“[Jan] Tschichold emphasized the basic geometric forms, the square and the circle, which the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich had seen as the ‘fundamental Suprematist elements’. Squares and circles appear in more than half the illustrations of Elementare Typographie; its first double-page spread is bordered by the eight pages of [El] Lissitzky’s Constructivist fairytale, The Story of Two Squares. Lissitzky, describing the upheavals at the time of the First World War, wrote, ‘Into this chaos came Suprematism, extolling the square as the very source of all creative expression.’ When [Theo] Van Doesburg proclaimed, ‘Already many people are using the square’, he was stating a fact. Hans Arp wrote that his wife, Sophie Taeuber, had “discovered” the square in 1916. In Switzerland after the First World War, when they saw the rectangles in foreign magazines such as De Stijl, they though it was ‘a joke, as if everyone who had drawn a square had been forced to yell with ecstasy and excitement’. True to the spirit of Dada, ‘We still decided to register our own squares at the Patent Office’.”

—Richard Hollis, Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965, 2006.