Trial and Error

Trial and error issue nº1

Wim Crouwel jan Van Toorn Experimental Jetset Karel Martens

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EDITORIAL

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CONTEXTO

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WIM CROUWEL

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JAN VAN TOORN

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KAREL MARTENS

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EXPERIMENTAL JETSET

Design de Comunicação III Universidade de Lisboa Faculdade de Belas Artes Design Editorial Bruna Gomes Laura Mesquita

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E D I T O R I A L

Here in Trial and Error, we explore some of the most known Dutch designers, highlighting Wim Crouwel as our principal reference, who has some sort of connection with each of the other three designers also mentioned as secondary references, such as Jan Van Toorn, whom he has a debate with (reflection), Karel Martens where he shares his individuality through his work and has helped design the book ‘Wim Crouwel: Mode en Module’. and last but not least, we also mention Experimental Jetset, a studio that has inherited his work and influence as a reference.

The post-war period between 1945 and 1960, in The Netherlands, was a time to rebuild cultural and societal aspects through design movements such as the De Stijl, which was heavily influenced by the Swiss style. The Dutch, around the sixties, started to prioritize their individuality and free expression, which they shared with others, providing the experimental characteristics that a lot of designers acquired, starting with one of the designers that stood out the most at the time, Wim Crouwel.

Willem Hendrik Crouwel, was born in the 21th of november of 1928, later on adapting his name to Wim. He studied Fine Arts in the Academy of Minerva from 1946 to 1949, and decided to follow abstract painting as a professional career. Years later, he quit painting in 1954 and started to work as a freelancer in the design area, getting inspired by Swiss Design. In 1963, along with other graphic designers such as Benno Wissing, Friso Kramer, Paul and Dick Schwarz, he founded Total Design, the first multidisciplinary Dutch design studio, that emancipated designers to influence the national and cultural identity of The Netherlands through his work. Wim helped shape the design identity found in Holland in the course of his career, until his passing in 2019.

His biggest “rival”, Jan Van Toorn, born in 1932, studied in the Institute of Arts and Crafts of Amsterdam and has been in the design field since 1957, being specialized in publishing and expositions. Toorn followed a more emotional and personal approach, contradicting Crouwel. Both of them were considered and known as two giants of ducth graphic design and had a debate in 1972.

Karel Martens, born in 1939, is also a designer that got inspired by Crouwel.

He studied Fine Arts in the School of Arts and Industrial Arts of Arnhem, concluding his studies in 1961. He started to work mainly in editorial design in small graphic studios, where he designed several book covers. In 1996, along with Jaap Van Triest, Printed Matter was published, a published piece that contains memorable pages showcasing his work (both digital and traditional).

Distinguished by his remarkable individuality and use of colour, Martens was still inspired by Wim, applying a certain balance between reason and emotion in his work.

Crouwel has left his footsteps in several projects in the post-war period in The Netherlands, inspiring the following generations of designers such as Experimental Jetset, founded in 1997 by Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen, a small but notable independent design studio based in Amsterdam.

Their work is mostly inspired by movements such as punk rock and modernism. As teenagers, they recall being completely absorved in all kinds of movements post-punk: psychobilly, garage punk, new wave, two tone and american hardcore. We’re going to briefly showcase several published pieces and themes developed and explored by these authors, not only individually, but also in juxtaposition with Wim Crouwel.

“ Dutch citizens prize their individuality and free expression and extend this freedom to others, creating a social climate that encourages innovation.”

- Meggs History of Graphic Design, Chapter 23: National

Visions within a Global Dialogue, Design in The Netherlands

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C O N T E X T O

Book, Meggs history of graphic design

World War II and the German occupation completely disrupted Dutch society; with severe shortage of raw materials transportation and communications came to a virtual halt. The postwar years were a time for rebuilding the economy and working to restore prewar cultural and social life. As Dutch design evolved, two strong currents became evident: a pragmatic constructivism inspired

by Dutch traditions from the first half of the century, including the De Stijl movement, Piet Zwart, and Paul Schuitema as well as post-war influences from Switzerland; and a vigorous expressionism, with jolting images and spontaneous spatial syntax.

This duality is not surprising, for the Dutch have a reputation as a thrifty people who favor order and structure; they are also considered broad-minded and tolerant of diverse political, religious, and artistic ideas.

Dutch citizens prize their individuality and free expression and extend this freedom to others, creating a social climate that encourages innovation.

A strong impetus toward functional design in the Netherlands began in 1963. The creativity and vitality of Dutch graphic design continues to inspire graphic designers throughout the world to push the limits of the printed page.

Reinforced by a unique artistic tradition, it is the consequence of many exceptional talents as well as a highly open-minded clientele and society (...).

Book, Thirty Centuries of Graphic Design. An Illustrated Survey by James Craig, Bruce Barton

(...) During the First World War, Holland was a neutral nation. Led by the de Stijl group, it was one of the most active centers of experimental graphic design. But with the Second World War, when Holland was overrun by the German Army, Dutch designers went underground and could only show their work privately (...).

