Unveil journal by Denzel Boyd

. un veil THE DEBATE ISSUE

Issue No.72

HOUSE DIVIDED

Unveil House Divided

PRINTED IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA USA WWW.KOOLHAUS.COM

This design publication embodies the arguments between Wim Crowell and Jan Van Toorn as well as found literature to supplement the main points stated by Toorn during the Debate between the two designers on November 9th 1972.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED. STORED IN A RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM, BY ANY MEANS, INCLUDING MECHANICAL, ELECTRIC, PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING OR OTHERWISE, WITHOUT THE PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAN VAN TOORN, AND OTHER ARTICLES

Printed through Blurb Typeface used: Chronicle, Neue Haus Grotesk, Editor

PRINTED IN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA USA WWW.KOOLHAUS.COM

table of contents Letter from the Publisher Jan van Toorn Debate pt. 1 Fuck Content Debate pt.2 We are Historians Debate pt. 3 The World in a Calendar Debate pt. 4 The Importance of Emotion in Design Debate pt. 5 How to be a Graphic Designer without Losing your Mind Debate pt. 6 Fuck Grids Argueing With Visual Means Closing Statement Credits Citation

7 9 12-15 16-23 24-27 28-33 34-35 36-41 42-45 46-53 54-55 56-59 60-65 66-75 76-83 84-91 93 95

The Debate

letter from the publisher In my experience as a graphic designer I have often heard the phrase “graphic design is not art” uttered by professors and peers alike. The conversation of whether or not design is art has been around for years, but in 1972 Wim Crouwell and Jan van Toorn sat down and had a heated debate over the fundamental principles of graphic design. They discussed the designer’s role, with Wim stating that a designer is like an engineer, using tools to create content for their client. Van Toorn argues that one cannot create content without injecting their individual ideals and message into their work, that design relies on the freedom of the designers unique expression. In a way I felt that Toorn was fighting back against the claim that graphic design is not art. The artistic process that goes into strong designing is vital. Toorn’s opinions on design have helped me become comfortable with the idea that design can be much more versatile than my previous assumptions. Design does not need to restrict itself to commercial application, but can be far more abstract and conceptual.In this journal, Koolhaus interprets Jan van Toorn’s philosophies in both process and product. We stressed the use of individual expression as well as deviation from structure. Articles and commetnaries collected by Koolhaus have been placed throughout the journal to drive home our interpretations of Jan van Toorn’s message. We hope you enjoy this journal as an expression of design, as well as an expression of art. After all, when you think like Jan van Toorn, the two might not be all that different.

Brendan Robson Publisher

jan van toorn Jan Van Toorn was born May 9th, 1932 in Amsterdam. In the early years he worked at a printing house and attended classes at the Amsterdam Graphic School and the Institute of Applied Art. In 1957 he started to work as an independent designer printing calendars for Mart.Spruijt, catalogs and posters for Van Abbemuseum. Van Toorn began teaching in the 1980s at the Gerrit Reitveld Academy and was the director of the Jan van Eyck Academy. Toorn is one of the most distinguished and provacative figures in an exceptional generation of Dutch graphic designers. His social and political concerns, and his way of talking about them, set him apart, even among such colleagues as Wim Crouwel, Anthon Beek, Gerard Unger, Swip Stolk. He is a member of the International Alliance of Graphic Design (since 1972) and of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In 1991-1998, he was the Director of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. In 2011, Van Toorn was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. Works by Jan van Toorn were exhibited in several retrospective exhibitions in the Museum Fodor in Amsterdam (1972), De Beyerd Centre for Fine Arts in Breda (1986-87), Hall of Art in Rotterdam (2004), Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (2007), Sheffield Institute of Art and Design (2008). The designer was awarded with two H.N. Werkman prizes (1965 and 1972), the Piet Zwart prize (1985) and the Athena award, established by the Rhode Island School of Design. Artworks by Jan van Toorn are in the collections as follows: Bijzondere Collecties; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Municipal Museum, the Hague; Museum of the Image, Breda; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moravian Gallery, Brno; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles; Library of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; VIVID gallery, Rotterdam.

-the debate-

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My first remark is a generalizing one. When as a designer you respond to a topical social or cultural pattern, this may give rise to, first, an analytical approach, in order to arrive at an objective participation in a process of communication; this is an approach, in my view, of lasting value and longevity. And, second, it may give rise to a spontaneous approach that strongly appeals to current opinion and therefore has powerful communicative effects. But I believe this is a short-lived communication.

WIM CROUWEL

In my opinion, these are the two things that move us, and I would like to clarify them. Designer A, who favors the analytical approach to arrive at a maximally objective message, will be inclined to make use of solidly tested means only and will not be easily tempted to experiment for the sake of novelty. For this reason, he is also likely to end up in a place that is sometimes characterized as rather dry. By contrast, Designer B is more likely to make use of trendy means, and he will not reject experiments in order to arrive at new results. Further, Designer A will be inclined to position themselves professionally, without surrendering their sense of responsibility vis-a-vis society, and therefore they will refrain from engaging in specialties that are not theirs. Through their specific work, they will provide a contribution to the problem articulated. I think that Designer B, based on their large sense of responsibility towards society, will tend to become so absorbed by the problem posed that they enter into specialties that are not theirs. They runs the risk of wasting their expertise by resorting to an amateurish contribution to the problem at hand. Our colleagues know which side Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m on, for I believe that as a designer I must never stand between the message and its recipient. Instead, I try to present the issue as neutrally as possible.

The Debate

I think that as a specialization graphic design, just like other forms of design, has begun to fall short under the pressure of industrial developments in our society and all their various consequences. The designer falls short not only because through their use of form they program rather than inform, but also because they no longer questions their goal and responsibility. Their design influences and conditions users, rather than supporting its content.

