- Ernst Bettler
Ernst Bettler is a fictional Swiss
graphic designer . He was invented byChristopher Wilson in a 2000hoax article published in the second issue of Dot Dot Dot, a magazine of visual culture.According to the article, Bettler was asked in the 1950s to design advertisement
poster s for "Pfäfferli+Huber" (P+H), a Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer. The article states that Bettler knew of the company's involvement inNazi concentration camp experiments and decided to accept the commission with the intention of damaging P+H. The four posters he created, Wilson's article recounts, were exemplary works ofInternational Typographic Style design, advertising P+H drugs such as "Contrazipan". However, according to the article, the posters featured abstract compositions that could be read ascapital letters – spelling out "N - A - Z - I" when displayed in sequence. Wilson's article states that the public outcry that followed the public display of the posters ruined P+H in a matter of weeks.Even though it was highly detailed and featured many photographs and illustrations, the article was a complete fabrication. Ernst Bettler,
Pfäfferli+Huber and its drugs do not exist, and neither do the Swiss towns "Sumisdorf " and "Burgwald " that feature in the article – their names are presumably based on the real Swiss towns ofSumiswald and Burgdorf. Nonetheless, the story was well received in graphic design circles. Among others, the September/October 2001 "Graphic Anarchy" issue ofAdbusters magazine hailed Bettler's work as "one of the greatest design interventions on record", and the 2002 graphic design textbook "Problem Solved " byMichael Johnson covers Bettler as one of the "founding fathers of the 'culture-jamming ' form of protest".Wilson's article was first revealed to be false in a 2002 entry in the
blog Lines and Splines byAndy Crewdson . The Bettler hoax and its reception was subsequently covered byRick Poynor in an article in the February 2003 issue of Eye Magazine, as well as by other blogs.References
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