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GRAPHIC DESIGN mUSEUm mAGAZINE # 3 - www.GRAPHICDESIGNmUSEUm.Com

THE GRAPHIC DESIGN mUSEUm IS A NEw mUSEUm IN THE CENTRE of BREDA, wITH lARGE ExHIBITIoN HAllS, A mUSEUm lAB AND kNowlEDGE CENTRE, A CEllAR wITH ClImATE CoNTRol foR THE CollECTIoN of DUTCH GRAPHIC DESIGN. THE NEED foR CUlTURE INCREASES AND mUSEUmS ARE BEComING moRE ImPoRTANT Now THAT wE SPEND THE wHolE DAy NETwoRkING BEHIND THE ComPUTER. oUR lIfE IS ComPUTERISED. TECHNoloGy kNowS No BoUNDARIES. THE mUSEUm REACTS To THESE EvENTS. IT TEllS oUR HISToRy AND lETS US SEE wHERE wE STAND. NEw TECHNoloGIES SHAPE THE wAy wE PRESENT AND ARCHIvE THINGS. DATABASES ARE BEING fIllED AND THE mUSEUm IS INvESTIGATING THE PoSSIBIlITIES foR ARCHIvING DIGITAl AND INTERACTIvE woRk. THE GRAPHIC DESIGN mUSEUm IS AT THE CENTRE of moDERN mEDIA. THE mUSEUm HAS A UNIqUE PoSITIoN (THE oNly oNE IN THE woRlD) To PlACE THIS ImPoRTANT AND RElATIvEly NEw DEvEloPmENT IN THE ARTS oN THE woRlD mAP. THE mUSEUm IS THE PlATfoRm foR GRAPHIC DESIGN, THE PRofESSIoN foR vISUAl CommUNICATIoN, PART of THE woRlDwIDE NETwoRk, A SANCTU-ARy foR TExT AND ImAGE, foR DyNAmISm AND CHANGE. SoCIETy AS A wHolE HAS BEComE DEPENDENT oN CommUNICATIoN AND NETwoRk TECHNoloGy. wE CommUNICATE mAINly THRoUGH SCREENS AND EvERyTHING oN THoSE SCREENS IS GRAPHIC DESIGN. moRE AND moRE PEoPlE ARE INvolvED IN IT All - jUST look AT All THoSE ImAGES oN flICkR AND yoUTUBE. THANkS To low-ENTRy SofTwARE, EvERyBoDy CAN mAkE SomETHING oN THE ComPUTER. INTERNATIoN-Al NETwoRkS, NEw mEDIA AND GloBAlISATIoN HAvE ENSURED THAT GRAPHIC DESIGN HAS ENTERED INTo THE BRoAD SPECTRUm of ImAGE CUlTURE. GRAPHIC DESIGN HAS BEComE A SoRT of INTERmEDIARy TERRIToRy. wITH INTERNET AND NETwoRk TECHNoloGy, oUR wAy of CommUNICATING, RUNNING A CAmPAIGN AND PUBlICATIoN HAS CHANGED ComPlETEly. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////THE CoRE of oUR mUSEUm IS foRmED By THE ExHIBITIoN 100 yEARS of GRAPHIC DESIGN IN THE NETHERlANDS. AN HISToRICAl RETRoSPECTIvE THAT ClEARly SHowS How DUTCH GRAPHIC DESIGN IS INExTRICABly lINkED wITH THE moDERNISATIoN of SoCIETy IN THE TwENTIETH CENTURy. THE oTHER ExHIBITIoNS THAT THEmUSEUm oRGANISES ARE INTENDED To ACT AS A SIGNAl. THESE ExHIBITIoNS ComBINE ToPICAl THEmES AND TRENDS wITH THE woRk AND RESEARCH of DESIGNERS. THE GRAPHIC DESIGN PRofESSIoN IS CoNSTANTly IN flUx BECAUSE IT IS SUBjECT To DEvEloP-mENTS IN THE mEDIA. THE mUSEUm wIll CoNTINUE To PlACE moDERN DEvEloP-mENTS IN AN HISToRICAl CoNTExT. THE mUSEUm SIGNAlS NEw DEvEloPmENTS IN THE GRAPHIC DESIGN PRofESSIoN AND IN ADDITIoN TESTS THE ovERlAP AREAS wITH oTHER CUlTURAl DISCIPlINES. IN THE yEARS AHEAD, THE mUSEUm wIll DEvEloP A vISIoN ABoUT moDERN GRAPHIC DESIGN wHERE EffECTS AND CoNSEqUENCES of TECHNoloGICAl DEvEloPmENT PlAy A mAjoR RolE. THE mUSEUm wIll DEvEloP THIS vISIoN IN CollABoRATIoN wITH DESIGNERS, ARTISTS, wRITERS AND THINkERS By INITIATING ACTIvITIES AND ExHIBITIoNS. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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As graphic designer in heart and soul, I have, for some time, concentrated on letters. I sometimes ask myself why I often think things with letters are so beautiful. I dream of clothes and objects with texts. I have been wearing the handwriting scarf of the French activist artist Ben for ten years. Ben Vautier is his name. I am obsessed with that scarf. I bought it in the museum shop of the Louvre in Paris. Just recently, a woman approached me on the street in Amsterdam and claimed that I was wearing her scarf; she had lost it and thought that she had now found it around my neck. But it re-ally was my very own scarf and I quickly made my escape. The text on the scarf is made up of the repetition of the word ‘J’aime’, followed each time by a different word. I have often reread the text. It is something like a poem and because it is on a piece of clothing, you read it more often than if it were in a book. I like the image of text, because I find a pleas-ing aesthetic in the repetitive pattern of letters. It becomes even more special if there is something interesting to read and if the text is beautifully designed. I even find letters beautiful if they are not designed for reading, but are used for decora-tive purposes. As museum director, I am slightly embarrassed by this, because it is really not done. This is a familiar phenomenon for designers. As a rule, designers search for the balance between form and meaning. I am supporter of letters on things. Why shouldn’t you walk around with your favourite poem on the back of your coat? Or why shouldn’t we write an essay for the front of our house?My scarf has become a little threadbare. If you ever happen to see a Ben scarf on sale somewhere, let me know. We would be pleased to include it in the collection of our museum shop.