JAN VAN TOORN

I start from more or less the same two types of designers as Wim. But what you call the analytical designer, I call the technologist-designer, because they work with methods derived from technology and science.The analytical strand, of which you are a characteristic exponent, is determined by a technologicalorganizational attitude. I do not believe that a designer can adopt, as you put it, the position of neutral intermediary. The acts you perform take place through you, and you area subjective link. But you deny this subjectivity, meaning: you view your occupation as a purely neutral one. Wim says that he uses a particular graphic means as a neutral thing, but in my view it is always used subjectively. Its use, after all, has social meaning. It has a social goal and that is why it is subjective. It is there that your influence lies, be it your personal influence or your influence as a group. It all depends on how you use your means. Those in graphic design, just like people in other specialties, are inclined not only to exaggerate their own value, but also to start seeing their dealings and their means as a goal in itself, thus losing sight of the actual goal. This is why I once again looked up what you wrote in the 1961 Christmas issue. The first thing you say there about design is that form is determined by content. But in the remainder of this short article I did not read a single word on the relation between content and form, yet there is an awful lot about formal options, techniques, and technology, so about means in general. But today, I feel, the relationship between form and content is in fact highly relevant. It is perhaps more so than in 1961, for it comes with a responsibility. And maybe we should adventurous in facing the challenge, without perhaps sufficiently knowing the means we have at our disposal.

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WIM CROUWEL

When you say that my approach is technological and observe that I constantly talk about technology, this is an effect of my fondness for technology. I was at times strongly influenced by technological innovations. But I do not have the sense of being led by technology to such a degree that I’ve ever become an extension of the machine. Technology is a source of wonder to me, and I have long believed that it would be able to free us from great many difficulties.After all, the amount of information fired at people has grown so large that it can no longer be processed. In this predicament a particular technology may offer a solution, if you apply it well. To apply technology well, I once made a proposal for a new basic alphabet. And this imposed larger freedom for the designer than before, when alphabets were forced upon us and handed down to us from the Renaissance, the baroque, and neoclassicism.To be sure, the designer has freedom, but it also comes with certain formal restrictions. For restrictions can be stretched according to your needs. So when I show admiration for technology, this does not automatically lead to technological work.I would like to cite a recent statement by Jan from the newspaper: “The function of a graphic designer is to convey information. This should happen in a way that makes it possible for the reader or viewer to arrive at a view of his own, rather than imposing the mindset of the messenger.”When Jan says that design is a subjective activity, he adopts—as a designer—the role of intermediary. I’m afraid, however, to adopt such a subjective role, and rather try to take an objective stance. At first glance, Jan van Toorn, as he put it in the newspaper quote, views the designer as a coordinator who, without defining views of his own, merely provides assistance in realizing some communication of information. But this is not the case with Jan, because he does not operate without taking a position between sender and receiver. Jan quite consciously participates subjectively in that process.

The Debate

JAN VAN TOORN

Let us talk briefly about this subjectivity. In my view, there are two important issues. To conveycontent does not mean that the design itself does not represent particular values. Any design has a certain content, an emotional value. It has specific features. It has a clear goal. You have to convey something to somebody. Perhaps a political conviction, perhaps only a report on a meeting. Any design is addressed to someone. The double duty of the messenger, the designer, is to convey the content without interfering with it. On the other hand, there is the designer’s inescapable input and subjectivity. You cannot deny this dialectic, and you should rather see it as an advantage.You are afraid of it, and you use the word ”fear.” You do not want to inflict harm onto either the content or the identity [of the message], which is why you always design in the same way—this, at least, is what I think your work will show over a longer period. By giving the same design response in all situations, you produce work of great uniformity, in which any sense of identity is lost. In my opinion, however, identity is a most essential feature of all human contact, including the communication of any kind of message.

FUCK CONTENT michael rock 2013

In Designer as Author I argued that we are insecure about the value of our work. We are envious of the power, social position and cachet that artists and authors seem to command. By declaring ourselves â&#x20AC;&#x153;designer/authorsâ&#x20AC;? we hope to garner similar respect. Our deep-seated anxiety has motivated a movement in design that values origination of content over manipulation of content. Designer as Author was an attempt to recuperate the act of design itself as essentially linguisticâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a vibrant, evocative language. However, it has often been read as a call for designers to generate content: in ef fect, to become designers and authors, not designers as authors. While I am all for more authors, that was not quite the point I wanted to make.

The problem is one of content. The misconception is that without deep content, design is reduced to pure style, a bag of dubious tricks. In graphic-design circles, form-follows-function is reconfigured as form-follows-content. If content is the source of form, always preceding it and imbuing it with meaning, form without content (as if that were even possible) is some kind of empty shell.

The apotheosis of this notion, repeated ad nauseum (still!), is Beatrice Wardeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s famous Crystal Goblet metaphor, which asserts that design (the glass) should be a transparent vessel for content (the wine). Anyone who favored the ornate or the bejeweled was a knuckle-dragging oaf. Agitators on both sides of the ideological spectrum took up the debate: minimalists embraced it as a manifesto; maximalists decried it as aesthetic fascism. Neither camp questioned the basic, implicit premise: itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all about the wine.

This false dichotomy has circulated for so long that we have started to believe it ourselves. It has become a central tenet of design education and the benchmark against which all design is judged. We seem to accept the fact that developing content is more essential than shaping it, that good content is the measure of good design.

Back when Paul Rand wrote “There is no such thing as bad content, only bad form,” I remember being intensely annoyed. I took it as an abdication of a designer’s responsibility to meaning. Over time, I have come to read it dif ferently: he was not defending hate speech or schlock or banality; he meant that the designer’s purview is to shape, not to write. But that shaping itself is a profoundly affecting form. (Perhaps this is the reason that modern designers—Rand, Munari, Leoni—always seem to end their careers designing children’s books. The children’s book is the purest venue of the designer/ author because the content is negligible and the evocative potential of the form unlimited.)?

So what else is new? This seems to be a rather mundane point, but for some reason we don’t really believe it. We don’t believe shaping is enough. So to bring design out from under the thumb of content we must go one step further and observe that treatment is, in fact, a kind of text itself, as complex and referential as any traditional understanding of content.