Article/Exhibition, Modern Netherland 1963- 1989, Design Museum Den Bosch

From the 1960s onwards, the Netherlands aspired to be modern. The distinctive design associated with Dutch modernism was abstract, geometric, white, grey and black.

While part of an international modernist movement, it was also typically Dutch in terms of bot its visual language and societal ambitions.

State-owned enterprises like the PTT (the postal service), the railways and the tax department were an important client for designers and combined in this way to communicate the country’s anti-traditional, open, tolerant and democratic post-war values.

From postage stamps to largescale civil engineering projects, the government made its mark on every form of public design (...).

WIM CROUWEL

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Article/Exhibition, WIM CROUWEL: MR. GRIDNIK, stedelijk museum, 28 Sep 2019 until 22 Mar 2020

Wim Crouwel (1928-2019), co-founder of the first multidisciplinary design agency in the Netherlands, Total Design in 1963, is one of the Dutch best-known designers.

He is internationally renowned for creating projects for numerous organisations and institutes including the Van Abbemuseum, the Stedelijk Museum, designing fonts such as the 1967 New Alphabet, company logos etc.

Crouwel was also a notable spokesperson for the profession.

Throughout his career, Wim Crouwel was a fervent advocate of the grid system, a tool he considers one of

Article, Designculture

Crouwel was solely responsible for the Stedelijk’s identity, designing almost all its posters and catalogs.

The New Alphabet is, in Crouwel’s words, “never meant to be really used, ” but a statement on the impact of new technologies on centuries of typographic tradition.

Wim Crouwel is a virtuoso of experimentation, who both lived and anticipated his own time.

He combined rigorous structural logics with meaningful expressiveness, showing an extraordinary mastery in color and typography, making letters become wonderful images.

He produced many of the few masterpieces that perfectly match functionality with aesthetics, and could be truly considered great works of both art and graphic design (...).

the most important in the designer’s toolbox.

His practice was profoundly influenced by the Swiss school of graphic design, whose rational, minimalist approach was organised around a grid system.

At Total Design, grid sheets provided templates for the abundance of typographic work produced for the Stedelijk. Crouwel has always favored an analytical approach, believed in technology and progress, and promoted design as an independent profession. He was and is a leading figure in Dutch design and in Dutch cultural life.”

Wim Crouwel, Vormgevers, 1968

Article, Electrifying the alphabet, at the dawn of the computer age, new functions ushered in new forms fortype design , Eye Magazine 2006

New Alphabet

Symbols of a new modernity

For example, type designer Wim Crouwel put forward the experimental New Alphabet (1967), consisting of radically simplified letterforms, with unusual ideas about case sensitivity and orthography. This proposal was to be seen only as an initial step towards further research made necessary by the increasing quantity of printed material. ‘We need to move on to a completely different form of letter,’ he explained. ‘The typeface that is to emerge will be determined by contemporary man, who knows the computer and also how to live with it.’

Basing his letterforms on the concept of computer memory as an assembly of cells, corresponding to the composition of organisms and structure of society, Crouwel conceived new communication symbols, purposely placing them in stark contrast to digitised, screenadapted typefaces, which he strongly disapproved of.

Aware that the readability of his alphabet might be questioned, he was nevertheless certain that in time, people could familiarise themselves enough to be able to read his letterforms comfortably.

Electronic alphabets were very much a product of their time, heralding a new age of electronically controlled communication, symbols of a new modernity.

As results of both technological innovation and successful collaborations between engineering and design fields, they inspired and helped to advance typograph into a new age: contemporary screen typefaces would be unimaginable without them. Perhaps it is now time for contemporary experimental typography to make a similar, lasting contribution.

Wim Crouwel, Proportion, 2006

Wim Crouwel - New Alphabet

Article, TYPEROOM: Happy birthday Mr. Gridnik: remembering Wim Crouwel

The swinging sixties adored his visual language and eventually Crouwel helped design the Dutch pavilion at EXPO ’70, the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. A lover of clarity and machinelike simplicity, Crouwel was solely interested in typography which “puts communication on paper in such a way that a message gets across plainly and clearly to the reader.

A dreamer of a simplified alphabet in which upper and lower case might become one, punctuation could be reduced, and type weight and width could be easily adjusted as needed indeed Crouwel gained a reputation for basing designs on grids, even when designing typefaces like Gridnik, Fodor, and especially his New Alphabet reports TDC. Crouwel “wanted to adapt his design to work for the new technologies, instead of adapting the technologies to meet the design” so his glyphs were pretty much unconventional with most of the letters based on a grid of 5 by 7 units, with 45-degree corners. At Total Design, grid sheets provided templates for the abundance of typographic work produced for the Stedelijk. We had an ideology, an ideology of grids.

