Butterflies, nasturtiums, roses and chromatic greys

The colouring of plants, the radiant blue of the Alpine sky and the baroque churches of southern Germany were his inspiration: Otl Aicher designed a modern age brimming with joyful colour.

“Can you picture a blaze of nasturtiums?” That was one of the questions Otl Aicher asked graphic designer Monika Schnell. The assignment was to develop a colour spectrum for the Druckhaus Maack printing house. “And for green, think of sage, or if you want the green to be slightly silvery and a bit furry, then think of the underside of a poplar leaf!”¹ Aicher, as many of his associates report, was “knowledgeable and affectionate”² when he spoke of colours.

He collected hues in countless black boxes. All the sheets of paper were arranged by hue. There were samples of a colour in every saturation and degree of brightness imaginable. Sometimes he had the coloured sheets specially made by a screen printer. Aicher was convinced that an extensive collection of such coloured papers was a tool that no designer can do without. Monika Schnell remembers that clearly. Both as a faculty member and a graphic designer, Aicher believed that choosing and combining colours should always be a process of trial and error – the result of experimentation and personal experience.

Interaction of Color

The exercises devised by Josef Albers were the trigger that prompted Aicher to explore colours in depth. The artist, who had both studied and taught at the Bauhaus, had emigrated to the US before the war and became head of the Art Department at Yale University in 1950. Between 1953 and 1955, he taught two courses at the School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung / HfG) that Otl Aicher, Inge Scholl and Max Bill had founded in Ulm. Although Aicher himself taught in the Department of Visual Design, he took part in Albers’ basic exercises along with the students.

Aicher was impressed by Albers’ method of working with commercially available, industrially printed coloured papers because it meant that the uncontrollable coincidences that occur when mixing pigments could be avoided. On top of that, working with papers, a craft knife and glue was both practical and inexpensive. Aicher applied the principle of Albers’ exercises on transparency in numerous posters for Ulm Adult Education Centre.

Aicher – like his teacher Albers – was always interested in the relationships, in the “interactions” between the individual hues. It seems safe to assume that, as a result of the countless potential combinations that Albers’ method made accessible to him, he felt encouraged to choose unusual contrasts for his designs at times – pairings like golden brown and light blue, pink and light green, or violet and light green.

From greige to vlau – from feeling to thinking

From 1957 on, Aicher headed Development Group 5 (E5), which operated as an independent design office within the HfG Ulm. In 1962, Ludwigshafen-based chemical company BASF commissioned E5 to develop an application-based colour system intended for Luran 52, a polystyrene it used in kitchen appliances. In keeping with the goal of establishing a scientific basis for design, Aicher and the E5 team produced a study in connection with this BASF assignment, including an extensive theoretical section with detailed texts on colour physics, colour perception, colorimetry, colour systems and colour symbolism.⁴

Aicher put Hans (Nick) Roericht in charge of the second, practical part. It involved several months of testing potential colour scales and meticulously documenting the series of experiments. Roericht recalls: “I ended up collecting 6,000 colour samples, spraying them in tempera in the basement and sorting them. We managed to pull off the trick of reducing the three-dimensional colour space, which is difficult to depict on something like a flat colour card, to two phenomenological dimensions.”⁵

Chromatic grey

Aicher and Roericht sorted the colours of the BASF Colorthek according to monochromatic criteria (colours of the same hue or division, but of varying intensity) and saturation (colours of the same intensity, but different hues). For the achromatic colours, Aicher introduced the term greige, which has been associated with him ever since and is made by combining grey and beige. The palette ranged from a light shell greige to chalk greige, smoky greige, sand greige, clay greige and nut greige, all the way to a dark ore greige.

The second grey Aicher gave a name to was vlau, a combination of violet and grey, which played an important role in the development of the corporate design for lighting company ERCO from 1974 on. As time went on, Aicher came to regard the greige he had originally used as not being “technical” enough, so to speak. “That means we need to alter our grey scale. From greige to vlau. From feeling to thinking.”⁶

The fried egg – an embarrassment

In spring 1962, Otl Aicher and his E5 team were tasked with formulating guidelines and standards for the corporate design of German flag carrier Lufthansa. They developed proposals for the redesign of all communication tools. This project exemplifies the significance of the corporate colours that Aicher assigned to a company or institution. He always saw them as the most important element of their identifiability.

In the case of Lufthansa, the corporate colours blue and yellow were retained but modified. The yellow shifted slightly towards orange and stood for speed and vitality. A little violet was added to the blue, which – in Aicher’s concept – was to serve as the accent colour. Semantically, this blue was to convey thoroughness and reputability.⁷

However, the Lufthansa board rejected Aicher’s original concept. “The blue appeared in a technically based band that linked the aircraft’s row of windows. The entire tail was yellow. But they didn’t take this opportunity to establish a distinctive, company-specific colour at airports either. The result was a blue tail with a yellow emblem, and the ‘fried egg’ was born – an embarrassment to this day.”⁸

A radiant sky over the lake

His appointment as official designer of the 1972 Munich Olympics was the high point of Otl Aicher’s professional career. At the same time, creating an antithesis to the Berlin Olympics the Nazis had staged in 1936 was of crucial importance. He excluded red and gold – the colours of many a dictatorial regime through the centuries – from the colour scheme.

