Designer Blog: 3rd post

 

Here is an example of Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet.

The task of the designer consists of analysing the design project and solve the problems he distilled in an objective way. The message and the way it should be presented flows out of this process. Graphic design is a wide field in which Crouwel mainly focussed on type. He works quite constructive, constructs type, and works on grids. Crouwel is especially admired for his systematic approach and his creative handling of the shape of letters. His work was influenced by the pre-war Werkmann and post-war Sandberg, an individualistic generation of typographers who dared to juggle with letters.

Designer Blog: 2nd Post

 

Here is a display at an exhibit of a span of Wim’s work over a 60 year period.

Once the Total Design studio had been established, from 1967 on Wim was responsible for the design of posters, catalogues and exhibitions of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Throughout Crouwel’s life he has designed several font sets, of which the new Alphabet is best known. His inspiration came after seeing the first digital typesetters at a print exhibition in Germany. The roundings of several sizes of typeface were not alike due to the amount of pixels used, in Crouwel’s eyes it looked horrible. He felt it would be better to design a type face that was suitable for this machine instead of forcing it to use the typefaces that we knew. Thus, he drew the New Alphabet, a highly abstract font, based on a dot-matrix system.

Designer Blog: Wim Crouwel

 

Wim Crouwel

WIlliam Hendrik Crouwel, also known as Wim Crouwel, is a Dutch graphic designer, type designer, and typographer. He was born in 1928, in Groningen, Netherlands, and later studied Fine Arts at Academie Minerva in Groningen between 1947 and 1949. In addition he studied typography at what is now Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Wim designed his first poster in 1952, while learning his passion of organizing visual information in an aesthetical context. In 1963, he was credited as one of the founders of Total Design, a design studio which is known today as Total Identity.