Armin Hofmann: the magic of color/the power of signs

Poster: Wilhelm Tell, Offset Lithography 1963

Hofmann’s impact on the teaching methods within the University of the Arts’ Graphic Design program is long lasting and evolutionary. His insistence on a lack of models and a personal investigation, discovery, and transformation of the student, remains as revolutionary today as in 1966. His work is practical, applicable to the real world – and yet, intensely personal. His lifelong curiosity in the “sign value” and the rhetoric of images precedes and encompasses the late 20th century experiments in semiotics and visual design in Italy, Canada and the United States. The images are often technically imperfect and there is often visible evidence of the human hand at work. Rather than be read as a lack of skill, which might be the reading in our highly refined digital images of today, they sing of the connection of one human to another, the beautiful fingerprints of a thoughtful man.