Jean Widmer, a French-Swiss graphic designer whose minimalist aesthetic manifested a striking logo for Centre Pompidou upon its opening in 1977, died on February 2 at the age of 96. His death was announced by Centre Pompidou, which said, “Since that day in 1977, Widmer’s logo has travelled the world, weathering the decades without ever losing its graphic force.”The logo—featuring a series of black lines bisected by a zig-zagging diagonal channel connecting the top and bottom at opposite corners—evokes the architecture that continues to make the Pompidou one of the most recognizable buildings in the world. The building was designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, but Widmer helped distill it into a form that could be applied to countless contexts.“It’s the logo I drew the fastest in my entire career,” Widmer said in a retrospective interview for the Pompidou. “I already had it in my head.”As the Pompidou noted, “Although Widmer’s creation is now inseparable from the Centre Pompidou’s visual identity, its adoption was far from a given. In the 1970s, cultural marketing had yet to take hold, and adopting a logo still seemed uncomfortably close to advertising.”But Widmer’s design transcended its commercial applications and became a work of art of its own. Widmer was part of a team of notable designers assembled to create a visual identity for the Pompidou, with members including the Belgian Michel Olyff, Polish Roman Cieslewicz, British Henri Kay Henrion, Swiss Adrian Frutiger, and Italian Massimo Vignelli. Among their contributions to the museum was a color-coded system to identify different departments: red for visual art, blue for industrial design, green for the library, and purple for music.Beyond the Pompidou, Widmer worked on numerous other notable projects that drew on his training with Johannes Itten, a proponent of the Bauhaus in Switzerland—where Widmer was born in 1929. After he graduated from the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich in 1950, he started work in Paris, designing looks for department stores and luxury products. For a period he worked as the artistic director of the fashion magazine Le Jardin des Modes, and he ventured into different kinds of industrial design.One of his most impactful campaigns involved a series of icons to mark the presence of sites along the roadways of France. As noted in a obituary in The New York Times, “French officials, fearful in the early 1970s that their highways would be invaded by American-style billboards, turned to Mr. Widmer. He was already a successful magazine art director and poster designer for exhibits at the state Center for Industrial Creation — just the man, officials thought, to ward off the horrors of advertising by directing drivers instead to the cultural riches of France that were situated along the highway.”Jean Widmer’s logo for Centre Pompidou.Courtesy Centre Pompidou