The span of graphic design is not a history of concepts but of forms. Form has evolved dramatically from one year to the next, and suggests a profession that continually revises and reshapes the world through the way it is rendered. Stellar examples of graphic design, design that changes the way we look at the world, are often found in service of the most mundane content: an ad for ink, cigarettes, sparkplugs or machinery. Think of Piet Zwartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s catalogues for electrical cable; or the travel posters of Cassandre or Matter; or the New Wave work of Weingart, Greiman and Freidman; or the punk incitations of Jamie Reid, in which the manipulation of form has an essential, even transformative, meaning

At a 1962 conference at the Museum of Modern Art, conservative art critic Hilton Kramer denounced Pop Art as “indistinguishable from advertising art” because “Pop Art does not tell us what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization. Its social ef fect is simply to reconcile us to a world of commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” But perhaps the content of graphic design is exactly that: an evocation of “what it feels like to be living through the pres-

ent moment of civilization,” with all its “commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” How else can we discuss the content of a typeface or why the typography of a surfing magazine suddenly becomes relevant? Or how a series of made-up or ‘self-initiated’ posters—already a medium of dubious functionality— can end up on the wall of a major design museum? Work must be saying something, which is different than being about something.

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I agree with you when you say that you can never step outside of yourself. As the designer of the message, you stand in-between the sender and the receiver. And when I claim to be afraid to put myself in-between them, that is because I feel it’s never productive for me to add a vision of my own on top of it. I believe you can separate the two.

WIM CROUWEL

When a designer works for a political party or wants to promote their own political convictions, they go at it in a very subjective way, because they then choose a perspective. They will shape this perspective through their own personal input in order to get their point across as optimally as possible This implies that a designer would only do work that they can fully agree with. Well, it is impossible for me to concur with that position. In particular with regard to work involving a political dimension, I say: “It’s okay to do it subjectively.” But then you run the risk of ending up with a rather narrow range of assignments. When you take a position like mine, I say: “Guys, I do not want to contribute to what the man says, because I want to be able to offer my services as a designer in a wider area.” After all, when as a designer I adopt a subjective position and I’m constantly aware of it, this is automatically visible in my designs. However, this is possible in specific cases only, and not in a very broad area, or you risk lapsing into that amateurism I mentioned previously, something I do not believe in. At the time I had an extensive conversation with Rene(2) about a program aimed at doing something about educational materials for developing countries. In this context, one designer felt motivated to immerse himself completely in the problem of educational materials, and subsequently he began to design based on that knowledge. My response would be: Come on, boys, stop it! You go too far as a designer.

(continued-)

The Debate

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This is something you really shouldn’t do, because in this instance you’d better engage an educational specialist to supply the specific know-how. You are the designer, and you shouldn’t come anywhere near that specific know-how. Instead, based on your know-how, you start tackling the problem from your professional attitude and approach, after you’ve been given a thorough briefing. And this is the part someone else should stay away from, because this is your territory. Of course there has been an ongoing conversation, unquestionably, but I strongly believe in specialties.

WIM CROUWEL

I fear, then, that for instance standard typography, meaning book typography, cannot be done by someone who adopts such a subjective stance, for a book, any book, will never become a better one just through its typography. Never ever. Even the admirable achievement of the Nieuwe Zakelijkheid(3), a typography that follows the text closely and emphasizes it, is way too subjective to my taste already. I find it altogether wrong. But let me not exaggerate the word “subjective.” The subjective designer has a much more limited scope of work, and they’d better accept it. Their talents will never be done full justice while there is a demand for designers in many more domains.

The Debate

JAN VAN TOORN

First, let me address your specialties and the reference to the New Objectivity. A specialist attitude such as yours, whereby you get in touch with other disciplines but do not want to immerse yourself in their backgrounds and expect to be briefed, produces a proxy. You create a disconnect, whereas there are in fact connections. Moreover, general human experience, which can’t be reduced to a single operational denominator, spans more territory than that covered by the rational disciplines. Still it is quite possible to approach, to come nearer to such a human dimension, and this is something you ignore.The designer should approach their vocation from the angle of the artist and the origin of their metier, and from an industrial-technological angle. For me, however, it is not relevant at all to articulate the different methods and their corresponding means. It is about one’s attitude regarding social relations. This is what should be center stage, but you see it only once in a while. You impose your design on others and level everything. You were at the forefront, and now our country is inundated by waves of trademarks and house styles and everything looks the same. Yet there are challengers as well, and they come from designers who take a much more sensitive approach. To me, your approach is not relevant, and in my view you should not propagate it as the only possible solution for a number of communication problems, because it’s not true. What your approach does is basically confirm existing patterns. This is not serving communication—it is conditioning human behavior.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to hear Jeremy Keith speak about the importance of owning your data and the challenges of digital preservation. In this particular lecture, his tone was slow and deliberate, and he explained with reverence that due to the crumbling of proprietary solutions, aspects of your digital life are slowly being lost. An obvious example he mentioned was Geocities; a website building platform that gave myself and countless others their first public experiences with publishing HTML. One morning, the world woke up and saw a message saying, “If you did not download your GeoCities files and images before October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to access that data.” Designers, we are historians. I doubt anyone feels that the world lost any substantial examples of design or engineering by deprecating Geocities. Its value clearly wasn’t in the quality of work that was stored on those servers—it was in the story it told. The loss we felt came from a piece of human history being carelessly discarded. More specifically, this loss of history was something that many of us made early contributions to in some form or another, and now it’s gone forever. While our corporate job descriptions don’t mention it, never forget that what we’re truly doing everyday is documenting the world around us. Every color you choose and line of code you write is a reflection of you; not just as a human being in this world, but as a human being in this time and place in human history.