I loved grids so much it verged on the neurotic, he once stated. Since the beginning of his career, Wim Crouwel has been strongly influenced by the modernist notion of Functionalism.

The principle that architects should design a building based on the purpose of that building.

Wim Crouwel designed posters, brochures and catalogues for 2 major art museums, first for the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven – and from 1964 to 1985 for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam” reports Dutch Profiles.

I like designers who think about their work,” he once said. “I get examples sent to me all the time by people asking for an opinion. Recently I received a typeface and I told the boy I didn’t like the uneven word shapes and thought it was unnecessary.

He wrote back to me saying he did it because he was bored and wanted something new. I hate that ... when they work from their stomachs like chickens without heads.I much prefer the thinking types. ”Nobody is seeking out the universal anymore. I want to see the next big idea and less of this convenient adjustment to circumstances.

It’s that sort of commercial approach that has caused Dutch graphics to lose so much influence.

It’s lost its edge and has become so much less visual.

Crouwel's influential take in type design will continue to shape and reshape the practice of many young designers throughout the world (...).

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Book, Meggs history of (...) Crouwel’s design philosophy was less emphatic about universal graphic design

form and standardized formats; he emphasized the designer as an objective problem solver who finds solutions through research and analysis, simplifying the message and the means for conveying it to an audience. He believed the flood of typographic messages in contemporary society demanded clarity and simplicity. Crouwel achieved a remarkable minimalism imbued with an aesthetic spirit (...).

Wim Crouwel, ‘New Alphabet Kwadraat-blad’, 1967.

Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Wim Crouwel - ‘Bazaine’, 1958 Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

JAN VAN TOORN

4 Article, Meggs history of graphic design

A designer who is not always clear about his intentions, who makes frequent use of inexplicable images and text, and whose work is often described with concepts such as ‘alienation’, ‘incomprehensibility’, ‘defamiliarization’, ‘digressions’ and ‘intrusion’. Jan van Toorn is a rarity: a radical designer with a long, steady career and an international reputation as both designer and educator.

Van Toorn takes an interest in all forms of propaganda, manipulation and dissemination of information.

From the 1970s on, his priority has been to make the viewer of his designs aware of the mechanics

of manipulation. His work includes subversive ‘dialogic’ elements (he used the term ‘dialogic’ to describe interaction with the viewer of design), which are deliberately provocative and unfinished.

Poynor documents at length the important and at times also amusing debate between Wim Crouwel and Van Toorn, including Crouwel’s ‘correction’ of JVT’s 1974 calendar.

These exchanges present two irreconcilable approaches toward design, which have now become landmark moments in Dutch graphic design history (...).

Article, Eye Magazine

Jan van Toorn (b. 1922) has been a graphic designer since 1957 and has taught in the Netherlands and the United States. From 1991 to 1998 he was the director of Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, where he developed programs in fine arts, graphic design, and design theory.

Van Toorn’s work has inspired

many expressionist designers, and he has explored means of organizing information to influence the viewer and to transmit social values.

His philosophy of “dialogic design” presents a critical challenge to the viewer to participate in the perception process and aexamine the meaning and motives of visual messages (...).

“ His memorable designs of calendars, museum catalogues, and posters are often assembled of intentionally provocative images and idiosyncratic font choices in unfinished montages rather than seamless compositions.”

Article, Jan van Toorn: The World in a Calendar, Rick Poynor, Design Observer 23/05/2012

(...)Jan van Toorn’s calendar for 1972/73, designed for the Dutch printer Mart.Spruijt, is one of the most extraordinary and provocative graphic artifacts of its era. The calendar proposed a new form of engagement for the graphic designer as a mediator and manipulator of photographic meaning. 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.

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 1972/73 calendar would require a virtuosic feat of research to pin down its hundreds of sources in ephemeral publications. 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 calendar’s impact comes from the variety and play of compositions, the vigorous massing of elements within the page, and the control of negative space. 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. “[Van Toorn’”] project looks for that situation in which the viewer — not the mass but each viewer, equal but different — 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.

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.

Jan Van Toorn - Classic calendar

“Design beyond design, critical reflection and the practice of visual communication”

In memoriam: Jan van Toorn (1932-2020), Typeroom 17/10/2020

Article, JAN VAN TOORN­(1932-2020) IN MEMORIAM, Stedelijk Museum

These are the works of a graphic designer whose subjective and confrontational approach to social and political engagement has greatly influenced the design community.

As one of the pillars of Dutch graphic design, and the polar opposite of Wim Crouwel’s neutral and functional approach to modernism, Van Toorn allowed his works to express emotion and urgency as a comment to the socio-cultural landscape of the day.

To Van Toorn, design was too obsessed with “the visual as realistic imitation or decoration” and not enough by “the image as a subjective narrative and interpretive element.

Van Toorn embraced the image as his design tool and his fascination with the media and its increasing manipulative power over the image only grew over time.

