Pictogram, Poulet,

1975–90

For fifteen years, Hans-Rudolf Lutz collected the pictograms on transport packaging from around the world. They consist of instructions for transportation, company or brand logos, and pictures of either the products themselves or their use or consumption. Lutz initially became aware of the pictograms in 1975, when he worked as a visiting lecturer in Edmonton, Canada. He discovered the quaint symbols on some cardboard boxes put out for garbage collection, and cut them out and saved them. Soon his pastime developed into an obsession: wherever he was, he rummaged through piles of garbage, in the end unearthing a total of 15,000 of these “visual treasures.” In 1990, he self-published a third of them in his book Die Hieroglyphen von heute (Today’s Hieroglyphs). His intention was to provide professional designers with inspiration on how to create internationally comprehensible symbols. As the transport packaging did not have an advertising function, with the exception of fruit and vegetable crates, it was not beholden to any advertising or sales strategy. The symbols were rarely designed by professionals but rather by craftspeople in the corrugated cardboard industry, who proved capable of reducing them to the essential, internationally comprehensible information without detracting from their ingenuity or sensuality—as opposed to professional designers, who, according to Lutz, excessively schematized their pictograms. Nevertheless, their charming simplicity is also a result of flexographic printing, which allows for neither fine lines nor grayscale values. (Barbara Junod)