We Are Historians by Mike Finch

co “E lor ver an ch y y o d o co lin os u de e o e w re rit yo f fle e i u of ctios a yo n u” Inside each project is a record of the styles and fashions you value, the technological advancements being made in the industry, the tone of your voice, and even the social and economic trends around you. Looking back on old projects, it’s easy to identify where you were when you made it. Most of us can probably remember what music we were listening to and what clothes we were wearing when it first went online. Each of these projects are detailed entries in a journal of human history. Make no mistake; we are historians. Long after we’re dead and gone, our families won’t look at our work and attach an ROI to our user experience strategies. The work we leave behind is a proclamation to the world that says I was here at this time, and this is what was important to me. Remember this the next time a frustrated client calls. Enjoy this responsibility the next time you’re forced to work an all-nighter. We don’t just design things. We’re not simply helping users and we’re certainly not just collecting a paycheck. We’re the few in this world who have accepted a calling to record the history happening around us. Let’s go make something worth preserving.

the to even ne of you trend the socia r voice s arou l and e nd yo c u.â&#x20AC;?

d r h o c c a e e . r d . . e a n e d a i s i u s ct les val n I â&#x20AC;&#x153; oje sty ou pr the ns y of shio fa e, and cono mic

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Think you’re right on many points, and it would sadden me if a designer’s contribution came across as a pulp of uniform corporate identity programs. When you work on a company’s or organizations identity, the package of demands you analyze proves to be the same in most cases. I translate “responding subjectively to it” as: “when I am cheerful, I respond in yellow, and when I am dejected I respond in blue.” Frankly, I don’t believe in it. After all, the communication of many businesses and organizations and the information on which you collaborate tend to be quite similar, and it is not necessary to disguise this fact or to put a gloss on it.

Subjective design leads to results that in my view seem just

WIM CROUWEL

as overblown or that are even uniform as well, except that they are uniform in the short run compared to the things that also come across as uniform in the long run. The latest Spruijt calendar by Van Toorn is as pretentious as a piece of so-called good design, or as a clean pof design.

3 34

The Debate

JAN VAN TOORN

A client’s package of demands is rational, and you can sum it up straightforwardly in a list of points. But how identity is determined is not the same overtime, nor are you a neutral intermediary. Several weeks ago I read an article by Brecht about the epic theatre. He writes about being an actor. You’re standing there, and still you’re playing a role. You shouldn’t want to deny the ambiguity. Engage with it! It will not truly function until you manage to find the right balance. I suspect that you need to train yourself in it, but in my view you should not try to evade it. My calendar for Spruijt is an experiment and a thing to look at, not a thing to read. It does have order, yet it is order with a twist to it. You continue to feel that something’s happening. And with a calendar that is fine, while in the case of typography you might not do it. In typography you will perhaps be more cautious to break rules because there are so many of them. But in fine art,experiments have been done for centuries, and perhaps we should pick up more from that tradition and use more from it.

352

Rick Poyn

Jan van Too in a Calenda

nor

orn: The World ar

Rick Poynor is a writer, critic, lecturer and curator, specialising in design, photography and visual culture. He founded Eye, co-founded Design Observer, and contributes columns to Eye and Print. His latest book is Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design. He is Visiting Professor in Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art, London.

ing Blocks for a Theory of Media” — that lie behind the calendar, though I suspect she attributes a greater degree of theoretical sophistication to Van Toorn in 1972 than was really the case. (See also the discussion of intellectual influences on his thinking in my book). Yet the knotty character and intractable demands of the object itself remain somehow elusive. We aren’t told much in the essay about what the calendar contains, or how it works as a sequence of pages. Van Toorn employs only photographs for his visual essay. The calendar has no text, no slogans and provides no explanation of what it shows. Many of the people seen in the photomontages are anonymous members of the public, but others are (or were) public figures who will mean little or nothing to contemporary viewers without some elucidation. Only in a few cases does Van Toorn keep the original caption where a picture came from a newspaper or magazine.

e Dutch printer Ma rt.Spruijt, is one of the most extraor dinary and provoc ative graphic artifacts of its era. The calendar prop osed a new form of engagement for the graphic de signer as a mediator and mani pulator of photogra phic meaning. The project st ill looks utterly re markable 40 years later. How di d such an uncompro mising object get made? In colla boration with the de signer Simon Davies, I publishe d the piece in its en tirety in Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice, my monogr aph about Van Toorn. Until th en the Dutch design er ’s masterpiece was known by just a handful of fre quently reproduced pages. Now Mark Schalken at de Ruimte, a design company in Amsterdam, has phot og ra ph ed and reprinted the entir e calendar — it wa s la un ch ed at a public event to ma rk the designer’s 80 th bi rt hday — giving a chan ce to experience its 50 pages at their original sc ale.The reprint co mes with a detachable folding -poster essay by Els Kuijpers, a design writer who collaborates regu la rl y with Van Toorn. There are 80 0 copies in Dutch an d 200 with an English transla tion. Kuijpers does a th orough job of explaining th e ideas — the epic th ea ter of Bertolt Brecht; Ha ns Magnus Enzensbe rger’s “Build-

Jan van Toorn’s ca lendar for 1972/73, designed for th

Ca to r cid and

an photographs be trusted represent reality? Who dedes what pictures we see d to what purpose? Every page poses questions about the relationships between the photos: why these pictures in this configuration? Here, the designer takes full

responsibility by drawing attention to his role — but more than this, his agenda — as a producer of meaning, and foregrounding his own interventions. Additional questions arise in the developing narrative, as the weeks go by, from page to page. The sequence cuts back and forth, seemingly without pattern, between four main categories of image, representing everyday life, the political sphere, military engagement, and the media and advertising. Its dialectical method is signalled on the cover (top) and following page: first a circle isolates the face of President Richard Nixon, and then it isolates the face of an unknown man in a crowd. The equivalence in presentation of these images — this week citizens like the viewer, next week a film star, later an execution — thrusts the spectator back into the picture. The calendar provides material for inquiry, but no pat answers. Each viewer must decide what to make of its visual challenges and occasional shocks, and indeed the viewer remains one of the imponderables when talking about the calendar several decades later.