For example, his design for the yearly calendar of Amsterdam printer Mart. Spruijt in 1972, functioned less as a timekeeping device than it was a visual journal of the media's representation of the human condition ranging from politicians of the day, to soldiers of the Vietnam War, to women in lingerie ads, to the faces of the everyday citizen.

In that same year, Museum Fodor, then a dependency of the Stedelijk, featured a show of Van Toorn’s work.

And Crouwel, as the house designer for the Stedelijk, designed the catalogue.

This exhibition was to serve as the backdrop of the now famous debate of 1972 between Crouwel and Van Toorn—Van Toorn defending his subjective postmodern approach to Crouwel’s objective modernist ideals.

Of the aforementioned calendar, Crouwel that evening remarked to Van Toorn: “But a calendar is not a vehicle to sell your story, is it?” But for Van Toorn it was not about the designer’s story. For him the main focus “should always be on the receiver, who should always be continuously allowed to be the expert of his own experience, his own history.”

The designer’s task was no longer primarily situated in aesthetics, but in stimulating engagement and participation in cultural and social processes. For Van Toorn there was no such thing as neutrality because every act is by definition a critical stance.

Van Toorn was able to pass these ideas down as a teacher at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, TU Eindhoven, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

And when he became the director of the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht from 1991 until 1998, Van Toorn was able to fulfill his vision of a werkplaats where critical theory fused with interdisciplinary discourse.

And there under Van Toorn’s rigorous guidance the discipline of design research was born, introducing to us the notion of graphic design as a critical practice. (...).

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Book, Graphic Design Theory: Reading From the Field

Since the 1960s, he has used his design work to unveil the social and cultural implications of mass media.

Using physical acts of cut-andpaste, he often combines media imagery into new statements.

Through his theoretical books and his commercial work he emphasizes to us that visual communication is never neutral, the designer is never simply an objective conveyer of information.

Van Toorn is critical, political, and, in some cases, polarizing.

Design and Reflexivity As an educator at universities and academies in the Netherlands and abroad, including the Rhode Island School of Design, van Toorn urges his students to take responsibility for their own role within the ideology of our culture. Born in 1932, this influential Dutch graphic and exhibition designer warns us that design has “become imprisoned in a fiction that does not respond to factual reality.

"Jan van Toorn reveals the designer behind the design, the ideology behind the aesthetics"

Jan van Toorn - Posters ‘chagall/duchamp er was eens... de collectie nu’ (1971) Reprint 2015, litho on paper.

Collection Van Abbemuseum.

Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven

Jan van Toorn - Poster P. Struycken, 1974

the debate Debate, Grid v Intuition, Neugraphic 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.

Wim Crouwel You say that I promote grids as the one true thing.

I say that graphic design consists of a process of ordering for the benefit of the clarity and transparency of information.

This needs to be founded on particular principles, because clarity and transparency on their own do not lead to quality information. There has to be an underlying principle as well.

My basic principles may have been characterized at times as subjective, but to me they are objective. When I depart from modular structures, then this is an underlying principle to me. These structures can be simple, but they can also be extremely complex.

And I believe that design—not just graphic design, but also spatial design, architecture, and industrial design— 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 at issue here; what matters is that you order things according to a specific point of view, from a basic principle. 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 dont’s 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.

Jan van Toorn By traditional form I mean what you refer to as something determined by tradition. It does not so much pertain to style, but to 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 doesn’t exist. 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.

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.

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 answers.

Wim Crouwel 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-à-vis contemporary art.

The Debate bewteen Jan Van Toorn and Wim Crouwel, 1972

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 history. 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.

By 1967 the Ulm School of Design was financially troubled and beset by faculty conflicts; some faculty members departed and the curriculum was scaled back. In 1968 the regional court in Bonn withdrew all funding to the school, forcing the institution’s closure amid student and faculty protests.

The Debate: The Legendary Contest of Two Giants of Graphic Design, by Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn, Foreword by Rick Poynor, essays by Frederike Huygen and Dingenus Van de Vrie, translated by Tom Brouwers Originally published as het Debat (Netherlands: [Z]oo Producties, 2008), New York: The Monacelli Press, 2015, 184p.

Reviewed by Kimberly Hopkins

The Debate: The Legendary Contest of Two Giants of Graphic Design, Rick Poynor, The Monacelli Press, 2015

Language, through the inability to translate or in the choice of words, can deny us the opportunity to learn from one another, to grow, to move beyond one’s own assumptions and perspectives. The Debate, a small, well-crafted, cloth, covered orange gem – brilliantly bridges these barriers with intelligent discussion, thoughtful discourse, and contemporary relevance.

Featuring Dutch graphic designers Wim Crouwel and Jan Van Toorn’s 1972 debate, this book is more than just a transcript translated into English.

