He was born in Zurich in 1914. After primary and secondary school in Zurich and vocational training as a caterer, he studied in Paris and earned a degree in French at the Cercle Commercial Suisse de Paris. He then worked as a commercial printer at a Zurich publishing house. He attended a weekly course in typesetting and letterpress at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich, where he learned typography from Alfred Willimann (1900-1957) and Walter Käh (1901-1970). In 1942 he was appointed permanent teacher of typography at the AGS Basel. In 1947, he founded a specialized typography department at the third department of the same school (Department of Art, Industry and Vocational Education) and became its director. In 1948, he became president of the Basel branch of the Swiss Association of Craftsmen (SWB). In 1956, he was a member of the Die gute Form jury at the Swiss Industrial Fair and was elected to the Central Board of the SWB (succeeding Georg Schmidt). He was also a member of the steering committee of the same association. In 1959, he was the Swiss delegate to the ATypI (International Typographical Union). In 1961 he became a member of the Swiss Federal Council for Applied Arts (succeeding Bercholt von Grunigen) and was artistic advisor to the philatelic department of the Swiss Post and Telegraph Office. In 1962 he co-founded the International Center for Typographic Arts (ICTA) in New York, and in 1965 he became principal of the Basel Industrial School and director of the Industrial Museum. In 1966, he became the second president of the Swiss Association of Craftsmen. In 1967, he published Typography with the Swiss publishing house Nickli, and in 1968, together with Armin Hoffmann, he founded the higher course in graphic design at the Basel Institute of Technology. He died in Basel in 1970.