new form

He organizes his piles of photographs of people by category. The calendar, which begins and ends mid-year, might not be encyclopedic, but in its relentless accumulation of visual evidence it feels like an attempt to delineate the totality of western life. The picture categories include pages of ordinary men and women (specially shot by his assistant Geertjan Dusseljee); couples: children; glamorous media images of women; a French actress (Jeanne Moreau); softcore pin-ups; hair models; underwear models; celebrities (John Lennon, Liz Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Buckminster Fuller, TV interviewer David Frost); politicians (Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, West German Chancellor Willi Brandt, Bernadette Devlin, a radical Northern Irish MP); clergymen; crowd scenes; protesters: marching soldiers; participants in incidents of atrocity; and a fugitive American activist (Angela Davis). Source hunting has been established for many years in art history as a tool for better understanding paintings and collages that make use of existing images. The 1972/73 calendar would require a virtuosic feat of research to pin down its hundreds of sources in ephemeral publications.

different

ways

Van Toorn cuts these figures out roughly, pasting them down as if assembling a scrapbook of references. Some pieces he places in a fairly regular grid, though usually with overlaps and disruptions; other pages have a more scattered or dynamic construction. While the primary purpose is not aesthetic, much of the calendarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s impact comes from the variety and play of compositions, the vigorous massing of elements within the page, and the control of negative space. Van Toornâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skills as an editorial collagist, developed in the 1960s in the first phase of his career, here reach their zenith: he had found himself and would be a dif ferent designer from this point. The roughly chopped images grind against the belligerent Block Extra Condensed he uses for the numerals at the bottom or sometimes top of the page.

“[Van Toorn’s] project looks for that situation in which the viewer — not the mass but each viewer, equal but dif ferent — can find and rediscover himself or herself in the complexity of the everyday world on the basis of personal experience,” writes Kuijpers. That’s a large and perhaps not entirely realistic claim for a piece of print meant to function, at least notionally, as a printer’s promotional item. As a continuous daily presence on someone’s wall, the calendar was an audacious choice of delivery system by Van Toorn. It was the third in a challenging series, with several more calendars to follow until the printer had finally had enough of what he called the designer’s “Marxist thinking.” Yet we still might wonder how likely it was that a calendar could generate a high level of intellectual engagement by casual viewers, though it must surely have been a talking point.

seeing

Nevertheless, seen against its contemporary background — the war in Vietnam, student protests, Godard’s films, the counterculture, the New Left, feminism, Black Power, post-structuralism, Ways of Seeing — the calendar represents, and today vividly reconstitutes, a historical moment of idealism when it seemed imperative to disrupt, interrogate and expose the seamless elision of media spectacle and manipulative political reality. As Kuijpers concludes,

Van Toorn’s method “is not deployed in the first instance to communicate this or that political message. On the contrary, the method politicizes the message. In the way it treats the subject matter.” This beautifully presented reprint

resurrects a key example of graphic engagement from European design history that still has the power to prompt necesssary reflections on design and photography’s role.

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I have great affection for the artist, but at the same time I do not claim to be oneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;I do not have as much freedom as an artist. Many designers are living with the dilemma of wanting to be a visual artist rather than a good graphic designer.

WIM CROUWEL

Let me go back to that calendar and your issue of identity. You state that it is possible to list everything neatly in a package of demands and clarify it all, but that identity cannot be made intelligible. But scientists in psychology and philosophy are looking for it; they in fact try to quantify identity, so that it becomes comprehensible. The same is true in aesthetics, which is perhaps one step further along. Notably Max Bense is quite far already in developing quantification methods for all elements of aesthetics, so that these things can be applied better and in a ore goalÂoriented fashion Your calendar, Jan, your story about it is fine. But that calendar is not a vehicle for selling your story, or is it? That cannot be the motivation for making a calendar, can it? You would be better off publishing it in a book. In my view it is nonsense to use a calendar as a vehicle for such stories, even when they interest you and many others, myself included. I consider a calendar an object in which you can express time as an elementâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an object such as a clock.

The Debate

JAN VAN TOORN

Grids are highly effective for conveying a message, but that is merely a starting point. You should not promote their use as the only way of design, or the only solution for arriving at great communication for the future.

un veil

You say that I promote grids as the one true thing. I say that graphic design consist of a process of ordering for the benefit of the clarity and transparency of information. This needs to be founded on particular principals, because clarity and transparency on their own do not lead to quality information. There has to be an underlying principal as well.

WIM CROUWEL

My basic principals may have been characterized at times as subjective, but to me that are objective. When I depart from modular structures, then this is an underlying principal to me. These structures can be simple, but they can also be extremely complex. And I believe that designâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not just graphic design, but also spatial design, architecture, and industrial designâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;benefits from a cellular approach, from a highly structural approach. Typography, for instance, is a preeminent example of such a process of ordering. Every form or shape in typography that wants to be more is one form too many. As a typographer you merely arrange information clearly so as to convey it in an easily readable way. That a clear arrangement may lead to incredible monotony is not issue here; what matters is that you order things according to a specific point of view, from basic principal. This is what determines form, and such form might well lead to a style as well. In my view, typography does not have to be determined by tradition and history at all. It is time, I believe, that we throw overboard all those dos and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ts that have kept typography in a straightjacket for so long. When as an alternative I advocate my structural approach, my cellular approach, which culminates in the use of grids for typography or spatial grids for architecture, I really have a different idea in mind.

The Debate

By traditional form I mean what you refer to as something determined by tradition. It does not so much pertain to style, but our way of reading, the way of reading we have grown accustomed to. It does not just emerge out of the blue, but has a history. It is a case of historically determined human behavior. And you cannot simply act as if it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist.

JAN VAN TOORN

Working with grids, it seems to me, is a tremendous refinement of our tools, but it is not essential and only of interest to fellow professionals. We saw where systematic ordering ad absurdum leads us in the protests against the closing of the Hochschule in Ulm: banners with perfectly clean typography. But in this way of protesting you do not see any identification with those you address, and this is a crucial problem for which a designer has to find a solution.

