Swiss international was a major force in graphic design and still is today. The swiss's attitude towards design is to make everything socially useful, universal and very scientific. the visual resuly of this was extreme abstraction, always based on pure geometry.Le Corbussier thought of his furniture as "equipment." Everything he designed was "a machine to sit on" and his furniture was always in rectangler forms and was very light-weight which made them very popular at the time.
italian born Massimo Vignelli was a New York based designer best known for creating the identity system for furniture manafacturer Knoll International. he was also known for the fisrt intergrated map of the New York city subway system which had a Helvetica type font like the rest of his work. Vignelli's map stirred alot of contraversy because it was abstracted so much that the people of New York complained about its usability.
i think the Swiss international era was probably the most unusal, yet the most simplified era that ever existed. it was the only era that overly used grids in their designs and everything was very thought out which makes it a very interesting era.