The debate is illuminated with a Foreword by British writer and curator Rick Poynor; an essay by art and design historian Frederike Huygen; an essay by curator Dingenus Van de Vrie; and brief biographies of each designer. These sections add valuable context and insight for readers familiar with or new to Crouwel and Van Toorn and this important event.

As Poynor’s Foreword points out, it is not unusual for graphic designers to voice strong

opinions on design’s role as a vehicle for communication.

However, the live event transcribed in The Debate is unique because it allows readers to feel as if they were in the audience that night taking in Crouwel and Van Toorn’s points and counterpoints in real time. What’s more, the debate’s conversational format, wherein ideas are not only stated but exchanged, reads as a lesson in civility; the discussion promotes not agreement, but greater understanding. Crouwel and Van Toorn debate two central points: (1) the proper function of graphic design; and (2) the relationship between graphic design and social issues.

The first point dominates the text. Crouwel advocates design systems such as grids and hierarchy to convey information and avoid visual bias. He believes graphic design should be objective, clear, and empower the audience to interpret without influence.

Van Toorn, on the other hand, believes design is inherently

subjective as designers cannot separate themselves from their work, nor should they. In his view, system-only solutions risk visual “conditioning” (29).

Human expression is required to connect with an audience, he argues, for without such kinship design is disengaged.

Towards the end of the conversation, Crouwel and Van Toorn discuss the relationship between graphic design and social issues. By 1972, designers in the Netherlands and elsewhere around the world were considering the ways in which design should better society. Crouwel and Van Toorn approach the topic in limited but noteworthy ways.

Van Toorn cites protest posters from the closure of the Hochschule in 1968, questioning the design approach and its influence (or lack thereof) on the outcome. The two designers then briefly debate whether design can truly create political change.

reflexão objetividade vs. subjetividade

Wim Crouwel jan van toorn

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KAREL MARTENS

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Interview, Karel Martens Graphic Designer, Peter Bil'ak, Typotheque 29/11/2004

In his work, Karel Martens embraces both freedom and order.

He finds inspiration in the limitations of the profession and turns obstacles into challenges. OASE, a Dutch architectural journal, is an illustration of how designers can maneuver in the narrow field of graphic design production. OASE balances between book and a magazine and each new issue reinvents its forms to surprise its readers. Karel Martens gave OASE a clear direction and convincingly makes a magazine that is both modest and luxurious, making one believe that a low-budget publication is in fact a precious object to be collected. A grid became a fascinating element forKarel Martens.

The most basic element in graphic design is given an active role that reflects the tone of the magazine.

When did you start working on OASE magazine?

The first issue that I did was in 1990.

Before it was a magazine of a different format, A4 size.

When you started working on OASE did you design a fixed grid for future issues?

For me the grid is an instrument that allows me to work with books.

Very often it is a flexible grid so I am not too constrained, I still have to make decisions about placing text and images.

I spent some time looking at OASE trying to follow the internal structure of the magazine. I had an impression that the grid is changing with every issue, as well as paper and typefaces. But those changes are so subtle that you don’t see them from issue to issue, you need to see a series of them to compare the first one and the latest one and only then can one see the changes.

That’s true. As basic typefaces I am trying to stick with Monotype Grotesque and Janson, but there are exceptions. The grid is also changing when the format is changing [an issue on poetry and architecture has a different size]. The grid, and the division of the grid, depends on the complexity of the issue. The last two issues are bilingual, so I had to adapt the grid to accommodate more text.

We are now doing an issue of OASE [issue 49] and we made the Dutch and the English text equal.

This requires a change in grid too.

It seems that you turn all the technical constraints and limitations to an advantage, and there is no visible aesthetic compromise in OASE, all the issues work well with all these limitations.

Limitations are an important thing in design in general because they offer solutions.

You seem to almost enjoy those limitations.

It’s not that I would ask for them, but I am always trying to find my space when working on a project.

There are not so many limitations as in the past, I feel more flexible, and it is easier. OASE is a very low budget publication, and I know that if I change the paper, I will probably be able to add one more colour on the cover, or if I reduce the size I could add more pages. For me, from the beginning, it was important to realise that it is always the same audience that reads OASE, and they don’t really want to have always the same magazine with just a different cover.

It is the same as if I would have invited a guest to my house and prepared a wonderful meal. They enjoy it, but if they come next time, I cannot prepare the same meal again.

It is more respectful to the public to always prepare something unique.

They look forward for the next issue.(...).

Karel Martens, Re-Printed Matter, pages

Karel Martens - 21st International Poster and Graphic Design Festival of Chaumont, 2010

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Book, Printed Matter/ Drukwerk, Karel Martens, Jaap van Triest, Robin Kinross, Hyphen Press 2001

Karel Martens is a versatile designer who occupies an unassuming but fundamental place in the "graphic Netherlands ". He conducts his own visual research, principally with used paper: newspapers, postcode books, and any kind of used material that draws him. His work is characterized by workmanship and simplicity.

