Typografische Kalenderblätter (prospectus)

Naturally calendars are to be read. We expect from them that they show us something, namely the days and months of the year. We want to get as much as possible at one glance and in a comfortable manner. The calendar for an airline company for example, has a special kind of “reading function”—it has to be comprehensive. The designer of such a calendar has to restrain his artistic dreams. This is easily said indeed. No doubt the calendars are also to be looked at. They include pictures which do not necessarily have to be as comfortable as a “Calendarium,” or the calendars entirely turn to pictures. This item promotes a calendar designed by Konrad Bruckmann for 1975 and it was not comfortable. Its “pictures” could not be followed at first glance. At leisure and whole-heartedly (also with some tolerance) one is able to “read” and fully comprehend them. Wolfgang Weingart found an emanation of directness and human warmth in these twelve designs—or so he wrote on the back of this item. To him their visual signs transmit something which still nobody wants to really expose: one’s self. In that era of overextended rationality and business sophistication, idealism and creative imagination were almost the only means to survive. A calendar showing idealism and creative phantasy through its pictures (and by its plain existence) is especially suitable for seeing and reading: it refers day by day to the very means of survival. Since one must confront themself with the twelve pictures of this calendar month by month, it functioned in a different way than an airline calendar. But it does function—for in the Bruckmann Calendar one did not only “read” month by month how time goes by—we also see how, month by month, somebody survives time. And now it’s time for this description to end.