As a result of a close collaboration with the Russian artist/designer El Lissitzky for Merz 8/9, Schwitters increasingly explored new typography and a Constructivist approach to graphic design. Merz 11 reproduces his commercial advertising work with Pelikan documenting the beginning of Schwitters’s role as a significant figure in modern German graphic design. By 1927, he had founded the Ring neuer werbegestalter (Circle of new commercial designers), a professional society of designers interested in applying experiments of the new typography to commercial projects.