He is not one for glamour. He wants to get the best out of techniques and materials. This attitude is expressed constantly in the choice of paper, of typeface, colour and format.

He does not shrink from the confrontation between form and content, so that each graphic product remains an exciting undertaking.

Meticulousness and demand for quality are leading motifs. Martens is a rock in the defence against the sometimes all-too-fashionable graphic racket that surrounds us (...).

Karel Martens, spreads from Printed and Re-Printed Matter

Article, “Absence in design is very important”: Karel Martens on paying attention to the things we don’t see, Jyni Ong, It’s Nice That 02/09/2020

He’s someone who views no difference between artist and designer (just the label) and through his unique way of seeing, creativity is “all about the person”. By this, he means that creativity is the antithesis of dogma.

Making work is “all about trying and discovering” and in his opinion, “there are no truths.”

Famous for his sense of experimentation, there are countless projects we could cite now to demonstrate the Dutch master’s way of thinking. There are countless projects we could cite now to demonstrate the Dutch master’s way of thinking.

We'll Just mention a few that helped cement his reputation for type and print: the design of OASE Journal for Architecture, where Karel explores the relationship between graphic design and architecture, a role he took up in 1990; his well-known symbol generated cloud images, formed by the tight repetition of intricately designed rosettes; and perhaps most infamously, his ongoing work with the Stedelijk’s print collection where he repurposes old archive cards to become diplomas for Werkplaats Typografie graduates.

Present technology erases many of the limitations that were present in the pre-adobe design era.

But for Karel, it’s imperative to remember that graphic design was born out of restriction; restriction of what the hands can do with print. So the fundamentals of the art remain much the same for this new era. The

process of graphic design can be boiled down to this question posed by Karel: “How many different elements do you need to tell the story?” The story doesn’t have to be 100 percent accurate, though.

The designer can “lie a bit” or cut corners in the information they hold back from the viewer. That’s also part of the script – don’t tell the total story so the viewer can hook onto the missing details. In graphic design, the work is outward-facing, for the public.

In some ways, the aim is to engage them and make them feel part of a story mid-climax.

As Karel puts it more broadly: “Curiosity is a very important thing for a human being. If you see a book on the shelf, you should become curious.

Absence in design is very important, the things you don’t see. But designers can offer a set of ingredients and allude to certain things.”

With so many options readily available nowadays at the click of a button, in Karel’s opinions, a design can feel “too complete”. After all, the computer is mimicking something that was first crafted by the human hand.

He expands on this notion of overcompleteness: “Too many colours, too many shapes, too many ideas.

It is harder but more important to take a small part of [a design] and make it clear as a kind of hesitation, or suggestion.” While Karel duly acknowledges that tradition is important, he also points out the necessity of criticality. “

Karel Martens, Untitled, ca. ,1991

Mode en Module

Book - Printed Matter/ Drukwerk, Karel Martens, Jaap van Triest, Robin Kinross, Hyphen Press, 2001

This monograph on one of the major Dutch graphic designers was a real experiment.

Such a detailed examination of the life and the work of a living designer is unprecedented.

Much descriptive text, a huge number of pictures, a catalogue of work and other listings run to 432 pages.

The designers were fully involved in the editorial work on the book, especially in the provision and editing of pictures, designed with Jaap van Triest (and Karel Martens).

Spreads from Wim Crouwel: Mode En Module, F. Huygen, H.C. Boekraad, 010 Uitgeverij, 1997

Book, Wim Crouwel: mode en module - A review, Hyphen Press Journal

Spreads from Wim Crouwel: Mode En Module, F. Huygen, H.C. Boekraad, 010 Uitgeverij, 1997

In contrast to Huygen’s essays, Hugues Boekraad’s contributions are wayward and frustrating. Boekraad’s background is in philosophy and literature.

He worked as an editor with the SUN publishing house in Nijmegen, helping to see it develop, from its roots in the student socialist movement of the late 1960s, into a distinguished radical publisher.

The SUN was distinguished not least by the form of its books, notably those designed by Karel Martens (the book under review is thus in one aspect a reunion).

The design of the SUN books formed the topic of a long essay by Boekraad, which brought together social-historical and visual discussion in a way that had hardly been attempted before in design criticism, the field that he then entered.

“(...) Both rational and emotional considerations are in play.”

Spreads from Wim Crouwel: Mode En Module, F. Huygen, H.C. Boekraad, 010 Uitgeverij, 1997

Book, Printed Matter/ Drukwerk, Karel Martens, Jaap van Triest, Robin Kinross, Hyphen Press, 2001

Design should be able to be seen fittingly inserted into a desired social structure.

Designing is making choices. During this process both rational and emotional considerations are in play.

Rational factors tend to be distilled out of the job itself and can also be determined through the constraints and possibilities that the techniques of production offer.

Emotional aspects are a more delicate matter, because they are more subjective.

