From Letter to Alphabet: Kees Broos
Corneille, Stedelijk Museum, Poster 1966
One of Wim Crouwel's first published statements about the graphic design profession was a short text published in December, 1961, in the Christmas issue of ‘Drukkersweekblad’, the Dutch Printers’ Weekly. The holiday issue was a luxurious annual publication distributed to printers and blockmakers. It was somewhat comparable to the Penrose Annual. Each year, the layout and cover were entrusted to a different designer, and in 1961, it fell to the then 33-year-old Wim Crouwel. He used a simple, strict typography that was remarkable for the time. Brief interviews in the magazine also provided space for the ideas of both the older-generation Dutch graphic designers, such as Piet Zwart, Dick Dooijes and Otto Treumann, and the younger Jurriaan Schrofer, Benno Wissing and Wim Crouwel. In his statement, Crouwel revealed himself as a designer who preferred to first carefully analyze an assignment, as well as someone who could also graphically express his rational approach in verbal terms: ‘The content determines the form, the typeface, the format, the cover, the binding. Every assignment can be divided into several factors, which are all interrelated. With each commission, as it were, you have to plot those factors along a horizontal and a vertical axis, stretch out a string and then see where it takes you. This has absolutely nothing to do with ‘l’art pour l'art’. The creativity is by no means lost. It is simply concentrated on a single point.’
This statement may seem more likely to have come from an architect than a graphic designer, but in Wim Crouwel's case, it is not surprising. Until shortly before that interview, Crouwel had worked intensively for five years with industrial designer Kho Liang Ie. Crouwel and Kho had distinguished themselves with innovative architecture and design for exhibition pavilions and stands, in the Benelux pavilion of the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels, for example, and for furniture showrooms and commercial trade fairs.
In his youth, Wim Crouwel had already shown great interest in interior and three-dimensional design. From 1946 until 1949, however, studying at the Minerva Art Academy in Groningen, his native city, he received no further education in these disciplines. The Academy's ambitions were reserved for painting, and Groningen had a strong painting tradition. Since 1918, its most important artistic focal point was formed by the expressionist artists’ group, ‘De Ploeg’. Crouwel became well acquainted with several of its members and continued to respect their work.
The walls of the academy were carelessly hung with posters designed by AM Cassandre, and they enthralled Crouwel, but they were never discussed in the art curriculum. They seemed primarily intended as examples of how to use the lithography press. Crouwel would only later realize that Cassandre had also designed typefaces. It was primarily Cassandre’s mastery of the large form that was reflected in Crouwel’s first poster designs, made while he was a student at the academy. In small print work for his former high school, he also demonstrated early on that he had an eye for interesting letter shapes, which he sometimes drew freehand. One explanation can be found in his background, as his father was a blockmaker. As a boy, Crouwel had spent many school holidays satisfying his curiosity in his father’s technical drawing studio, whenever he accompanied his father on visits to printing houses of all kinds. Groningen also had an old-fashioned lithography printing firm, which particularly fascinated him.
After completing art school and military service, Crouwel moved to Amsterdam, and emerged as a more or less abstract painter. He joined the ‘Creatie’ (Creation) group, who were advocates of ‘absolute art’, and later the ‘Liga Nieuw Beelden’, which strove to integrate art and architecture. His interest in typography and letter forms was meanwhile further fuelled at evening classes at Amsterdam's School of Art and Design, taught by Charles Jongejans. Jongejans was a teacher for whom Crouwel had to draw out greatly enlarged Garamond letters, for example, and the man with whom it was really possible to discuss typefaces and their history. Together with his somewhat older colleagues, Dick Elffers and Otto Treumann, whom Crouwel also admired, Jongejans was a link to the graphic design innovations of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as to the younger modernist traditions of the Bauhaus, "Nieuwe Bouwen’ and the New Typography. Crouwel had been taught little history in his academy years in Groningen, but a fascinating world now opened up for him, and it was one with which he felt great affinity.