l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T 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S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E 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E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T T E R S l E T -

page 04LetterLabstrange attractors

page 12DUtch DesIgn DatabaseDIgItaL graphIc herItage

A letter or character is A chArActer in A written lAnguAge or sometimes more sounds of the spoken lAnguAge displAy (wikipediA september 2009)

l e t t e r s

page 16the web & bLoggIng IntervIew wIth meIjer & maYo

page 14coffee to go stYLIng café mIchIeL schUUrman

pagIna 18the aLphabetwIth coLUmn bY wIm croUweL

page 08DIgIlanguage aboUt text anD Letters

lETTERS & THINGS

EDIToRIAl By mIEkE GERRITZEN

page 26Letters In the coLLectIonpUrchase thonIk carpet

page 28bUsIness nIeUwscLUb / partners / frIenDs

page 30agenDa & coLophon

page 25DIck tUInDer aboUt reaDIng anD wrItIng

page 20shoppIngLetterproDUcts

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lETTERlABThe Graphic Design Museum, in close collaboration with Strange Attractors, has developed Letterlab. A unique concept in which children from the age of seven can be active with typography. From the moment they first enter Letterlab, the young visitors discover that letters are more than just something with which to write. Letters are shapes, letters are sounds, letters have meaning and letters have a function in a composition. Letterlab is an environment in which children enter a new world of experience and are sub-mersed in the phenomenon of the ‘letter’. The starting-point for Letterlab is the his-torical development of the letters. This is not translated literally, but the visitor experiences a linear development in the design of first sounds to designing in the digital era.

Strange Attractors and the Graphic De-sign Museum tempt the visitor to the Let-terlab to investigate the letter. To achieve this, Letterlab is made up of five com-ponents, which are built up non-linearly and engage children in a nonconformist way. The melting together of design and didactic concept has achieved a space in which visitors are challenged to learn in an informal way. Diversity is the depar-ture point in the space: the young visitors leave behind their tag in a dark alley, stand on stage in the letter theatre, build letters, discover that putting together composi-tions for a printing press is something completely different than composing something in the computer era and relax in the letter lounge, where the anima-tion specially designed for the Letterlab shows all the ins and outs of the letter and connects all the sections with each other.

The learning tools in the Letterlab are mainly hands-on. Far-from-common digi-tal and analogue tools are deployed to ap-peal to various senses. The different sec-tions are layered so that both young and older children can undergo an ultimate learning experience. For example, the chapter section ‘letter and composition’ contains a built-in method which allows children to re-experience their own de-sign process. The vision that Strange At-tractors strive for in their work is recog-nisable in Letterlab. In Letterlab, visitors plunge into a whole new world. In Letter-lab, a choice has been made for a balance between skill and technology. The result is that the visitor can be addressed and challenged in different ways. The visitor is seduced and provoked with the aim of allowing the communicative experience to take place as effectively and intensely as possible.