THE IMPORTANCE OF EMOTION IN DESIGN PAUL JARVIS

Business on the Internet is about standing out and being noticed. We want what we do online to be thought of as remarkable and worthy of continued discussion. Simply put, we want an audience to commit to a relationship with us. Page views, mailing list signups and product purchases are all the result of this pined-for engagement. But to achieve this, we need to show them value, trust and possibly most importantly, create an emotional connection with them. As consumers ourselves, we’ve all become accustomed to exceptionally designed online experiences. Even if we aren’t professional Web designers or graphic artists, we know what looks good and reward companies that have got their aes-

thetics just right by giving them our money (some examples are: Apple, Nest and Kickstarter). Conversely, if your website and its products don’t measure up visually, trust and value won’t be established and sales could be lost. More and more, companies are focusing on building a personality and story into every website and product. This evokes an emotional reaction from a visitor. Personality turns a lifeless product or soulless corporation into more than sum of its parts. Expressing the company’s personality helps create an emotional connection with the audience. This isn’t just something large corporations do – savvy entrepreneurs and one-person shops have also caught on.

Effective emotional design is created for human beings first—not metrics, algorithms or SEO robots. And this can happen with products or companies with thousands of employees or just one (you).

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to at speaks h t n ig s e D is… emotion

plays a “Emotion in our e l o r l u f r powe ined a g s a h d lives an ttention a t n a c fi i sign a of e r a y t i r o i as a pr eraction t n i n i y d stu design”

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– Golman &

Jordan

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un veil

WIM CROUWEL

Jan, I don’t believe in that at all. The lively concern of these people and their involvement—their angehauchtheit, as they call it in Germany—is equal to that of people who protest in more amateurish ways. Look at Paris ’68 ! The posters they made there are all obvious cases of amateurism; not a single one of them has any value. Not one of them is a good piece of design that really tries to convey an idea. It is all clumsy work that comes across as sweet, pleasant, full of feeling, but not as tough. Good designers could have conveyed the content much more strongly and this could have brought the movement more success.

The Debate

JAN VAN TOORN

Why then did those designers fail to contribute? Because they are incapable of giving adequate answers. So all that remains is amateurism. The people in our profession have no answer.

HOW TO BE A GRAPHIC DESIGNER WITHOUT LOSING YOUR MIND ADRIAN SHAUGHNESSY

#135/THE CREATIVE PROCESS

“

Where does the creative process begin?

You could argue that the creative process begins with the decision to become a designer. From that moment on, everything you see and do feeds your visual intelligence, and contributes to the make of a designer.

It’s one of the best things about being a designer: seeing design everywhere, and taking inspiration from anything. You can’t turn off the fact that you’re a designer: you will always be tuned in and receiving. Or at least you should be.

”

When we look at good design - the stuff that inspires us we want to emulate it. Infuriatingly, the best design always looks effortless. We are convinced we can do it too. But when it comes to it, we find it is much more difficult than we at first thought. So what are the skills you need to do good work? I’ve already mentioned talent, and I’ve stressed that the discipline of graphic design, as it is practiced today, allows a wide and generous interpretation of the word. Graphic design is a bit like the game of rugby. At school I was forced to play this semi-barbaric, often violent ball game in mud and freezing rain. My school’s Rottweiler-like sports instructor was a rugby fanatic. After picking the best players he’d glare at the unsporty residue-the ones who hadn’t been picked for his team-and say gloatingly: ‘Don’t worry, there’s a place for all types of rugby. Big or small, fat or thin, there’s a role for everyone’. There isn’t much physical violence in graphic design, but there is room for nearly everyone with any sort of talent. Let’s assume that talent is given. What else do you need? Industriousness, dedication and a love of your craft are indispensable. Obviously really, but if you can’t say that you have all three of these qualities, then you should perhaps consider another career. I’d say that it is also essential to have a questioning attitude to your work. If you don’t question everything that is put in front of you, then you run the risk of being compliant and submissive, and these two qualities of mediocrity. By urging you to adopt a questioning attitude, I’m not advocating a carping or complaining approach. I’m saying that you should be skeptical (but not bitter) towards the business of design. Finally, you need to acquire a ‘voice’. I was tempted to say ‘style’ here, but voice is more accurate, because it is more personal and it suggests humanistic qualities. How do you acquire a voice? This is not easily answered. A design voice, a tone, is forged by three main elements.

un veil

Jan, before the break let’s briefly return to the typography in the catalogs we make for museums. I have always taken the view that these catalogs should have a kind of magazine format, because they need to tell the museum’s story, rather than that of the artist. For this reason, they should be recognizable in their design as coming from an institution that takes a specific stance vis-a-vis contemporary art.

WIM CROUWEL

This has led to catalogs of which people said:”We can’t recognize the artist in it.” But the artist was present in the reproductions, and I have nothing to add to his story. The artist’s own story, when conveyed clearly and in a readable fashion by means of well-placed illustrations according to a certain principle, should be so powerful that he is always stronger than me. What I add to it is at most the specific objective of the museum involved. In your catalogs for the Van Abbemuseum I recognize first and foremost the voice of Jan van Toorn, while that of the artist becomes perceptible only if I put in some more effort. As “pieces of art” these are great contributions to what is currently possible in free typography, but they are outright unreadable. I simply get stuck.

The Debate

JAN VAN TOORN

At the Van Abbemuseum we wanted to do things differently. Our museum was not something that needed to be sold;at stake was a program made by people and also one that evolves. This policy, which is discernible in its exhibition and activities, had to be center stage, not the institution. Through their activities and connections, the staff determines the museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s identity. And this does not take place while I sit at home thinking up designs. Usually we [the director and I] have a conversation, if possible with artists joining inâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a joint discussion in which I am not told how I should do something, but in which we look at the historical considerations that should be in the catalog. It is a matter of seeking an identity collectively, a concern I then try to respond to, using the tools of my profession.

un veil

WIM CROUWEL

Recently I had an interesting experience in the context of the catalog for Jan Dibbets. As a conceptual artist he conveys a number of incredibly clear thoughts through his work. I am deeply impressed by it, and therefore I love working on such catalogs. And when you love the work so dearly, you feel inclined to add your own story. But that story is in fact my story, my testimony of this affection. Well, Jan Dibbets immediately rapped me on the knuckles. He said: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Just listen to me, boy, you are standing in between me and the public here. Would you please refrain from doing that. Please, position that line straight again.â&#x20AC;? This confirmed, I felt, what I usually in fact try to do in my work. Dibbets tells his story. He gives me the briefing and I am the one who, as typographer,as designer, takes a service-oriented stance in trying to translate his story to the public. For this is something Jan Dibbets himself cannot do.