In his own wedding announcement in 1952, one of Wim Crouwel's earliest typographic designs, we find an echo of the modernist tradition. In this asymmetrical work, Crouwel combined a script typeface with a bold grotesque, all in lower case and in two colours. This was a kind of softer form of the New Typography, which Jan Tschichold had introduced to the Netherlands in the Dutch translation of his book, ‘Typographische Gestaltung’, just before the Second World War. It was one of the few available guides to contemporary typography in post-war Holland. In the design field, one extremely attractive activity that had emerged in the period between the two World Wars was the design of pavilions and stands for world exhibitions and commercial trade fairs. Contributing to these short-term events, artists and graphic designers had an opportunity to work with each other, and with progressive architects. In post-war Holland, in the context of national reconstruction and expanding trade and industry, attention was once again being paid to exhibitions of all varieties. In 1952, Crouwel found work with the Enderberg firm in Amsterdam, who were important contractors for exhibition and advertising projects. Crouwel would very quickly feel at home in the field. One large project that Enderberg handled was the ‘Alle hens aan dek’ (All Hands on Deck) exhibition in 1952, an educational exhibition on increasing productivity through American Marshall Aid to Europe, held on two inland waterway barges. This exhibition, by the Paris office of the United States Information Service, was designed by Italian architect Lanfranco Bombelli Tiravanti, who was already known for his mobile exhibition constructions. Crouwel assisted Swiss designer Gérard Ifert and photographer Ernst Scheidegger with the graphic design for the exhibition.
The exhibition proved an important moment in Crouwel’s relationship with letters. 'I then became acquainted with Akzidenz Grotesk. The Swiss had with them big wooden boxes with rubber stamps of Akzidenz Grotesk. It was beautiful, in all sizes. Oh, how I envied them! They stamped the letters and we sawed them out of plywood... I’ve known the Swiss since then.’ He also became well acquainted with Swiss typography and graphic design, and held it in high regard. In the 1950s, he travelled to Switzerland with Gérard Ifert and met other designers. He was especially impressed with the work of Karl Gerstner and Armin Hofmann. In Switzerland, abstract geometric painting, at whose cradle Dutch painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg had once stood, still continued to flourish and be taken very seriously. Respected artists such as Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse represented ‘concrete art’, which had forged a natural bond with architecture and graphic design. Concrete Art found a voice in the Swiss magazine, 'Werk', which specialized in contemporary Swiss architecture and industrial design. Graphic designer Walter Herdeg edited another magazine, ‘Graphis’, which focused on international graphic design, and the youngest generation of abstract artists and printmakers were represented in the brilliantly designed magazine, ‘Spirale: International Review of Young Art’, published in Bern by artist/printmaker Marcel Wyss. Switzerland had much to offer the young designer from the Netherlands.
More and more, Crouwel acknowledged his affinity to abstract art forms, but his was not abstraction created from spontaneous personal signature, nor was it based on natural shapes or materials. His was an abstraction that was carefully calculated and constructed. ‘Mondrian or Miro’ was the title of a 1958 essay by Joost Baljeu, a constructivist artist and a friend of Crouwel’s, and if Crouwel had been asked to choose between those two artists, given the relationship between their respective visual languages, he would undoubtedly have preferred Mondrian. A few years later, Kenneth Clark used ‘the blot and the diagram’ to indicate a comparable visual dichotomy, which he considered characteristic of the new directions in the fine arts.
In his years with Enderberg, Wim Crouwel seemed more than capable of expressing his creative impulses and his inclination to constructivist solutions in exhibition architecture and graphic design. He stopped painting in 1954. Fine art reached a relatively small public, and although he appreciated the laboratory function of the fine arts, the applied arts’ ability to be put to direct use better suited his character. When the 'Liga Nieuw Beelden’ was established in 1955, Wim Crouwel’s signature was on the founding manifesto. The manifesto appealed for the organisation of ‘demonstrative exhibitions’ as an important task for the ‘Liga’. 'A demonstrative exhibition is a collaborative work by architects,fine artists and designers, giving shape to ideas that live in our society.’ The second of the 'Liga’s’ objectives was the organization of discussions amongst the urban designers, architects, sculptors and designers themselves, 'with all those who consider themselves responsible for the spiritual and material shape of the world of tomorrow.’