LetterLoungeThe animation in the letter lounge shows what each section in the Letterlab stands for and connects them with each other.

desktopLetters are constructed from separate shapes. On the screen, these are trans-lated into small blocks. You can cre-ate complete letters using these small blocks. No letter needs to be the same.

game theatreIn the theatre, children play a multi-player game that encourages them to exercise influence on the shape of the letters by choosing sounds. To what extent does the sound of the letter relate to its shape?

printer’s drawer When letters were printed making use of a printer’s drawer, the designer was re-stricted to the grid which was used in this method. Now that the printing process is digital, does this offer greater freedom?

dark aLLeyIn a dark alley, the visitors spray graffiti with their signature onto the wall. For this they can make use of templates, but a letter designed by themselves can be more exciting.

letterlab can be seen in the Graphic Design Museum from 18 October until september 2010.Primary schools and special secondary schools that visit the letterlab can download a preparatory and a concluding lesson free of charge from the website. In the museum, school groups are always accompanied by one of our education specialists.Children’s parties can also be held in the Graphic Design Museum. the children are accompanied in the letterlab by a font specialist and hold their party with cake in the café. Children can also take part in special workshops that are held during all school holidays. the workshop is suitable for children up to the age of 13 and lasts around 1.5 hours.

IN lETTERlAB vISIToRS DIvE INTo A NEw woRlD

THE woRlD of lETTERlAB

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Ridiculous Design Rules, Ridiculous Advertising Rulesen Ridiculous Fashion Rules

Available now! www.bispublishers.nl

rule

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STRANGE ATTRACToRS “Ryan Pescatore frisk and Catelijne van middelkoop are the founders of design studio Strange Attractors, a young and international agency that handles typography, graphic design and new media in a particularly headstrong manner.” (jury report, Rotterdam Design Prize 2007)

Strange Attractors is the design studio behind the Letterlab museum project. In their work, the designers create a bridge by connecting physical form, represen-tation and tactility with the intangibly conceptual, the digital and the transitory. Skill and technology, programming lan-guage, historical and theoretical knowl-edge are some of the tools they use to reach this aim. They believe that commu-nicative experiences are most effective if they either seduce or provoke the specta-tor. Strange Attractors make considerable use of typography in new and traditional media so that they can thus propose solu-tions for contemporary design problems and wishes. The designers are convinced that each design problem is unique and deserves a solution specially produced for this occasion and thus make no dis-tinction between applied or free assign-ments. The aim is the creation of rich ex-periences and special messages.Strange Attractors are increasingly con-centrating on directing the total experi-ence in the work. Either as an assignment or on their own initiative, the design only functions optimally when the context, the setting in which the design is exposed to the public, is correct in its entirety. This expresses itself in the research into further possibilities of so-called typo-graphic installations, in which they try to design the experience of the location with typographical interventions in the space. The work developed for Q Model Management on Broadway in NYC is a good example of this.

Following tradition, a hundred new letter Qs were developed, after which

these bricks formed the tools for a new interpretation of this space housing the headquarters of Q Model Management.Instead of basing the design of an iden-tity on the traditional house style, Strange Attractors used a series of essays, literal content, to give shape to the identity they created for the Design Platform Rotter-dam. Because the platform is not only in-tended for designers, but particularly for other parties such as government and cor-porations, a conscious choice was made to keep the building bricks for the design as simple and widely-known as pos-sible. Times New Roman, derived from the ‘global style’ and available on every PC was therefore placed in an alienating jacket and deployed in an ironic way to communicate the message of the plat-form to everybody. In a specific context, something everyday is raised to a new message.

www.STRANGEATTRACToRS.Com

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Has our life with the computer an influence on how we relate to text and language? Are there consequences for reading and writing? Does digitalisation induce

changes in design?

DIGI LANGUAGE

max Bruinsma Editor in chief, design magazine Items

mAGISCHE lETTERSIt is quite possible that during the last, say, 25 years, I have come to look at letters differently because I have come to know more about typography. The eminent font designers I have met have given me a greater awareness of the visual details of letters, the importance of a precise con-trast between letter and non-letter, of the line and the curve... My reading has be-come more like looking. Now, my look-ing was already a form of reading; that’s what happens when you’re an art histo-rian. For a long time, I have looked at an image as if it were text. I read it. During the last quarter of a century, text has also increasingly become image for me.But it is not just a greater knowledge of typography which has changed my view of letters, of text. The way in which letters are used has also changed. With a little exaggeration you could say that the title has become the main ingredient. Decorated, elaborately designed, promi-nent letters were, in the past, even before the discovery of the printing press, re-served only for titles and initials, the letter which opened the text. The rest of the text was written or set in a letter that wanted to be as invisible as possible. They are still around, letters that modestly serve to make reading as undisturbed as possible, but in recent years they are becoming in-creasingly surrounded, and sometimes even submerged, by letters that demand