In good design, I suggest, the expression must exhibit a certain tension and/or harmony between functionality and the qualities of attraction.

My thoughts about matters of this kind have their origin in the time when I trained, when there was a prevailing belief in the good of functionalism and in the beauty of the constructed, which the application of this idea led to.

Uniformity gave way to diversity. The designer took another, more personal approach to the content. The content should come to expression in the form.

And so, through the individualization of the person, a social style has to make way for a multiplicity of individual voices with expressions to match.

individualidade objetividade e subjetividade

Wim Crouwel karel martens

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EXPERIMENTAL JETSET

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Article, Typeroom

(...) Consisting of Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen, this small, independent, Amsterdam -based graphic design studio was established back in 1997. The trio, who met and collaborated during their studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy formed Experimental Jetset and since the beginning of their adventures in the world of the letters, they decided to focus on printed matter and sitespecific installations. Best known for their typographic solutions have

completed projects as diverse as the new graphic identity.Conscious “of its origins and place in design history” they see their work as an archive of influences. Experimental Jetset portfolio is influenced by their involvement as teenagers in the 1980s with the “post-punk subcultures such as New Wave, Psychobilly, 2 Tone and Mod”, notes Brinkers. And although they have become synonymous with the use of Helvetica typeface Stolk wants to set the record straight (...).

Experimental Jetset Paradiso, Posters 1, December 1996; - De Theatercompagnie Driekoningenavond, 2006

Experimental Jetset Artimo poster, August, 2003

Article/Exhibition, Pop, subcultures and the future of graphic design_ an interview with Experimental Jetset, Emily Gosling, It’s Nice That 28/06/2016

(...)On top of that, a lot of post-punk subcultures used to have this added element of “social mobility” – which is hard to explain, but what we mean is simply this: subcultures can sometimes function as “gateways”, enabling kids to escape from certain fixed social milieus. As working-class teens, growing up in non-academic surroundings, it was through subcultures such as punk and new wave that we first learned about movements such as Surrealism, Futurism and Dada. In that sense, postpunk was a form of education for us.

How would you describe the Dutch approach to graphic design? How has it changed since you formed in 1997?

A lot has changed over the last few decades. From the end of World War II up until the 1990s, the Netherlands have been a (more or less) socialdemocratic country, leaning (culturally and socially) to the left.

This was also reflected in graphic design — in general, graphic design was regarded as the embodiment of a certain socialist, modernist ideal: the synthesis of art and the everyday.

Society as a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Within this atmosphere, graphic design was considered to be a public platform, not only for utilitarian communication, but also for authorship, and self-expression.

The graphic designer was allowed (or better said, expected) to explore the artistic dimension of the medium to the fullest. This meant that, for most designers, there was no real separation yet between “autonomous work” and “commissioned work”: the functionality of a piece of design was also measured by its ability to push certain boundaries, to challenge expectations — but all within the realm of the public, as an integral part of society. However, since the turn of the millennium, Dutch society has slowly transformed itself, from a Scandinavian-style welfare state into a more Anglo-Saxon-style neo-liberal market economy. And this process of dismantling the welfare state has had an immediate effect on graphic design. Most of the public and cultural infrastructure has been destroyed, or will be destroyed soon.

Everything has been privatised, commercialised, opened to the market. Most institutes (even the so-called ‘cultural’ institutes) have stopped working with independent designers or small studios, and are collaborating more and more with large communication and advertising agencies. The whole notion of socialdemocratic design has disappeared, to make way for more neo-liberal concepts such as branding, advertising and marketing. A catastrophic state of affairs, obviously. (...).

Experimental Jetset - poster, De Theatercompagnie Postcards, 2006

Video, Experimental Jetset on Scavenging the ruins of Modernism, Design Indaba 13/05/2016

Wim Crouwel: (...)So within the Dutch context we basically grew up in a fairly specific late modernist social democratic environment, a graphic landscape that was for a great part created by designers such as Wim Crouwel and Studios like Total Design, the stems, the school books, the phone books, everything around us was designed in this particular graphic language. So, as a consequence we now consider this late modernist language almost as a sort of mother tongue or maybe even a sort of folk art.

It’s a language in which we were brought up and we now feel entitled to use it as a language ourselves to expand it, to explore it, to tell our own stories with it (...)

Modernism: By now it will be clear that one of the main themes in our work it's a personal relationship to modernism , however

we have to admit that we have a very broad definition of modernism.

In fact we usually speak of modernism's in plural. We never really believed in the notion of one single unified modernist movement in our view, modernism consists of a multitude of very different, often even conflicting movements.

What binds them all together is that they all can be seen as a specific reaction to modernity but then again rejection of modernity is a special specific reaction as well and this also counts as a form of modernism or at least it doesn't our own warped definition of modernism.

Stedelijk Museum: (...)It’s a space that keeps reminding us of being part of this larger narrative of modernism. It is also a museum with an important graphic tradition being connected to great graphic designers such as William Sandberg and Wim Crouwel (...)