The following year, Crouwel began his three-dimensional and graphic design collaboration with Kho Liang Ie. They received commissions from the furniture and printing industries, but in retrospect and for our purposes, their contacts with the museum world proved especially significant. The Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, a focal point for modern art whose reputation blossomed under director Edy de Wilde, became a steady client for poster and catalogue designs. Thanks to the great freedom that Crouwel was allowed here, he was able to realize his first controversial experiments with letter forms in his designs for the museum. The commissions he received from museums and exhibition centres were an important factor in his development as a designer. Again and again, this work confronted him with the very diverse issues and convictions that played a role in the fine arts. In his own work, it led to an approach that was open to contradictory artistic theories as well as to the search for spatial and graphic systems in which such convictions could stand on their own, without impediment.
As the printing world was already familiar to him since childhood, we might suppose that Wim Crouwel's treatment of letters was formed by the half-technical, half-handcrafted realm of letterpress printing and the structured typographic norms and aesthetic principles that were inherent to it. It is a fact that until the 1960s, letterpress printing was the prevailing technique in the Dutch printing world. Nonetheless, right from Crouwel's earliest typographic work, letterpress was but one of the many technical possibilities he used to generate word and image. In the 1950s, photo-lithography and offset printing gradually began offering the designer alternative techniques to letterpress printing. In the Dutch printing trade, these alternatives were seldom used in the same locations as letterpress printing, but they did offer designers attractive possibilities to work with non-standard paper sizes and printing inks. Offset also facilitated the moves towards black-and-white and colour photography, with designers discovering the graphic and communications potential of photography in print, one step at a time. The remarkable fact that the catalogues for many of the Van Abbe Museum exhibitions were printed in letterpress by Lecturis, in Eindhoven, and the posters accompanying them by De Jong lithographers in Hilversum certainly contributed to Crouwel’s sharply discriminating treatment of the different printing techniques.
The new popularity of silk-screen moreover gave poster designers a playground in which they could experiment with large planes of unusual colours on diverse materials and in small editions. As a graphic designer, Crouwel’s earlier work on exhibition spaces had required him to apply eye-catching texts to walls and three-dimensional spaces. Lettering of this kind not only had to be clear and legible, but it also had to be economic in use and technically simple to apply. Such concerns and limitations meant that Crouwel undoubtedly developed a keener eye for letters and letter shapes than he might have done had he confined himself to letterpress and book typography, where little innovation was taking place at the time. The pre-war battle between the New Typography, initiated thirty years before by the young Jan Tschichold and promoted in the Netherlands by Piet Zwart and Paul Schuitema, and classic, calligraphy-inspired typography after the examples of S.H. de Roos and Jan van Krimpen, still seemed undecided.
In 1959, when Wim Crouwel and Kho Liang Ie were first asked by ‘Kunst des Gestaltens’, a German magazine, to formulate some of their principles on typography, they took a clearly self-aware stand. ‘In our work, we follow a number of rules or guidelines that are moreover not definitive or absolute. (...) Some of these rules are: to apply no more than two different typefaces to a work; to use only a limited number of good typefaces; and that clear typography is built up from a typeface that depends on the size and the format of the respective work. (...) In the chaotic state in which typography currently finds itself, our first task is to bring order into the assignment. (...) In doing so, we will not neglect the creative aspect of the work.’