The Munich Games were to radiate an upbeat, joyful character. Aicher was convinced that a positive atmosphere could be created by means of a corresponding colour concept. As his son Florian Aicher reports, he found the colour spectrum he was looking for at the Kirschsee, a lake to the northeast of Bad Tölz in Upper Bavaria. During a walk, he pointed towards the mountains and said: “What you see here is the complete colour palette for the Munich Olympics. The light blue of the lake in the foreground, the silver of the glittering waves, the light green of the spring fields, the dark green of the nearby forests, the violet of the forests further in the distance, the silvery-blue mountains in the background and the vibrant blue of the sky above.”⁹

Aicher took the colours of nature and the cultivated landscape, as well as the colour atmosphere of southern Germany’s baroque churches, which also fascinated him, and transferred them into a system. Its primary colour was a bright mid-blue. In virtually all cultures, this shade of blue is associated with positive values like youth and peace. The supporting colours were a mid-green with the same degree of brightness, as well as silver and a glowing orange. The palette was supplemented with blue violet, dark green and light orange as variations of blue, green and orange.

Besides aesthetic and semantic qualities, the colours always had wayfinding and assignation functions as well. Blue, the official colour, denoted the Organising Committee, green was for the media, orange for technical services and silver for the VIP area. In addition, everybody involved wore clothing in the colour that corresponded to their respective area of work.

Just a few years later, in 1975, Aicher again chose a light blue as one of the main colours for a corporate design – this time for public television broadcaster ZDF. It stood for the news and politics coverage. Other main colours, like green, orange, yellow, silver and brown, were used to code the individual programme genres. And as with the Olympic Games, it was once again the blue of the Bavarian sky that inspired his choice of colour for the corporate design of Munich Airport, which he began developing in 1979 in collaboration with Eberhard Stauss.

Candy-coloured butterflies, vibrant nasturtiums and dark roses

When Aicher founded the Institute for Analogue Studies in Rotis, he envisaged an experimental design lab that could initially work on projects that didn’t have clients behind them. In 1985 he tasked Monika Schnell with developing a complex colour manual as part of a development project. The graphic designer tried nuances of varying subtlety from violet to blue on the colour wheel. But Aicher and Schnell weren’t satisfied with the results. Then Aicher developed an idea for the solution: the addition of several colour wheels, assigned to different themes, would perhaps result in a complex colour spectrum. “Think of nasturtiums,” he said to Monika Schnell, “and think of dark roses.”¹⁰ The former come in fresh, vibrant colours, the latter in muted, heavy shades.

These two ideas subsequently served as the starting point for establishing five colour wheels, each with ten hues. “Nasturtiums” served as the basis for fresh, vibrant colours, whereas the “roses” idea resulted in slightly darker, more velvety colours. The next image Aicher proposed was “candy”. That resulted in a colour spectrum that he later described as “Pieridae butterflies”. And finally, there were earth colours and chromatic greys as well.

Monika Schell reports that Aicher was fond of having intense discussions with her about the subtlest of nuances in these colour palettes and colour chords. He often used examples from the world of plants – or, alternatively, he would go to his colour boxes and look for the corresponding tone there. And that’s precisely what he did when, in the early 1980s, the Druckhaus Maack printing house, whose owner Klaus Jürgen Maack was also managing director of ERCO, commissioned Aicher to create a collection of wrapping paper. The hues from the five colour wheels were combined with geometric basic patterns, sometimes with the help of a CAD program. The result was the Lüdenscheid Manual which, according to Aicher, permitted four billion potential combinations.¹¹

Colour chords in picture panels

The Lüdenscheid coloured papers were put to unusual use in an exhibition entitled William of Ockham – The Risk of Modern Thinking, which Aicher created on behalf of insurance company Bayerische Rückversicherung. The 36 picture panels were made with the papers from the Lüdenscheid colour study. With painstaking precision, Reinfriede Bettrich and Sophie von Seidlein arranged and stuck the paper cutouts to the boards according to Aicher’s instructions, ensuring that not even the tiniest gap remained between them. Between 12 and 18 different coloured papers were used per panel, each of which had its own colour atmosphere. By using contrasts that only covered a small area but were extreme in their impact, Aicher created precise counterpoints. The result was a virtuoso play of colours.

From word to sound

One of the chapter titles in Martin Krampen’s book on Aicher’s posters for Ulm Adult Education Centre can be translated as “From word to sound”¹². And indeed, Aicher really did use colours to strike a chord. In every phase of his life, he saw exploring colours, tracking down their subtlest nuances and creating the strongest possible contrasts between them as crucial design tools. That was Aicher’s specific response to Wassily Kandinsky’s theory of colour and form at the Bauhaus, which was limited to the primary colours red, blue and yellow and was both celebrated and misunderstood in the postwar era.¹³

Aicher took an empirical approach to the phenomenon of colour in various phases of his life. But for him – in keeping with Josef Albers – that meant nothing other than acquiring practical knowledge through experimentation, by “making”. He never considered this knowledge complete. According to Aicher’s method, the best way for anyone who deals with colour to arrive at a successful approach to it is to gather as many individual experiences as they can and pay close attention to nature. Florian Aicher fondly recalls how fascinated his father was when the first flower buds started to open: “There were still a few brown hues left over from winter, and at the same time spring was announcing its arrival with a tinge of purple and a pale green.”¹⁴