For the last thirty-six years Weingart has lectured and taught extensively in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. He is represented in the permanent collections of museums and private galleries, and has received design awards from the Swiss Federal Department of Home Affairs in Bern. Internationally exhibited, WeingartÕs publications and posters have been reproduced in numerous design references and journals. He was a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale/AGI from 1978 to 1999, on the editorial board of Typographische MonatsblŠtter from 1970 to 1989.

A self-taught designer who fosters imagination and insight, Weingart teaches his students to teach themselves. His experimental work in typography has influenced the course of design history in the last decades of the twentieth century.

General Thoughts:
Weingart was a teacher at the Basel School of Design from 1968 to 2000 and at the University of Art and Design Basel from 2001 to 2004. Since the end of the 1960s, he has been upholding the tradition of the Typography Department, which, under the management of Emil Ruder and his colleagues, had been gaining international success since the beginning of the 1940s.

In April 1968 Ruder and Armin Hofmann started the unique Advanced Class for Graphic Design and Weingart began with his typography courses alongside a small group of internationally highly respected instructors. He had the great opportunity to work with older, experienced students who, for over thirty years, came to the Basel School from around 35 nations to help him build up an (Other Way) of teaching typography inside and outside of Switzerland.

During these amazing teaching periods, Weingart developed a particular relationship to his students. As a consequence, he had the extraordinary opportunity of visiting students from Basel scattered all over the world. Besides teaching in Basel, he has held a total of approximately 200 lectures, instructions or seminars since 1972, beginning with a rebellious series of lectures at several Universities of the United States such as Yale, Princeton, the University of Cincinnati and others.

Weingart's personal critical statements about design education in general or typography in particular in lectures, articles and discussions are known for their frankness, honesty and constructive criticism. At the same time the statements include the commitment to critically look into the near and far future, allowing for broad, open-minded perspectives regarding new expectations of various directions. These attitudes go hand in hand with his high standards of teaching, the design qualities of his students and a strong interest in new technological possibilities, which he often moderately and premeditatedly integrated into his typography classes.

Weingart is a fanatical critic of the so-called (Radical New Restrictions in Design Education) introduced by the Swiss Government a few years ago. For him, the (Selected Swiss Design Schools: Status of a University Level) reflect the end of well established and proved classical opinions about how to teach a discipline. They put an end to an individual way of transmitting the chance to find the personal path of a signature, which, for Weingart, is the focus of a creative profession. The bureaucratic state authorities, who mostly have their ideas and plan their strategic prescriptions at a desk, often without knowing about the real professional needs in the field of graphic design, give directions and orders for the future which could have disastrous consequences for human beings devoted to their profession. The delegate experts give indirect orders on what to do and what not to do. It is basically a 1:1 copy of the Anglo-American school system (Anglomania). And it fits exactly into the slow combustion burner called globalization. Weingart made his attitude very clear in an interview with AIGA (New York, 1998):

"The school's new administrative empowerment may bring benefits, but it also means that the Swiss State can now impose other restrictions like setting up review committees to observe the classroom. This is complete nonsense. Such control groups propose recipes for education which suppresses individuality, the eccentric, the unconventional, the unorthodox. The outlandish are inhibited in favor of uniformity, which is the first step towards mediocrity. Do these state controllers have the right or competence to assess our visual language? The next generation will have to fight to find their own way.

Either the Basel School will go on, or it will be drowned in bureaucracy. As a teacher, I see another dark and depressing aspect of this state-controlled bureaucracy which mainly deals with the allocation of funds. Departmental budgets are justifiable only according to the level of technological sophistication. Superficial lip-service is given to the cultural implications.

Indirectly, the state forces the individuals to become compliant with every technological trend. Without computer proficiency, a design school or a design student has no chance of surviving. The loss of individuality, the loss of choice is at stake. This development is dangerous because people who dislike working with computers do not stand a chance. Those young people who do not fit into the system may never find their place in the professional life. Of no quantifiable societal value or reward, their basic creative impulse, originating in childhood, will gradually be destroyed. This I find tragic, and it affects me deeply."

In another interview with Professor John Maeda, MIT Cambridge, Massachusetts, he stated: "Advanced digital design work is usually a fancily decorated package that hides an empty core. Skill in the digital age is confused with mastery of digital tools, masking the importance of understanding materials and mastering the elements of form."

Switzerland did not learn from the mistakes of its neighbors near and far. The State cannot implement visions of the future and bureaucratic illusions in a field which, as regards education and its function, is diametrically opposed to an education for doctors or lawyers. It seems that the people responsible are not willing to understand these facts. The only thing that matters to them (and often to the school administrators, too) is the number of attractive courses on the program, how thick and attractive the annual report of a University of Art and Design is and the number of professors and international lecturers from famous universities who came to visit during a certain period of time. And, of course, how many international awards the institution received. Only facts like these count for administrators because they are objectively measurable. How absurd!

An attempt at a conclusion:
Weingart is convinced that the so-called classical education in graphic design has to be delicately transported into an absolutely new way of thinking, made for an increasingly changing world: into our future. His criticism and personal thoughts are a result of his international experience gained during many visits to design schools in Europe and on other continents. Globalization in design is obvious, individuality and quality of the individual no longer seem to be a priority.

Weingart: "In Switzerland, we need a center where we can openly, constructively and objectively discuss the real, burning problems in design education. We no longer need cities which still have their own theaters and symphony orchestras. We have to rationalize the dualities in our field, but we have to do so carefully, through a dialogue which takes into account the highest demands in education in general as well as ethics and critical views of the future in particular. To do so, we need bright and experienced people of all ages, people who are personalities in their field.