attention, that show that they are there and are different. The design of letters, and thus of words and sentences, has become more and more a form of expression, something that previously was the exclu-sive field of text. Then, letters were a me-dium that allowed the thoughts of a writer - the text - to be transported with as little interference as possible to the head of the reader. For text is actually an immaterial concept, just like language. It has no fixed shape, no tangible raw material. That has changed. Text has become matter...The way text has become matter is related in a somewhat paradoxical way to the digital revolution. The paradox is that the computer has, after all, given things that were previously tangible a ‘virtual’ guise that sometimes ousts the real world. It’s a ten to one chance that anybody who says “desktop” will mean the transient collec-tion of pixels on the screen instead of the physical table on which the computer is placed. The ‘virtual world’ has penetrated so far into our daily lives that it has taken on traits of the ‘real’ world. The actions we take on the virtual desktop are just as real as those we did in the past with pencil and paper. And who still uses a physical pair of scissors and glue pot when cutting and pasting? As the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ becomes increasingly vague so does the difference between ‘text as thought’ and ‘text as matter’. And through this a greater awareness has arisen, not only among designers but also among

writers and readers, that text is always simultaneously form - form that is made, realised and materialised. With a certain exaggeration you could say that language has become matter, just like wood or steel: a raw material that you can process physi-cally into artful constructions, into forms which you can walk around, which you can touch. We touch text and it changes into different text, or into an image. We stroke an image and text appears. We look at a word and it changes in front of our eyes into another word.Sometimes the circle seems closed: for our forefathers text was magic. Word and objects were directly connected - the person who held power over words held power over things. The magic spell is the most immediate example: words that force things to do their will. Isn’t our cur-rent use of language in the digital world a variant of ‘Open Sesame’? The magic spells of the 21st century are computer codes, which set words and actions into motion. The meaning of letters, words, text has therefore changed, and in a cer-tain sense has returned to the origins of language: as a tool with which we, liter-ally, come to grips with the world. And this in turn means that designing letters, and text, is more than ever designing the world.

DesIGners anD wrIters reaCt

Illustration www.nobodyhere.com

Recently, I spoke to a student who claimed never to have written a letter by hand. If that is not change... Writing an e-mail, sending a text message or holding a telephone conversation seem to adopt more and more the same style. There is neither the room nor the time for handwritten letters, and e-mails written in haste, without salutation, filled with spell-ing and linguistic mistakes, are now the rule rather than the exception. The choice of word is less precise and messages are sent to mailing lists. Take two questions I recently received by e-mail: “Has our life with the computer influenced how we treat text and language?” and “Are there consequences for reading and writ-ing?”; it would take a book to answer ei-ther of them properly. At the same time it shows that it is not the precision and knowledge of the individual that counts, but rather the sum of a whole lot of dif-ferent opinions. It is indisputable change that says more about mentality than form. And once again about the loss of preci-sion. To continue with the example of the two questions posed via e-mail: this question is about insight into the impact of a technical development in the area of the appearance of text and how to deal with language. Those are major questions about very different areas, but because of their ‘appearance’ - a short, unannounced e-mail, one received among a whole lot of others - they seem very lightweight. (And, as here, just as ‘facilely’ answered.) The codes that determine what is signifi-cant and what is not change drastically because of this. They are only revealed by the mentality of the ‘messenger’ and by time. That implies a different way of designing.

Annelys de vet Designer and head of Design Department at the Sandberg Institute

For me, the logo is the cultural expres-sion par excellence in which language and image come together. The word logo is derived from the Greek logos, which, loosely translated, means word. It is a visual strategy to claim the corporate im-age language and to make it operational for more public and cultural purposes, an interaction between meaning-giver and meaning. All well-known logos can be downloaded in high image quality via a website such as Brandsoftheworld.com. Stored on my hard disk, they form an in-coherent alphabet, not content but form. My computer is a tool for deconstructing form and recontextualising content.

Erik kessels kesselskramer The meaning of letters, text, language, reading and writing has not changed essentially in recent years. It is, however, true that, thanks to the influence of the digital world and the general use of comput-ers, millions of designers of text have emerged. My mother has been sporadically working on a computer for just a few years, but she has a basic knowledge of fonts. She could tell me the names five, just like that. The design produced by these ‘amateurs’ often inspires me more than the work of many ‘professional’ designers. The ‘mistakes’ they unintentionally make have a certain beauty.