It is not the case that every poster designed by Wim Crouwel embodied an experiment with letters. Most of his posters continued along the lines drawn by the New Typography and its Dutch representatives of the day — Willem Sandberg, Dick Elffers and Otto Treumann. At the same time, in the choice of typefaces and the endeavor to achieve a severe simplicity and a logical structure, Crouwel’s posters also reflected the influence of his friends in Switzerland. Whenever Crouwel experimented with the shapes of letters, he always did so within the framework of clear, open typography. The experiment itself usually concerned a word, a name, the numbers of a year, or an abbreviation thereof, from which he constructed a composition that was compact in form and sometimes leaned toward the abstract. Such a composition had to adhere to the rules or limitations the designer himself had set in advance. For one project, Crouwel would introduce a consistent distortion into an existing typeface, in another he might use graph paper or another regular pattern as the basis for his hand-built letter constructions. He sometimes found his starting point in a characteristic aspect of the work of the painter or sculptor for whom the poster was being made. His posters for Léger, Couzijn, Lur¢at, Tajiri, Fernhout, Michaux and Oldenburg are good examples. There are, however, also examples in which the experimental form of the letter was a goal in itself, an invigorating game played with geometric shapes. Depending on the function such a composition had to serve in the overall image, Crouwel often alternated between legibility and abstraction. The design sometimes incorporated a familiar eye-catcher, but at other times it was at most about a background motif, and Crouwel achieved results that could be very divergent. For the time being, in any case, they did not include the design of whole alphabets, because the need had not presented itself. Crouwel's abstraction of forms arose primarily from the desire to find compass, he proved able to generate an enormously varied arsenal of forms, something which today still seems to surprise him. Lines and planes, circles and squares, diagonals and ellipses comprise the fundamental elements that, through repetition and rhythm, reversing and turning the image, create images on a two-dimensional surface or in space. In turn, the forms thus created may evoke certain visual associations and thereby serve to convey information. in Crouwel’s printed work, however, we also encounter geometric constructions apparently created out of the sheer enjoyment of the construction, and to which he would then add a powerful contrast, for example, by juxtaposing classic letter shapes.
From the very beginning of his working life, Wim Crouwel seemed to take pleasure in relating or connecting letter shapes to abstract, constructivist forms, as he did in 1953 with the logo for Enderberg, his first employer. The upper case 'E’ in the name forms part of a construction of verticals and horizontals, in between light and dark planes. The attention Crouwel devoted to the counters and forms between the letters was also evident very early on, for he gladly took advantage of the opportunity to use letters in the negative, preferably on more than one colour. What had once been an unremarkable enclosed shape would leap out and catch the eye as a positive form. He also often mixed small and extremely large sizes, as well as contrasting types of letters, despite adhering to his fixed rule of no more than two different typefaces at a time. The early photographic composing machines, then just beginning to appear on the market, might have been a great help to him, but for now, Wim Crouwel’s posters made do with the use of photography only for enlarging existing lead type. Crouwel thus discovered that there were frequently very distinct deviations in the different sizes of existing font families.
Through the years, although one can certainly detect a personal preference for sans-serif typefaces, in the hundreds of designs made during the first decade of his career, Crouwel allotted space to such widely varied fonts as Excelsior script, Garamond and Bodoni, Gill Sans and narrow Bold Egyptienne. There is no dogmatism to be found in Crouwel’s work, as people later tried to attribute to him. On the contrary, his designs reflect his intense investigations and comparisons of historic and contemporarily manufactured fonts, and his respect for them. His obvious preferences for certain forms of letters and the details that characterized them evolved during the process of working with them. He tried out many combinations of typefaces, and it was natural that he would develop a strong antipathy to what he saw as visual irritations in the forms of the letters.
When the Amsterdam Typefoundry introduced Dick Dooijes' new sans- serif Mercator to the market in 1957, they asked Crouwel if he would design a type specimen book for the typeface. He took the opportunity to produce a demonstrative piece of work in which, as an exception to habit, he focused on the individual letterforms and their detailing.
With graphic examples, he demonstrated where and how this typeface differed from comparable sans-serif faces. It seems that in completing this project, he had examined the Mercator so thoroughly that it was indeed also the last time he would use it. ‘The Mercator was an attempt to make a good sans-serif letter in Helvetica style, but its proportions were strange, its thicks and thins were strange. It was a very strange letter. It was cast only for a short time. It was too late; digitalization came on the scene right after that.’
