NORM

NORM is a Zurich-based graphics team which has defined and now executes an iconoclastic, but intellectually rigorous approach to typography and imagery both for experimental work and commercial project. NORM have defined their own graphic language in print and on screen by determinedly ignoring the established conventions to create their own highly complex parallel system.

Making something unique but universal in a cultural climate that strives for novelty and declares that everything is possible, is a daunting prospect. By embracing technological invention without being dictated to, Norm’s designers have found their own method for dealing with those endless possibilities. ‘We narrow the fields of what is possible,’ says Krebs, unabashedly. 

For Norm, it is all about standards, parameters and templates, setting them and pushing against them, to discover creativity and innovation within a set of limits, by way of repetition and constant refining. Windlin has observed that method at work: ‘They are clearly working on creating their own Norm cosmos, which has its own sets of rules and preferences.

Where: Zurich, Switzerland

When: 1999

Style: Swiss / Modernist / Interactive / System based