Letters are an integral part of the image, or are even the image itself. Dynamics, looseness and handwriting are key terms for me. It deeply saddens me that, with the emergence of chain stores and legislation by the government, all character is slowly but surely disappearing from the streets of the Netherlands. All city centres and roads look alike. For this reason, I am more interested than ever in physical, ‘un-schooled’ letters. Who on earth reads all those trivial blogs? I consciously choose for a partly analogue lifestyle and am only accessible to others when I want to be. How do you know whether the information found on the internet is worth anything if you never visit libraries and only consume the diluted pulp information provided by free newspapers? Good information is not free.

Hendrik-jan Grievink designer

GarbaGe Char-aCters are Often the result Of ex-CessIve lust fOrM.DeniseGheringdesigner

beautIful bOOks wIth beautIful letters - the DIGItal wOrlD Can’t MatCh that. bas van lierjournalist

You prefer to see that which is written in a lan-guage that you speak yourself. Drawings in the sand and later hieroglyphics in stone commu-nicated matters significant for the community. The way we ultimately developed an alphabet from those drawn images is fantastic. There are fewer and fewer living languages and more and more images with a personal meaning are pub-lished. From the desire to signal new knowledge and to share that knowledge internationally, we now live in a period in which subcultural and local values have become the foremost point of interest for meaningful communication. Ed Annink

Design work The Hague

LANGUAGE

Harmen liemburg Designer

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During the past ten years, we have actu-ally started thinking more precisely about the relationship between typography and materiality. In our work, we try to re-search the relationship in various ways. If we are asked for our personal definition of graphic design, we generally answer with

lETTERS AND So.....From the divine moment when letters formed a word and I could read, I have been fascinated by their appearance. First of all, there was a big difference between the letters around you: in books and news-papers, on shop windows and signs with street names and the somewhat prissy slanted writing that teachers thought you should be taught at the time. I still use joined up slanting letters today, more than sixty years later. But handwriting itself

something along the lines of “turning lan-guage into objects”. That transformation, from language to matter, plays a large role in our work.There have been various writers who had made us increasingly aware of the rela-tionship between text and materiality. Augusto de Campos, for example, who defined Concrete Poetry as “The ten-sion of thing-words in space/time”. And recently Régis Debray, who described in his essay ‘Socialism and Print’ the inher-ent ideological dimension of printed ma-terial.Guy Debord has also had a very big im-pact on our thinking. His criticism of the ‘spectacle society’ has had much influence on our choice to prefer, in our work, text above image. In our work we constantly try to refer to the material (and thus no-ticeable) basis of the world around us. Unlike a poster with an image, a textual poster does not imprison the viewer in an illusion, but actually makes the viewer more aware of the material construction of the poster: ink on paper.The digital world has undoubtedly had an

DIGI LANGUAGEinfluence on designing texts or working with language. The form of language is, for a large part, determined by technol-ogy, so it is only logical that digital tech-niques leave their marks on the develop-ment of graphic design in general.What interests us personally is the chang-ing meaning of printed material. The emergence of the computer has changed the role of printed material in a way that is comparable to the way in which the role of painting changed with the emer-gence of photography some hundred and fifty years ago.In other words, after the introduction of photography, the painted portrait acquired a different meaning, largely because paint-ing was no longer the most obvious way to make a portrait of somebody; painting became a conscious choice. In the same way, we think that the use of printed ma-terial has increasingly acquired a more self-aware character. That is an interest-ing process and we really want to make a contribution to it.

Experimental jetsetDesigners

photo: Pat Shepherd

is made up for a large part of nice letters stolen from here and there. And I know exactly who the original owner was of ‘my’ elaborate capital H, ‘my’ jolly d, the circles above ‘my’ i. Closely connected with my love for letters is my irrepress-ible passion for fountain pens and note books. Starting in a fresh book using your favourite pen; I can’t go into details without things becoming too intimate.