Through his encounters, particularly with Swiss graphic design and typography, Wim Crouwel had been made aware of how limited the arsenal was of typefaces that were available to printers and typesetting shops in the Netherlands in the years following Worid War II. For machine composition, there was simply the stock of pre-war Linotype and Monotype, and for hand-set type, the limited choice offered by the two foundries that dominated the Dutch market: the Amsterdam Typefoundry, formerly N. Tetterode, and the Joh. Enschedé & Sons Foundry in Haarlem. After the war, importing typefaces, for which Germany once played a major role, was for the time being restricted. Certainly for the Netherlands’ numerous small printing houses, acquisition of a new typeface inevitably meant enormous investment.
To return to the 1961 Christmas edition of the Printers Weekly, designed by Crouwel and from which we already quoted him, various sections of this ambitious publication were printed in friendly competition by twelve different printing houses across the Netherlands. It is therefore also of interest that Crouwel required a single typeface for the whole magazine, Folio, from the Bauersche Foundry in Frankfurt, which had only just reached the Dutch market. Here, Wim Crouwel's reputation as a stubborn designer who insisted on a sans-serif typeface at whatever the cost, was already partially in the making. That Christmas issue moreover had a brilliant red-orange cover, with a thin square of white lines and Folio lettering, embossed and in black. This was undoubtedly a homage to Swiss design.
As he had by now worked intensively with letters for some time, it was self-evident that in that 1961 interview, Wim Crouwel would have something to say about typography and letter shapes. ‘We need to move on to a completely different form of letter, a letter that operates from a single fundamental form, which can be optically narrowed, thickened, italicized, and so on as needed. With such a standardized letter, where the idea of lower and upper case is completely eradicated, you would achieve a much more restful visual page to begin with, which is especially important because of the pace at which people now live and read. But stop and think of what more you could do with it, how you could use letters and pages as elements of the form that you want to achieve. The text becomes much more of an image in its own right.’
Many traditional typographers were shocked by such statements, and there were more to follow, as Crouwel rather enjoyed provoking the traditional printing world. It is in any case clear that he felt the need to think ahead, beyond the restrictions of classic letterpress printing, and to create a far broader base for the application of typefaces. One may be tempted to view his words as an initial step in the direction of his New Alphabet, but either way, Crouwel held innovations in science and technology in high regard, perceiving them as closely interwoven with broader changes in visual culture and communications. Some saw Crouwel as a dangerous dissident, but for others, his ideas very logically continued the experiments of Modernism. It is as though we are again hearing the voice of Piet Zwart from around 1929: ‘Our times force us into normalisation’; ‘we yearn for more businesslike letters’; ‘the more uninteresting the letter, the more it is typographically useful;’ and ‘the New Typography is elementary (building on) an emphatic or visual form’. In the designs he made in the 1950s and 1960s, we see that Wim Crouwel took pleasure in trying out new typefaces, as far as their availability allowed. He worked with Helvetica, Clarendon, Univers, Folio and Volta, although the last two fell by the wayside at a certain point, because they no longer satisfied his aesthetic requirements.
This also applied to the new possibilities in photographic typesetting. When the Starsettograph was introduced, the ability to set text in a fan shape or in circles seemed perfect for Crouwel’s geometric inclinations. It was a lightning-fast alternative to tedious, hand-manipulated photogrammes. Nonetheless, Crouwel quickly grew bored with it: 'I always objected to the Starsettograph, because you could always see that the work had been made with that thing.’
In 1963, Wim Crouwel closed the doors of his one-man studio. He and his fellow designers Friso Kramer and Benno Wissing, together with Paul and Dick Schwarz from the business community, set up the Total Design studio in Amsterdam, where he would continue to be active until 1980. In a statement soon after ‘TD’ was established, its founders succinctly summarized its objectives: ‘Our working area is primarily determined by text and image, together with objects and space: drawing characters and letters, creating word images, making numbers understandable, designing signposting, visualizing processes and intentions, developing spatial situations, creating structure in visual material. It is all to simplify traffic between people, in order to increase the probability of communication.’
