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Typography was the means by which Wim Crouwel found order in a disorderly world.
Typography was the means by which Wim Crouwel found order in a disorderly world. Photograph: Luke Hayes
Typography was the means by which Wim Crouwel found order in a disorderly world. Photograph: Luke Hayes

Wim Crouwel obituary

This article is more than 4 years old

Leading Dutch typographer and graphic designer who created the Gridnik and New Alphabet typefaces

Wim Crouwel, who has died aged 90, defined the look of the modern Netherlands. He became an influential graphic designer, establishing one of the first professional Dutch design offices, Total Design, with Benno Wissing, a fellow graphic designer, and the furniture designer Friso Kramer, in 1963. “We designed all of Holland, more or less, or at least that is what our competitors said,” Crouwel told one interviewer.

And indeed, he is responsible for its stamps; the signage system for Schiphol, its main airport; the identity of its biggest bank; two decades’ worth of posters for the Stedeljik Museum, Amsterdam; and even the Dutch team football strip for the 2014 World Cup. He was also an influential teacher at the Technical University in Delft and, from 1985 to 1993, the director of the Boijmans Van Beuningen art muiseum in Rotterdam. In 2011, the Design Museum in London staged a Crouwel retrospective under the title A Graphic Odyssey.

A display of Wim Crouwel’s work at the Design Museum, London, in 2011, in a retrospective entitled A Graphic Odyssey. Photograph: Luke Hayes

Crouwel saw himself as a modernist, reducing type to the bare minimum needed to communicate a message, from which one’s own personality is ruthlessly suppressed.

In his work you can see the unsentimental abstraction of Piet Mondrian and the ruthless minimalism of Gerrit Rietveld’s furniture.

Typography was the means by which he found order in a disorderly world. To some people, judging the right degree of space between the descending curve of a lower case “t” and a full stop might seem akin to looking at the world through a letterbox. For Crouwel, it was the subject of lifelong reflection.

His medium was the grid: a way of finding an all-encompassing underlying structure for his work. “We had an ideology, an ideology of grids. I loved grids so much it verged on the neurotic,” he once said. It was the grid that told Crouwel where to make a mark, not his own intuition.

For most of his life he confined himself to using just two typefaces, Helvetica and Univers, though he perhaps attracted most attention for designing two of his own, Gridnik, in 1974, and New Alphabet, in 1967. Using only straight lines, the latter took grid logic to its extreme and rendered some letters almost unintelligible by eliminating curves altogether, even from the “S” and the “J”.

Crouwel believed that rational typography was based on technology. Just as the serifs that characterised classical Roman lettering had their origins in letters carved with a chisel in marble, the New Alphabet was Crouwel’s response to the crude early days of digital dot matrix computer printing. The only way of making consistent letters out of dots was to create a typeface that used just straight lines. It produced a radical-looking new type that seemed like a natural reflection of a country that has no illusions about its artificial landscape of greenhouses and canals.

Wim (Willem) was born in the provincial Netherlands city of Groningen, the son of Jacobus Crouwel, a printer, and his wife, Aganeta Wallerstein, who was in domestic service. He grew up there during the second world war, while his father endured two years of forced labour in Germany.

Initially, Wim studied painting at the local art school, but was impressed enough by a poster made by the designer AM Cassandre advertising the Étoile du Nord express train hanging on the studio wall to consider design as a career. He moved to Amsterdam in pursuit of a more sophisticated education at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

There was a provocative point of view among postwar typographers that if only the Germans had not been so fond of capital letters they would have been able to resist the rise of nazism more effectively. The suggestion came not from Crouwel but from his German contemporary Otl Aicher. Crouwel shared Aicher’s conviction that there was something faintly immoral about upper-case letters, but he was equally passionate in his belief that the shape of the letters we use to make words has a deep impact on the way that we see the world.

He succeeded in designing what is likely to have been the world’s only telephone directory without a single capital letter, for the Dutch post office, produced annually in the mid-1970s. In the analogue era, when every owner of a landline had a telephone book, they were printed in their millions and updated every year. Crouwel saved whole forests by using smaller type, reducing entries to the minimum and organising each page in three columns.

Wim Crouwel’s work at the Design Museum, London, in 2011. Photograph: Luke Hayes

What was perhaps most surprising about this apparently austere figure was his cult status among a generation of young graphic designers in Britain. Peter Saville used the New Alphabet for Joy Division’s album cover in 1988 and for the first time the font became widely available. The appetite for hardcore modernist typography the album triggered was akin to the sudden enthusiasm for brutalist architecture.

There is a striking mismatch between Crouwel the man and Crouwel the designer. The work suggests a puritan. But, in person, Crouwel had more than a touch of the dandy about him, an impression fostered by a remarkable portrait taken by his friend the fashion photographer Paul Huf in 1969. He wears white shoes and a white suit. The trousers have no turn-ups. The tunic jacket has a fly front with a silver buckle fastening his collar. Even when he was not dressing like a Starfleet commander, he had a weakness for sharp tailoring and large-scale bow ties.

When he stepped down as director of the Boijmans Van Beuningen, he was invited to curate a farewell exhibition. He chose 1928 as his subject, the year of his birth, and selected the tubular-steel cantilever chair that Marcel Breuer designed then, work by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, and the Type 37A Bugatti. In his eyes these were all things that made it a key year for the evolution of the modern world, and the design that shaped it. He was responsible for quite a bit of that himself.

Crouwel met Emy Wijt, a ceramicist, in 1948, when they were students. They married four years later, and had two sons, Mels and Remco. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1963 he married his second wife, Judith Cahen, an art historian and curator, and they had a daughter, Gili. Mels Crouwel, an architect, designed the 2012 extension to the Stedelijk Museum.

Crouwel is survived by Judith and his children.

Wim (Willem) Hendrik Crouwel, typographer, born 21 November 1928; died 19 September 2019

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