Pixillion

It was with great excitement and anticipation that Remco found himself standing outside the doors of The Design Museum on the 25th of May. The reason for this grand outing and show of support for the design industry was simple; from the 30th of March The Design Museum London began showing a retrospective of the life work of the famous Dutch Graphic Designer, Wim Crouwel; a man whom Remco has come to admire and whose work has been a great inspiration.

“Wim Crouwel’s work has always been around me, whether I was aware of it or not,” Remco says trying to remember when he first discovered Crouwel, “His studio has produced a lot of iconic work. Stuff that you saw every day in Holland; it being a stamp, the logo of your bank or a promo poster for a museum.”

The show itself covers over 60 years worth of Crouwel’s work, from his early museum posters to the years spent as part of the Total Design studio and his unique take on typography.

With his father a block-maker for the printing industry and a love of art and architecture from an early age, it is only natural that the young Wim Crouwel would go to art school. But the lack of jobs in the aftermath of World War II meant that Crouwel didn’t enter into the world of design until the late 1950’s. Once Crouwel found his way in, he began to work on some of what we consider the most iconic poster, catalogue and typography designs of the last century. Looking specifically at typography, he took the subject to a whole new level with the advent of his ‘New Alphabet’ [video] which was his response to the changing nature and digitisation of printing during the mid 1960’s. With its bold, straight lines and diagonals it may have been hard to read, but it made perfect sense to Wim in terms of printing, as the lines stayed the same no matter what the point size was.

Wim Crouwel’s work always stood out to Remco and has had a big impact on his own creative style and design ethic. Growing up in the suburbs of Rotterdam it’s hard to see how anyone could not be influenced by the creativity and history that permeates the landscape.

Dutch design certainly had an effect on Remco from early on: “I don’t have a formal graphic design background. I grew up around street art and DJ-ing/producing and got interested in advertising at a young age. Inspiring design is all around you in the urban parts of Holland".

Dutch design has a long and unique history, emanating from its cultural, social, political, ideological and even its geographical background and it’s for this reason that Dutch Design is still so relevant and significant today. Take Rotterdam for example, much of it had to be rebuilt after World War II, signalling the opportunity to design a new city. Although the Dutch did embrace the then modernist way of thinking that gave simplicity, form and function after the war, they also equally looked to their own roots. In doing so they added the Dutch tradition of making use of space and including beauty and nature in their designs to the more logical and rational buildings of the modernist architecture. So that over time Rotterdam has become a collection of modern buildings with large green park areas interspersed, giving the city a feeling of space despite its growing population.

It is this kind of reaction to a problem that makes Dutch Design so interesting. The openness and active encouragement of liberal thinking is why the city is so rife with expressions of creativity and it doesn’t stop at the physical. Dutch design permeates through into the digital world and is still as prevalent and influential today as it was in its infancy. From the clean, minimalist, simplicity of page designs, and the bold, block colours of typography, to the grid-like functionality of layouts – there is a lot to take away and learn from European designers like Wim Crouwel, Josef Müller-Brockmann, Massimo Vignelli and Jan Tschichold that is still relevant in today’s ever changing culture.

With the ongoing addition of platforms on which we can access the Internet, the need to create sites that can be read anywhere and on any platform is more important than ever. Yet it is vital that they still be interesting, catch the users eye and be quick and easy to navigate. Digital design needs to be able to navigate these changes to technology just like the people of the Netherlands learned to adapt to and overcome the challenges of living in a 'polder'. In a similar way to the grid systems of dams, ditches and canals that were built to reclaim the land once owned by the sea, designers are now using flexible grid systems in design in order to create more versatile and fluid websites. More and more designers seem to be falling back on the minimalist, simple designs, bold typography and grid like efficiency that originates in Dutch and other European Design and which makes websites so easily transferable from one platform to the next. Who knows where the future will take us with regards to design, we only hope that Dutch Design stays as relevant and prevalent as it has been for hundreds of years.