«A tribute to Walter Ballmer»

Walter Ballmer was one of the Swiss graphic designers who moved to the booming city of Milan shortly after the end of the Second World War. In the late 1950s, Adriano Olivetti hired him for the company’s in-house advertising department. In the years that followed, Ballmer designed a number of iconic posters for Olivetti. His early posters are dominated by the interplay of graphics, typography, and photographic set pieces. Around 1970, he then began collaborating with photographer Serge Libiszewski, using photos that extended all the way to the edge of the sheet. In 1975 Ballmer designed a series of purely typographic compositions in which the Olivetti brand name and the name of the respective country are set against variously colored plain backgrounds to celebrate the company’s worldwide triumph.