The Debate

True, he cannot do that, but he does have thoughts about it. I also designed an exhibition for Dibbets. We sat together with a group of people, and he told us what activities he planned to organize in the museum. He has clear views about it, and it is then up to me to find a stance or attitude. Just as the museum had to try and answer questions or find a spot in the museum where Jan could operate. The same applies to me, for the activities involved are part of a collective endeavor rather than just my own. At one point these culminate not in all sorts of separate pieces but in something that results from a shared mind-set.

JAN VAN TOORN

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WIM CROUWEL

I believe I shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t say much more. It is my conviction that you yourself play a large role in this process and that you are the last person to create something together with the artist. It is the artist who creates and brings things into being.

The Debate

Dibbets has been very preoccupied with that catalog indeed. That has never been an issue of contention between us. On the contrary. Other artists tell me as well that they think my posters are great and that they recognize their own mind-set in them.

JAN VAN TOORN

BREAK BEGINS

FUCK

GRI DS

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N A V JAN

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Websites need structure, not grids (necessarily). So fuck â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;em.

ARGUING

jan van toorn:

WITH

rick poynor

VISUAL

MEANS

Jan van Toorn, subject of a meticulously researched retrospective that opened today (21 March) at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, is one of the most distinguished and provocative figures in an exceptional generation of Dutch graphic designers. Van Toorn’s social and political concerns, and his way of talking about them, set him apart, even among such colleagues as Wim Crouwel, Anthon Beeke, Gerard Unger, Swip Stolk and Hard Werken founder Rick Vermeulen, who all attended the opening celebration. Van Toorn has described himself as someone interested in the history of ideas, who also happens to be a practical person, a designer, and this is how he comes across. The observations that follow are based on a talk I gave at the opening ceremony.

I first met Van Toorn in the early 1990s. He had recently been appointed director of the Jan van Eyck Akademie and I travelled to Maastricht to interview him for Blueprint magazine about his plans. The whole experience made a powerful impression. Designers and design watchers in other countries have always viewed the achievements of Dutch graphic design with envy, and the 1980s had been a highly creative period. Now here was Van Toorn about to embark on what promised to be an unusual attempt to unite art, design and theory within a small institution blessed with a handsome building, plenty of equipment, a fine library, luxurious amounts of space, and some promising-looking teachers. Frankly, I felt envious of the students – or participants, as they were always called at the Akademie. Who wouldn’t want to spend time in such a haven, pursuing their personal researches? The appointment of a designer to head a centre of postgraduate study that also covered art and theory seemed like something that could only happen in the Netherlands. It recalled Willem Sandberg’s role as director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Wim Crouwel’s position as director of the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

“ argue with visual means”

During his time at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Van Toorn and his staff initiated a series of conferences and related publications. These included “And justice for all . . . (1994) and Towards a Theory of the Image (1996), culminating in Van Toorn’s final project at the end of his time as director, design beyond Design (1998), based on one the most stimulating conferences I have ever attended. Looking at this activity from the outside, and knowing just how much effort is involved to make these things happen, it seemed extraordinary that such a small institution could generate so many worthwhile contributions to debate. In the 1990s, I taught for several years at the Royal College of Art, London, a much bigger establishment than the Akademie. During the same period, the RCA produced nothing comparable in terms of ambitious academic events and publishing. This was another sign of Van Toorn’s commitment to critical analysis, dialogue between the disciplines, and the exploration of ideas. It was his achievements as a designer, though, as well as his experience as a teacher, that made the Jan van Eyck venture possible. Van Toorn has often remarked that he wanted to approach communication design as a form of visual journalism. In other words, the designer could function as a kind of reporter – investigating, reflecting, editing, shaping and delivering his findings in the form of a visual outcome. He spoke of his wish to use design as a way to “argue with visual means”.

If you compare the publications and posters Van Toorn produced in the late 1960s and 1970s with typical approaches today, his deliberately dissonant work can look astonishingly direct and uncompromising. This was, of course, a period of loosening and liberalisation when every kind of social convention was being challenged, and matters of politics and ideology were central concerns for many people within western societies. For a short, heady spell in the 1960s, revolution was in the air and to a designer with Van Toorn’s inclinations it must have seemed entirely natural to bring this spirit of social questioning into the “laboratory situation” – as he called it – of his own work. Consider, for instance, his series of calendars for the printing house Mart Spruijt. This kind of calendar is produced as a promotional item because the company hopes it will act as a reminder to use its services. Anyone who put Mart Spruijt’s 1972/73 calendar on the wall would have been reminded, every week of the year, of the complex, contradictory, troubled nature of the contemporary world. Van Toorn’s calendar showed black and white portraits of women shoppers in an Amsterdam street market, colour photos of women in bras and corsets from underwear catalogues (an ironic feminist commentary), and references to the war in Vietnam. There was a recurrent emphasis in his work on the ordinary – on everyday situations and the experiences of real people – as well as allusions to the political realm. A poster insert for a PTT Dutch post and telecommunications company report presented an informal, entirely unglamorous montage of postal workers. It couldn’t be further from the kind of glossy PR shots used so often in company literature since then. A cover design for Museumjournaal in 1979 confronted curators and scholars with a photograph of seven chubby naked men chatting in a shower. Another Museumjournaal front cover, which would be unimaginable in institutional publishing in the US or Britain, showed a man’s horribly mutilated naked body laid out on some wooden planks. This was an astringent visual sensibility that refused to flinch from even the least pleasant aspects of human experience and required the viewer, as a moral imperative, to see.

u can ssible, yo hing is po use ever y “ Ever y t , you can g n i h t y n ts r e quote eve the argum where are to a style, but tribut ing eal ly con ocial that are r e in our s tal chang fundamen s?” condit ion

