Max Huber was born in 1919 in Switzerland. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Zurich where he excelled in graphic design and photography.
Huber worked across advertising, packaging, design and industrial design. He had a distinctive style that skillfully blended bright hues with photomontage. His organised typographic compositions and experiments in photomontage were derived from a meeting with Professor Willimann.
In 1940 Max travelled to Milan to avoid being drafted by the Swiss Army and joined Studio Boggeri, later becoming its art director. Although he had to later go back to Switzerland in around 1941/42 when Italy joined the War. Whilst in Switzerland he worked for the Artemis publishing house in Zurich, working with magazines such as DU and freelanced for several industrial firms and advertising agencies.
After World War II, he travelled back to Italy where he worked with some of the leading Italian firms such as Olivetti, La Rinascente, RAI and Monza. Working on a wide range of design output from logo designs and posters to book covers and exhibition designs.
He collaborated with designers such as Max Bill and the late Werner Bischof on exhibition designs and also had exhibitions of his own work in Milan, in 1948 at the Il Camino Gallery and in 1950 at the Libreria Salto. He also took part in exhibitions organised by the Composing Room New York and the University of California of and contributed to ‘Purpose and Pleasure’, London, 1952, ‘Allianz’, Zurich, 1943, ‘*Réalités Nouvelles’, Paris, 1946, and ‘Arte astratta e concreta’, Milan, 1947.
Max was a proud member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and received numerous awards and accolades throughout his career, including the Compasso d’Oro in 1954, an award for lifetime achievement in design and a gold medal at the Milan Triennale; in 1954.
Huber’s playfully modern aesthetic is full of visual metaphors and motion and still holds up today. Here is a sample of Max Huber’s work both collected and scanned from various sources in the design archive.
“He was a splendid mix; he had an irrepressible natural talent and a faultless drawing hand; he possessed the lively candour of the eternal child; he was a true product of the Swiss School; he loved innovatory research; he boasted a lively curiosity, being quick to latch on – not without irony – to the most unpredictable ideas, and he worked with the serious precision of the first-rate professional.”
– Giampiero Bosoni
