aufwärts
Imagine an art director without any design experience, no formal design education, no technical skills. What Fleckhaus had were the boldness and courage of a 28-year-old who wanted to talk about things that mattered to his generation (″Should girls wear long trousers?″ the first issue of Aufwärts asked). But it would be wrong to assume that Fleckhaus didn’t have any visual models: he wasn’t new to the editorial world, and he certainly had heard about Swiss typography.
A page of Aufwärts magazine, issue 16, 1954. Designed by Willy Fleckhaus.
A page of Aufwärts magazine, issue 16, 1954. Designed by Willy Fleckhaus.
A page of Aufwärts magazine, issue 11, 1956. Designed by Willy Fleckhaus.
fleckhaus used graphics to relive the youth that he had been denied: protest, opposition, liberalism, sentimentality, pleasure—all these things were worked out, processed through the layout. —adolf theobald
Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin, issue 81, 1982. Cover designed by Willy Fleckhaus. Illustration by Bernard Speckin.
twen
Twen (short for ″twenty″) was a magazine for the first generation of postwar teens and young adults. It was a wild conglomeration of the controversial ideas and blooming freedoms of the 1950s. A big part of the impact came from Willy Fleckhaus’ design: a 12-column modular grid with already familiar blown-up headlines set in Schmalfette Grotesk; psychedelic illustrations; extremely tightly cropped or enlarged black-and-white photos, and, of course, a lot of white space perfectly arranged on the page. Twen was stunning, groundbreaking, sometimes shocking (Fleckhaus used a photo of his wife giving birth in one issue) and definitely something that had never been seen before.
Twen magazine, issue 6, 1969. Cover designed by Willy Fleckhaus. Photo by Guido Mangold.
Twen magazine, issue 2, 1962. Cover designed by Willy Fleckhaus.