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INSPIRATION PROFILE

Designer and art director Willy Fleckhaus was born in Velbert, Germany, in 1925. He became a prolific designer of books and magazines and one of the first art directors in Germany.

Willy Flackhaus’ nickname was “Germany’s most expensive pencil,” and he devoted his lifetime to perfecting his art. After beginning a career in journalism and covering various cultural and social topics, after WW2, Fleckhaus became fascinated by Swiss graphic design.

This was the period of the International Typographic Style with a minimalist approach pioneered by designers like Josef Müller-Brockmann, Armin Hofmann, and Massimo Vignelli. This group emphasised grids to order and structure content, and its modernist principles led to the influence of content-driven design, which is still relevant today.

When Fleckhaus began his career in design, magazines were laid out by typesetters who mostly worked separately from editors and writers. Over in America in the 1950s, art directors like Bradbury Thompson took creative control over the appearance of the magazines they worked on.

Perhaps Fleckhaus’s enduring legacy was combining German/Swiss and American graphic design styles to create something no one in Europe had seen. This is especially incredible for someone with no experience and no formal design education when he took his first job at Aufwärts magazine.

In 1953, Fleckhaus joined Twen—German for “twenty”—and worked on the magazine until it closed in 1971. This magazine was aimed at the first generation of German postwar teens and young adults. Fleckhaus took the role of art director—a position unheard of in European publishing at the time. Only one other designer was so dominant, Alexey Brodovitch, at Harper’s Bazaar magazine in New York.

Willy Fleckhaus and his designs can teach us a great deal about improving our work on the web today. Although his name is not commonly associated with product and website design, his designs can be influential.