The most influential design book you’ve never heard of

Behind some of the most recognizable iconography in the world, from American presidential campaign logos to New York City subway signage and Apple keycaps, is one Swiss designer and a textbook he published in 1949. You’ve probably never heard of either.

Walter Käch was a calligrapher and educator at the Zürich School of Arts and Crafts in the late ‘30s and ‘40s. During this time, he published a simple manual, called Lettering, which laid out his approach to crafting letterforms, letting students learn about proper technique and trace and copy letters directly inside the book. Experts have credited Lettering for popularizing the idea of type families and directly inspiring the creation of Univers and Helvetica, two of the world’s most famous typefaces. Over time, Käch’s contributions have largely been overshadowed by those of his students. Now, there’s a team working to fix that.

This week, the first modern reprint of Lettering was published through a collaboration between Dinamo type foundry, the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, and the graphic design firm Omnigroup. For the designers behind the reprint, it’s a passion project that’s been more than six years in the making. 

The book that inspired Helvetica

Fabian Harb is the cofounder and head of type design at Dinamo. He discovered Lettering while studying at the Basel School of Design, where he learned that, despite being printed in an extremely limited run (likely between 500 and 1,000 copies), Käch’s manual has had resounding ripple effects on how typefaces are designed today. 

“[Käch] really went about type design in a quite broad way,” Harb says. “If you look through the manual, it’s not just sans serifs; it’s also about serifs, it’s also about script typefaces. Back in those years, there wasn’t a lot of teaching material around, so this being such a proper folder, I’m 100% sure it traveled and people that were teaching in other places also drew from the same material.”

Lettering’s holistic approach to type design represents one of the first true explorations of a versatile type family—or a cohesive system of fonts with various weights and orientations—which is the standard in today’s industry, where most new typefaces come with eight to 10 different weights. 

Käch also directly inspired his student, Adrian Frutiger, to conceptualize the typeface Univers in 1957. Univers is now one of the most influential typefaces of all time, appearing everywhere from George W. Bush’s two campaign logos to some of Apple’s early keycaps and the UNICEF logo. Likewise, the font Helvetica (the basis of NYC’s subway signs) is believed to pull direct inspiration from Käch’s work.

“There’s a direct connection to Univers and Helvetica, which are typefaces that just became so big, so visible, and so influential up until today,” Harb says. “Designers definitely know Univers, and Helvetica is probably known even to people that don’t have anything to do with graphic design. Helvetica is so closely connected to Käch, but nobody knows about him.” 

Reprinting an iconic text

The idea to issue a reprint of Lettering came as Harb learned more about the text for himself. In school, Harb discovered that copies of the manual are considered rare and precious, and those that are available in Switzerland are mostly held by libraries that don’t allow them to be checked out. Meanwhile, designers interested in owning their own copies often found themselves in intense bidding wars on eBay, as those “in the know” on the manual’s influence jostled to secure a version for their collections.

“It was a little bit of a sport to check the eBay and see, ‘Okay, is a copy coming up?’” Harb says. “Then everybody would bid on it, and basically whoever had the most money would get it. Very often it went for crazy prices, especially as a student—like somewhere like 250 and 350 Swiss francs.” Due to the manual’s interactive nature, nearly all surviving copies of Lettering tend to be in poor condition. “People worked with them, a lot was traced in them,” Harb explains. “You can see that sometimes, people drew their own guidelines to figure out the proportions.” 

Finally, in 2014, Harb’s type foundry Dinamo was able to secure its own copy of Lettering through his connection with the Basel School of Design. The acquisition began a years’ long exploration of Käch’s work for Harb, starting when he designed a custom typeface inspired by Käch’s core teachings called Walter Alte. When Walter Alte was used in a contemporary art exhibition, the publicity led Leonardo Azzolini and Simon Mager, cofounders of Omnigroup, to connect with Harb over their shared interest in Käch’s work. Together, the three created another Käch-inspired typeface—this time translated for a digital age—called Walter Neue. Both Walter Alte and Walter Neue were officially published in 2022.

As Harb, Azzolini, and Mager dedicated months to closely studying Käch’s principles, they realized that the rest of the design community should have access to this resource, too. So, they joined forces with the Museum für Gestaltung on a new reprint of Lettering, a project that took another three years to complete.

The 2025 reprint of the manual, designed by Omnigroup and co-published by the Museum für Gestaltung, is made to come as close to the original as possible. All of the text, Harb says, has been copied one to one. And, just like the trailblazing 1949 text, the new version of Lettering allows today’s generation of type designers to trace directly in the book itself.

The book is now available online for €48, a far cry from the cutthroat prices on eBay. Still, Harb says, anyone with an interest in type design should get the chance to look at one of Käch’s original manuals at least once.

“[The reprint] is very similar to the original,” Harb says. “But if you ever have the chance to see the original, you’ll see that it has a richness of materiality that, in today’s world, is almost impossible to recreate.”

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