Dan Friedman was among few Americans who had a chance to receive proper European design education. But legendary Ulm was nothing like he had imagined. The school had a very precise, almost scientific approach to design, with a lot of theory, psychology and even math. What used to be, ten years ago, a cutting-edge way to teach turned into a dusty ghost of Modernism.
Proposed wrappings for Bonwit Teller department store, while with Anspach Grossman Portugal, 1976.
it is a profession which involves a great deal of drudgery and concern about minutiae that can only be measured in quarter points and millimetres. graphic design has always defined its focus in narrow terms—in ways that may stimulate graphic designers into a frenzy but mean nothing to the rest of society.
—dan friedman
Cover for the book of solutions to the Grid Project at Yale 1993–94.
The Basel School of Design became Friedman’s second attempt to study in Europe, and the difference was mind-blowing: the school was already taken over by rebels and revolutionaries like Wolfgang Weingart who advocated for intuitive, against-the-grid teaching. There Dan Friedman learned all kinds of professional radicalism and was ready to bring it back home.
Dan Friedman, Wolfgang Weingart Speaks to America, poster for a college lecture tour, 1972.
Cover, Typograpfishe Monatsblatter, 19717.
Yale Symphony poster, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, 1973. Collection of Tom Strong.
what appealed to me was making things with my own hands, getting dirty, raw and messy. it was the antithesis of working in a clean graphic design environment. —dan friedman
Mutant Chair, 1985. Produced in collaboration with Paul Ludick. © Joe Coscia, Jr.