young architects from the University of Berkeley and often referred to as “California’s modernist utopia”. In the late sixties, Stauffacher Solomon shook up the architectural world with her groundbreaking Supergraphics—an abstract mural blending Swiss style, wooden architecture, and bright colors.
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Moonraker Athletic Center interior supergraphics, 2018.