The Swiss Grid

Poster House (New York City) is the first museum in the U.S. to be dedicated exclusively to posters, presenting a global view of the medium from its earliest appearances in the late 1800s to present-day uses.

The Swiss Grid was a Poster House exhibition that launched on February 26, 2020. Ten days after the opening, the museum shut down due to COVID-19. We helped Poster House transition the exhibition into a remote-learning tool that provides historical and pedagogical context for some of the technical teachings of design.

Using core material from the original exhibition, the microsite shows how a particular aesthetic—referred to as “The Swiss Grid”—developed in post–World War II Switzerland and spread around the world through generations of practitioners, and how that aesthetic was used to create incredible posters for the cultural sector. The site interweaves contemporary attitudes toward teaching mid-century Modernism and the desire to both break free of and find new use for grid systems in contemporary design.

View swissgrid.posterhouse.org