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Walter Ballmer

Swiss graphic designer, b. 1923. iWe quote Answers.com: Well known for his advertising, graphics, and industrial design for the Italian office equipment manufacturer Olivetti, Swiss-born Ballmer studied graphic design at the Kunstgewebeschule in Basel from 1940 to 1944. He worked in publishing before moving to Italy in 1947 to join Studio Boggeri in Milan (established 1933). An established and successful graphic design office, Studio Boggeri executed a number of graphic design commissions for the office equipment manufacturer Olivetti and, from 1956, Ballmer went on to work as a graphic designer in Olivetti's advertising department where he remained until 1981. The visual clarity and deceptive simplicity of his graphic design work revealed something of his Swiss training and informed much of his publicity design for the company. Amongst his work for Olivetti was the coordination of a number of exhibitions shown in Italy and abroad, including Olivetti-Style (1961), Olivetti Innovates (1965), and Olivetti Image (1968). He was made a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) in 1970 and, in 1975, received a Gold Medal for Olivetti-Image at the Ljublijana Bio 5.

Toto's K22 Stile Ballmer (2011) is a free art deco typeface modeled after Walter Ballmer's typeface designed for Olivetti. The Olivetti logo from 1960 by Ballmer also led to Interno (2004), a type family created by Eli Carrico and Ian Lynam at Wordshape. The Olivetti logo was also extended by Serena Petraglia into a full font (in 2016).

In 1963, together with Gret Mengelt-Mergenthaler, he created Texpo for the Schweizer Expo 1964. This custom typeface is not generally available. However, Mindofone made a free version of it, called Hadley Stencil, in 2013.

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