The form of language is, for a large part, determined by technology. Experimental Jetset

Richard van der laken Designpolitie

Hedy d’Ancona Politician

I have noticed for some years that as far as internet is concerned, I do not read. What I mainly do is im-mediately click on a button and if something doesn’t work or if I don’t understand it, then I leave. There you have it: the scourge of communication laws on the web. The same is true of instructions for use. I plunge into putting an IKEA Billy or Bolly together and only look at the instructions for use when I’m half done. And then I prefer to study the pictures. Only if things go terribly wrong do I start reading the explanatory text. Where my work as Designpoli-tie is concerned, I have as the years have passed be-come more conscious of text as text and text as im-age. I used to see text mainly as image, which often led to differences of opinion with writers, journalists

and editors. Because of Gorilla (the daily illustrated column in De Volkskrant, now in the Groene Amsterdammer and Adformatie), I began writing a lot more - call in copywriting. This has also meant that text has again become much more text for me.Just like many other designers, we use typical old media typography and design in a digital environ-ment and vice versa. Fonts developed for the digi-tal environment work very well in printed material. Ugly hyphenations and messaging slang can be very pictorial and also work well.On the other hand, as Designpolitie, we always con-centrate on the conceptual, condensed form and mes-sage. That principle applies in every environment, whether printed material, animation or internet.

The question about the change in the meaning of language, of reading and writing, of text and letter should, in my view, deal with the quality of the applica-tion and working of language and typog-raphy as cultural production.All technology has an influence on our forms of expression and behaviour, whether in the media or not. That does not, in the first place, give rise to the question of whether or not the technique is right, but necessitates looking at the consequences of the introduction of the technology and how - in this case - media professionals deal with it under the given circumstances.Turning its back on social and symbolic issues, the culture industry, including design, has, during the last thirty years, more or less restricted itself to its own world and in that way has made a consid-erable contribution to the neo-liberal con-

Hedy ‘d AnconaPolitica

Notes about letters.I cut out letters, make a word from them, scan it in the computer, add or remove something, and print it out on an A6, in a print-run of three. Forty years ago, the computer was as large as a removal lorry; now it is the size of a cigarette packet. It was during this development that I was training as designer. One morning per week spent copying Roman capi-tals and calligraphy with pen and ink. Calligraphy was the source of all letters. Calligraphy was supposed to work won-ders for your handwriting and turn you into a better person. Organic carrots, but

then as letters. As a reaction to calligra-phy, I started shaping letters from Mars bars, I made an alphabet using football boots and an alphabet with letters that didn’t quite match each other. And I didn’t become a better person. Letters. Anybody who compares the fonts available on his computer with a galley from forty years ago will not see any development; the letters are the same. The computer has contributed nothing to the development of fonts. For the development of the font, the spray-can has been more important that the computer. Thanks to the spray can, letters on graffiti have been able to spread their wings. I’m no admirer of graffiti. Think of a talent search for sing-ers: in various rounds, the worst singers are eliminated and sent packing. In graf-fiti, nobody is eliminated. Everybody is a graffiti artist. And so we are harassed with letters by dabblers without any taste and by pollution of the public space. My calligraphy is dead, but has, together with Chinese brush writing, started a new life as tattooing. There are no professional footballers without calligraphy on their arms. Tattoos are also pollution of the public space. I walk in a wood and miss

the letters carved into the bark of a tree. The letters carved into a tree have been replaced by messaging on your mobile phone. I walk along the street, people in T shirts with text. A competition to see who can wear the ugliest letters. I see a woman with the word ‘art’ on her bounc-ing breasts. If I say: “show me the art, because I understand it, I studied model sketching at college,” - well, then I’m a dirty old man! Or aren’t texts on T-shirts supposed to be read? I see a T-shirt with handcuffs on breasts, decorated with sequins. Perhaps letters are becoming old-fashioned and the future is set aside for the pictogram? Advertising letters? Signs? In forty years, pollution with letters has increased tenfold. Okay, my favourite letter is the ‘e’, my favourite font is Futura, my typography heroes are Willem Sandberg and Jan Bons. As a disciple, I cut out letters, make ‘notes about letters’. Scan and print them out in a run of three. What would the world be without letters? Brains that cannot think. Football without legs.

jos HouwelingDirector Sandberg Instituut

jan van ToornDesigner

For the development of the font, the spray-can has been more important than the computer. Jos Houweling

version of the world. Result: a strongly ritualised use of image and language in the media.The aesthetic experience of every cultur-al thing, of letters, typography, photos, a design, a website etc. generates meaning.In other words, every cultural product contains, potentially, the challenge to stop the chaos of stereotypes by offering alter-natives to the unrestricted stream of con-sumer platitudes. In that case, the design no longer counts as a fact in itself, but it is all about its (critical) interpretation. The aesthetic experience says something about the world, removes us and the viewers or readers from self-satisfaction and political tepidity. And possibly helps rescue us from the debilitating lack of so-cial imagination that all too many cultural productions demonstrate.