“ We realize that we are basically scavenging

the ruins of Modernism and we hope that we will still stumble upon something of value.”

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Article, Notes on Experimental Jetset, Rick Poynor, 12.21.03

(...) Experimental Jetset claims just about the most provocative and interesting list of influences I can recall any design team offering as an explanation for its activities.In a recent interview with Rudy VanderLans about their use of Helvetica, two key ideas emerge. First, that they always try to emphasise the physical qualities of a piece of graphic design.

“By stressing the idea of design as matter rather than as an accumulation of images, we try to get away from the alienation of visual culture,” they say. By “images” they mean the representations used to attract certain audiences, and this

Experimental Jetset - SMCS Time and Again Exhibition Opening Invitation, 2004

Experimental Jetset - We Are The World, Biennale di Venezia, 2003

Experimental Jetset - artbrut, 2012

leads to the second idea. “In our view, design should have a certain autonomy, an inner logic that exists independently of the tastes and trends of so called target audiences.”

Without this autonomy, design simply ends up reflecting back at the audience representations of things that it already knows about.

Experimental Jetset compares the situation in design to contemporary politics. Increasingly, instead of presenting policies based on their own convictions, politicians try to discover what the public wants through market research and shape their policies to mirror these wishes (...).

Experimental Jetset - Statement & Counter-St. Book Cover, September, 2015

Typographic Architect.2 Article, This reissue of Typographic Architectures designed

by Experimental Jetset is a must-own, Typeroom, 2020

As a major figure in contemporary European graphic design, Wim Crouwel (1928-2019) has widely influenced the history of the discipline through his extensive practice of design, applied both to the cultural and commercial field.

Over the course of his career, he has carried out works in the range of typographic creation, visual identities, posters, book design, or scenography.

In the 1950s and for decades, Wim Crouwel, whose influence extends beyond the borders of the Netherlands to a large extent, has managed to develop an approach to graphic design combining modernist heritage with pop fantasy.

Article and Booklet, WIM BOOK,Typographic Architect. 2, Experimental Jetset, July 2007

Spread from Typographic Architect. 2, Experimental Jetset, July 2007

The grid is quite clear: each page is divided in four. It is in fact the most basic grid ever: a horizontal line and a vertical line, crossing each other in the middle.

We thought such an archetypical grid would fit really well with the subject of the book, self-declared 'gridnik' Wim Crouwel.

We had been playing with the idea of using such an archetypical grid earlier, but for some reason we never found a good occasion; so we were glad we could now finally use it in the right context.

Spreads from Typographic Architect. 2, Experimental Jetset, July 2007

Spread from Typographic Architect. 2, Experimental Jetset, July 2007

“(...) Instead of portraying Crouwel as the stereotypical functionalist, they really shed a new light on Crouwel by showing the way in which his work is influenced by pop-cultural forces such as Science Fiction and Pop Art.”

Spreads from Typographic Architect. 2, Experimental Jetset, July 2007

crowelism Interview, Crouwelism, Conversation with Wim Crouwel, Experimental Jetset, Graphic Magazine, 7th of January, 2003

This meeting took place in January 2003, in our studio, and it turned out to be a very pleasant afternoon. It was the first time we met Wim Crouwel, and we were instantly taken with this personality; he’s an enormously charming and erudite man.

WC: For whom do you make your creations? Yourselves, or the public?

EJ: We don’t really see that division. In our opinion, target audience based approaches do not automatically result in more functional designs.Designs that have a sort of built-in resistance, a certain stubbornness, could very well be the ones that function the best in a society, in the way that a grain of sand can produce a pearl in an oyster.

WC: Nevertheless, I think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The heart of the matter is to create intelligent and self-confident designs focused on a target group, without being outsmarted by that target group.

Crouwelism, Experimental Jetset, Graphic Magazine 7th of January, 2003

WC: Yet I can see where a lot of criticism of younger designers comes from. I despise nostalgia, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking back to the 1950s.

We all had the feeling that we were working towards a goal: the postwar reconstruction. We wanted to make the world better.

A kind of utopian idealism.

It’s hard not to get the feeling that today’s generation of designers is chiefly occupied with themselves.

And then when you talk to these designers, this appears rather often not to be the case at all, not at all.

EJ: What you’re talking about now is postwar modernism.

Perhaps the situation today resembles more pre war modernism. That was a totally divergent situation: marginal movements, splinter groups, manifestos, opposing utopias.

In our opinion, we’ve reached a similar situation.

Looking at the designers around us and at our students we notice that everyone is in fact quite idealistic, very ideologic, despite what the critics say. But everyone has their own approach. We do agree there is certainly not a common movement.

WC: Exactly, there is no common movement. And maybe that’s the problem that so many designers of my generation have with today’s situation.”

influência sequência

Wim Crouwel experimental

jetset

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