At Total Design, working with letters and creating trademarks or logos were welcome activities. Like himself, Benno Wissing, Ben Bos, and later Jurriaan Schrofer were also delighted to work with letter forms, with geometrically generated logos and their application in company house styles. A house style is often not just limited to printed material, but also has to be produced in a variety of techniques and materials, some of them three-dimensional, so Total Design developed their endeavour to find solutions where modular systems or grids played a major role. The grid and the module would also exert a clear influence on Wim Crouwel’s letter experiments, as in his 1968 ‘Vormgevers'’ poster for the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum and his catalogues for the Fodor Museum, also in Amsterdam. In 1964, Wim Crouwel began designing all the printed material for both museums.
In the meantime, graphic designers began filling their shelves with stacks of boxes full of sheets of Letraset or Mecanorma. Transfer lettering involved a hands-on, circuitous and uneconomic means to avoid typesetting machines, but it was universally applicable, for the cheapest office offset or the most refined, multicolour printing. It moreover offered font designers a chance to realize ideas and reproduce them without the help of the type foundries. It was the first step towards total freedom in typography — anarchy to some — which would eventually come full circle with the computer. The gradual replacement of letterpress printing by offset brought enormous growth in the availability of phototypesetting machines, each with increasingly newer systems and associated letter designs. By the mid-1960s, the computer had arrived in ‘Letterland’. The announcement of the first digital typesetting machines led to both excitement and scepticism amongst graphic and typeface designers.
At the 1965 DRUPA trade fair, Wim Crouwe!l saw the first results produced by the Hell Digiset phototypesetter. ‘If you held it under a magnifying glass, you saw the digital structure of the letters, Garamond, for example.’ Cathode ray tube raster scanning (CRT) meant that the fluid contour of a classic letter would break up differently in each type size. This reinforced Crouwel in his conviction that typefaces had failed to evolve along with technical advancements. It gave him immediate incentive to create a new font that would not suffer such technical shortcomings. That led to the evolution of his New Alphabet between 1965 and 1967.
Designer Piet Brattinga, who edited the series of 'Kwadraat-Bladen’ on design experimentation for De Jong printers, devoted an issue of this irregular publication to the New Alphabet, which quickly became known as a result. Crouwel was unambiguous about his intentions. ‘The proposed unconventional alphabet shown here is intended merely as an initial step in a direction which could potentially be pursued in further research. Reproduction by means of the cathode ray, the same principle used in television, is the starting point. The letter symbols will be introduced into the memory system of a computer. Because circular and diagonal lines are least suitable for this technique of screen reproduction, this proposal for a basic alphabet is made entirely of vertical and horizontal lines.’ Examples of the New Alphabet in the ‘Kwadraat-Blad' made it clear that this font family effortlessly held its own in every format, in thin, bold, narrow and wide versions, as well as in dot matrix versions. Although readability was not the basic principle of the New Alphabet, the letters were presented at a time when readability was a subject of heated, if inconclusive debate. The still rather magical notion of the ‘computer’ had already produced some futuristic letter designs. Did Wim Crouwel intend to force unsuspecting readers into having to memorize his puzzling characters? From the outset, he pointed out that the New Alphabet was not specifically designed for book typography. Nonetheless, he did feel that people could get used to ‘new forms of new alphabets and new forms of typography’.
In 1968, when Wim Crouwel was asked to present his ideas at the ATypI congress in Prague, his lecture was entitled, ‘Type Design for the Computer Age’. He asserted that history had always produced new and characteristic typefaces, because ‘each period has the type it needs, one which reflects an overall cultural pattern. I believe that we fail in this respect. Our types are generally anachronistic... The lettertype for our time will certainly not be based on the written or drawn models of the past. The type that is to emerge will be determined by contemporary man, who knows the computer and also how to live with it.’ His New Alphabet had enjoyed rapid notoriety, and its maker was in a position to present his font family as one humble contribution to the wider discourse.