I used to see text mainly as image. Richard van der Laken, Designpolitie

Richard van der laken Designpolitie

DIGI LANGUAGE

DUTCH DESIGN DATABASE

DUTCH DESIGN DATABASE

With the exhibition Dutch Design Data-base, the Graphic Design Museum shows how graphic design became professional from after the Second World War un-til now: from printed material to digital media, from a select group of designing artists to the countless number of design-ers working today. From hand work and adhesive letters to software and comput-erisation.Around 1950, there were just over one hundred graphic designers in the Nether-lands. They mainly produced posters and book covers. Newspapers, magazines, brochures and the inside of books were largely produced by typographers work-ing for printers. Sixty years later, there are more than five thousand people active in the Dutch graphic design sector. They still make posters and books, but also logos and house styles, packaging, interactive websites and moving images.The Dutch Design Database exhibition shows how the profession developed in the intervening period. From a profession with a few individuals to a sector with one hundred and eighty agencies (with five or more employees) and a total turnover of more than four hundred million euro.The exhibition is designed as a physi-cal database through which the visitor walks as he is submersed in the work, the facts, figures and core developments of the graphic profession between 1945 and now. The visitor thus becomes a part of

the data flow where he can search for data according to his own requirements. This exhibition not only deals with the profes-sional development of the profession, but also with archiving and conserving the graphic heritage. How does graphic heri-tage arise, how are archives made acces-sible and how does a museum work in this together with other partners? And what do we learn about the profession of graphic

design if we place all this information next to each other? What does it tell us about working in different disciplines and media, about the collaboration with other specialists, about the relationships with other artistic fields, about the clients?The form of the presentation - a design by Niels Schrader and Erik Boldt - illus-trates the database in 17,000 thumbnails. The people who compiled the exhibition

DUTCH DESIGN DATABASE: the exhibition

IllUSTRATING THEDATABASE, ExHIBITIoN DESIGN vAN NIElS SCHRADERAND ERIk BolDT

were confronted with the fact that since the nineties, digital, interactive work was rarely archived. The museum therefore links the exhibition to a unique project. This Data Station is specially designed for this exhibition and every time some-thing is added to the database of the mu-seum, the image of the museum hard disk changes.For the exhibition, some 17,000 images of Dutch graphic design were collected in the months prior to the opening of the exhibition. Following an invitation, many designers and design agencies have added their work to the Dutch Design Database via http://data.dutchdesigndatabase.com. Several hundred designers and agen-cies, including NAGO, Barlcok, Mattmo, Koeweiden Postma, Martijn Engelbregt (EGBG), Thonik, Ben Laloua/Diedier Pascal, Total Identity, De Designpolitie, Niessen & De Vries, Lava, Lex Reitsma, Smidswater, Vandejong, Luna Maurer, Eden and 75B accepted the invitation.The Dutch Design Database will be fur-ther supplemented during the exhibition itself. In this way, the exhibition hopes to contribute to the discussion about digital conservation of the graphic heritage and the conservation of digital graphic work.

The Dutch Design Database will also remain accessible outside the museum and after the exhibition. The database will be part of a new national collection platform. The aim of the Dutch Design Database is to make national graphic design heritage accessible for a broad public. In this way, the museum has made a start of collection digital heritage of the last twenty years, as a supplement to the work that has pre-viously been collected and digitised by the Dutch Archive of Graphic Designers (NAGO) and Reclame Arsenal.

Graphic design will be accessible through one portal: the Dutch Design Database. The Graphic Design Museum has entered into alliances with various national and

international partners for the exchange of knowledge. Various collections of in-stitutes that maintain collections, from museums to archives, will be placed in the Dutch Design Database. Thanks to the development of one graphic design data-base, the possibility arises of linking vari-ous collections. This means that a visitor to the Dutch Design Database will be able to find on this site everything in the field of graphic design in the Netherlands: from poster to TV commercial, from 1850 until now. The visitor can use the various col-lections to create his own virtual exhibi-tions and make links between old and new work. The Dutch Design Database will be community based. This means that de-signers also determine what is offered to

the public by, for example, uploading their own work. The public can consult the da-tabase for graphic work from the past, but can also find contemporary work there as well. Furthermore, there is a possibility for discussion and for making comments.

The Graphic Design Museum is starting the development of the digital portal in the autumn of 2009 and expects that the first version of the Dutch Design Database will be online in the course of 2010. The museum will then become accessible virtually for a wide national and international public.

DUTCH DESIGN DATABASE: a national collection database

DUTCH DESIGN DATABASE: the exhibition

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Niels SchraderNiels Schrader (1977) is the designer of the Dutch Design Database exhibition. He is a romantic; every subject is world trip. He takes to you unknown areas, to places where his personal interests are made public.