Some of these communications are not without humour, but, like Van Toorn himself, they are utterly serious and purposeful. What they embody, above all, is an idea about citizenship. Their unapologetic realism is underpinned by a deep strain of social idealism. They address viewers not as consumers with tiny attention spans who must be perpetually entertained and flattered if they are not to grow bored, but as critical, thinking individuals who can be expected to take an informed and sceptical interest in the circumstances of their world. Even in the 1970s, this was a very strict demand to make of design practice, but by the 1980s, with Reaganomics, Thatcherism, the rise of neo-liberalism, and the doctrine of the free market, it was becoming much harder to function as a designer in this way. Van Toorn continued to produce some challenging work, such as his series of posters for the De Beyerd art centre, but he found fewer opportunities for the kind of critical practice at which he excelled. Design, as he often noted, was increasingly part of the problem. As he told Eye in the early 1990s: “Everything is possible, you can quote everything, you can use every style, but where are the arguments that are really contributing to a fundamental change in our social conditions?” Becoming director of the Jan van Eyck Akademie was one way of helping to encourage young designers to examine this question for themselves.

In 2004, we confront essentially the same question: where, in visual communication, are the arguments that are contributing to a fundamental change in our social conditions? To make such arguments, you must first believe that social conditions require change, and you must possess a clear sense of the kinds of change that are necessary and possible. But, despite the global crisis caused by terrorism and our responses to it, these are less certain, less politically motivated times in the wealthy nations, and designers, as a social group, share much the same disengaged outlook as other similarly educated people. In recent years, I have heard few designers express the sort of concerns and convictions that motivated Van Toorn’s generation. Nevertheless, the example of his long career is hugely inspiring and the Kunsthal exhibition (until 20 June), curated by Els Kuijpers, provides a valuable opportunity to reconsider the possibilities of engaged design. (It may be shown later in the US at the Rhode Island School of Design, where Van Toorn has been a visiting teacher for 15 years.) There is every reason to hope that young designers encountering this exceptional body of work for the first time will emerge asking tough questions about the way things are now, and wondering what they, as visual communicators, might be able to do about it.

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The Debate

It is not a matter of whether you feel closer to your workâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recipient or not. What matters is the question: What has to be done? What kind of function does your work have? Which factors determine contact between people? Can we learn more about that? After all, human beings have been conditioned in part.

JAN VAN TOORN

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WIM CROUWEL

Human beings are able to recognize themselves better in typography that relies on very simple, transparent principals that define the matter clearly, without veiling or obscuring it, rather than on the basis of Janâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s much more subjective story. This is why I believe that what Jan claims to do is not in fact what he does.

UNKNOWN SPEAKER

What are the things you choose as a human being and as a designer with your specific capabilities? For Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sake, choose the right objective and cut down on consumption. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t work for any other lousy business. It does not make a hell of a difference whatsoever whether it is a museum or a peanut butter company, or some margarine producer located in the far corner of the country. The choice involved is a much more essential one. What matters is the effective attack on the social structures that prevail today. We should make a choice, but not one for the industry or capitalism, because that is pointless. All night the discussion has been about nice places, such as museums, but not about work in less attractive corners such as Shell Oil and the like. That issue is a much more fundamental choice. This has not yet been addressed. Let us talk about that.

RENE DE JONG

I would like to narrow down the conversation somewhat, not because of a lack of problems to discuss, but because it is a discussion that we all have been in many times within numerous fields and in many places, namely: if you want to change the world, where should you begin? Talking about a socially committed stand in its ultimate implications seems to be a big story about which strategy or tactics you use to achieve social change. What is far more interesting to me is this: if you share the view that your profession is also a means for bringing about changes in society, you should start talking about how you can do so as an individual while belonging to a professional group. Which means need to be developed? Which assignments should you accept? Should you be actively looking for specific assignments or not? It is one thing to go look for work as a designer in places where social relevancy would be useful; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s another thing to not walk away from the places you do work.

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These two people claim that they find such commitment, or such a concept of commitment, much more important to discuss tonight than that which we originally had in mind. As if we have to put our social commitment into words. But when someone asks me how I, being the person I am, wish to put my talent at the service of society, I don’t mind articulating it. I am not afraid to do so, not at all in fact.

WIM CROUWEL

I believe that if you follow the tendency that I sense from the question about commitment, ninety percent of our colleagues would have to be advised to leave their profession. In fact, this is something I keep telling my students. I say to them, “Above all, make sure you know what you are doing. If this is incompatible with what you aspire to do, get out of it today and rather embark on a study such as political science or philosophy or psychology; or go into politics, because from there you have much more influence on people and you may achieve whatever you aspire faster than through our vocation.” After all, our clout is incredibly limited. Politicians in parliament can respond directly to our society and introduce bills that our government may subsequently implement. We do not find ourselves on that side. I’m not a politician, and I also made a conscious decision to stay away from that world. I love my profession, and I try to make a contribution from there.

The Debate

END

The Debate

CREDITS PUBLISHER Brendan Robson

PRINTER Denzel Boyd

DESIGNERS Natalie Abraham SongYae Han Ashley Moody Annalie Robinson Hannah Yun Rachel Zhou

CITATION Rock, Michael. Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users. New York: Rizzoli International, 2013. Print. Finch, Mike. “We Are Historians.” AIGA: The Professional Association for Design. 5 December 2011. Web. 26 October 2015 Poyner, Rick. “Jan Van Toorn: The World in a Calendar.” Design Observer. Web. Jarvis, Paul. “The Importance of Emotion in design.”(2014). Web. Retrieved from http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/02/25/importance-emotion-design/ Shaughnessy, Adrian. “The Creative Process.” How to Be a Graphic Designer, without Losing Your Soul. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2005. 135-37. Print. “Fuck Grids.” 8 Gram Gorilla RSS. HeyDesigner, n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2015. Poynor, Rick. “Jan Van Toorn: Arguing with Visual Means.” Design Observer. Observer Omnimedia LLC., 21 Mar. 2014. Web. 26 Oct. 2015.