In addition to the enormous speed and versatility with which the computer could process information, it was primarily the computer’s digital principle that had impressed Crouwel. As a designer, he had always had a predilection for constructing forms out of abstract visual elements. He referred to the ‘cellular structure’ of a system and appealed for two-and three-dimensional typography to be founded on series of ‘cells — nuclei or signs — units or concepts’. To illustrate, he selected raster forms and cell structures from science, technology, architecture and the fine arts — Buckminster Fuller, E Catalano, Victor Vasarely, Richard Lippold, Aldo van Eyck. Amongst these were several constructed fonts, ranging from Luca Pacioli in the early Renaissance to Epps and Evans's recent computer alphabet. For Wim Crouwel, one factual advantage of the digital system was that in the future, text and image no longer had to be handled separately, but could be created simultaneously, juxtaposed and interwoven, and based on one and the same digital graphics system.
The New Alphabet was Crouwel’s first more or less complete alphabet, including numerals and in three widths. It was in principle lower case, although capitals could be indicated by a line above the letter. Crouwel’s father made the technical drawings. The font was also produced in Mecanorma, so that he could use it for his ‘Kwadraat-Blad’. Other alphabets or beginnings of alphabets appeared intermittently amongst the great volume of other design work he completed during the Total Design years. The 1968 ‘Vormgevers’ exhibition produced a number of lower case letters and numerals. The poster for Claes Oldenburg led, at Oldenburg's request, to a series of 26 ‘padded’ letters. For the Fodor Museum catalogues, Crouwel developed a lower case typeface based on a rectangular grid. The Italian firm, Olivetti, asked him to design a typewriter font in variable width, but its further development and the production of new electric typewriters was overtaken by personal computers and printers, and the project was cancelled before it was completed. Crouwel subsequently reworked that typeface for use on the numeral postage stamps for the Dutch Post Office, which began their quarter century of circulation in 1976.
Although there was rarely the need to develop complete alphabets and fonts, Wim Crouwel was nonetheless very involved in typography and letterforms. Where these related to digital techniques, in collaboration with the industrial design department of the Technical University in Delft, he helped develop alphanumeric symbols for mosaic printers and display tubes. These particular techniques would soon be overtaken by yet newer methods, but this was typical of Crouwel’s undiminishing interest in letterforms composed from smaller elements. He would, for instance, always take photographs whenever he saw a Dutch farmhouse with the farm’s name on the roof, made with ceramic roof tiles in contrasting colours. Even the formation and evolution of handwriting excited him, including the patterns he discerned in the early scribblings of young children. Crouwel expressed his suspicion that more or less regular patterns could be distilled from these scribblings. These could serve as the building blocks for a more natural handwriting that would make a more personal expression possible.
Crouwel once said, ‘I am a functionalist troubled by aesthetics.’ He used Univers and Futura in his typography in strictly functional fashion, but his approach to the letterform was sometimes very unorthodox. This method of working had an earlier parallel in the way that some of the Netherlands’ most original twentieth-century architects designed letterforms for buildings and printed materials. H P Berlage, J L M Lauweriks, H Th Wijdeveld, W M Dudok and Gerrit Rietveld made letters that sometimes show personal and decorative elements, but they were still essentially the result of constructive, systematic and geometric foundations.
In the course of the 1980s and the 1990s, everything changed. The computer became common fare. Anyone who wanted to design letters could do so. Specific technical processes no longer demanded system-specific forms. Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet had now become an alphabet that symbolized the primeval age of the computer, but he nonetheless continued to see it in print. ‘At a certain moment, you saw that font showing up in all kinds of magazines, always badly drawn, always copied in those pop magazines.’ For this reason, he welcomed renewed interest in the New Alphabet coming from an unexpected corner of the typography world. Crouwel met with David Quay, of The Foundry in London, a meeting that led to real fonts, with all the required symbols and characters duly included. Three versions were produced, Architype New Alphabet 1, 2 & 3. The letter used for Crouwel’s Vormgevers poster was extended into the Architype Stedelijk, and Crouwel’s other ‘Amsterdam’ letter became Architype Fodor. Finally, The Foundry developed an entire font family from the typewriter and postage stamp typefaces, now the Foundry Gridnik. Wim Crouwel has consequently been able to see his fondness for grids and systems playfully immortalized in the name of a universal typeface.