Schrader’s work should be seen as criticism on the modern media landscape, that tries to make us aware of communication problems. His strategy: by transforming content from one medium to another (for example, acoustic to visual or physical to digital), he shows the strong and weak points of communication.

Niels Schrader does not only play the role of mediator and autono-mous artist. He is also the designer whose job it is to make complex processes understandable and expose the techniques behind media systems. For more information: http://www.nielsschrader.de/

above left: Urban hymns (2006). series of 7 posters for the public space, developed for the exhibition the Urban condition by the De paviiljoens museum in almere.

above right: mondriaan foundation annual report 2008 (2009). the mondriaan foundation works with a large international network of cultural bodies with the aim of promoting Dutch art, design and cultural heritage. the annual report for 2008 offers a visual report of the events within the network, which can be seen as a digital data cloud in the form of a book.

right: corporations and cities: visual identity (2008). this was an initiative of the architectural faculty of the technical University Delft in collaboration with the berlage Institute in rotterdam.

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The website of the Graphic Design museum has been renewed. lotte meijer and mickey mayo were responsible for this update. Earlier this year, meijer and mayo won a webby award for the Smarthistory.org website.

www.GRAPHICDESIGNmUSEUm.Com

Fran van de Bogaert, editor of the magazine, asked Lotte Meijer a few questions: Why have you renewed the website of the Graphic Design Museum?Firstly, I drastically adapted the structure. The informa-tion on the homepage has been considerable expanded and adapted, so that you can see in one glance what is on show and what is happening at the moment in the museum. Also, more attention is given to the activities for children. A weblog has been added for professionals.Mickey then designed a completely new look which is appropriate for a Graphic Design Museum in the 21st century. With web elements, but still based on a strict grid. He has also changed a lot of small details. We can

wHAT IS A wEBBy AwARD?The Webby Awards are the most impor-tant international awards for excellent websites and online campaigns. They are sometimes called the Oscars of the Internet. The International Academy for Digital Art and Sciences, with members such as David Bowie, Richard Bran-son, and political columnist Arianna Huffington chose Smarthistory from the five nominated websites (selected from thousands of entries) as the best website in the Education category, beat-ing major names such as the George Lucas Foundation, Times Media and the Myriam Webster Dictionary. The website, which started as the blog of the American art historians Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, was redesigned by Lotte Meijer and an international web team in 2008 into the prizewinning new site.

now show more photographs, so that it is clearer what you can expect in the museum. What can you do and see at www.graphicdesignmuseum.com?You can see what the current, planned and past exhibitions are, and what we offer as an ancillary programme. For professionals and other interested parties, we have started a blog on www.graphicdesignmuseum.com/blog. With articles about our collection, cur-rent graphic design and other interesting sub-jects we encounter. It is aimed at sharing our knowledge and vision with everybody interested in graphic design.

The new website is achieved by Netvlies

For a large part, my graphic work arises from a fascination with letter construc-tions and the typographic structures which can be formed with them.

The search for the construction of let-ters and type forms for typography has always been inspiring. Centuries ago, people looked for keys to proportion and configuration for letters and page designs in order to create aesthetic standards.

At the start of the twentieth century, the century of modernism, there was a re-newed interest for letter constructions which would lead to new typography. In 1929, Jan Tschichold designed a

fASCINATIoNS By wIm CRoUwEl

constructed ‘single alphabet’, in which capital and lower case letters were com-bined. The original experiments for the Futura of 1927 by Paul Renner are also similar fitting and linear constructions. They are expressions of a strong belief in the need for elementary letters which give in a new way expression to the mod-ern era.

Impressed by such ideas and inspired by the predecessors, I have often construct-ed letters and regularly experimented with typography schemes. The emer-gence of digital thinking in the sixties strengthened my belief in the importance of a structural basis for letters and typog-raphy. In that period, I sometimes went so far as to make all 26 letters equally wide; the regularly of set text was thus, in my eyes, perfected.

This is now history; in the digital world, unrestricted fantasy has reached great heights. That can be seen in the count-less, often baroque new fonts that are de-signed and the fascination for exuberant typography which can be created with them.

In short, fascinations are overtaken by other fascinations.

COLUMN

Bottom right: Bike Alphabet by Emma Webb http://www.ideasareshiny.co.uk/ Above right: Google Maps Alphabet by Rhett Dashwood. http://blog.freepeople.com/alpha-map670.jpg Below: Slotervaart Alphabet. The notorious Amsterdam district Slotervaart encapsulated in letters. http://www.gloriusvandeven.nl

THE AlPHABET < foUND oN THE INTERNET >In 1632, the first alfabeto Figurato was made by Giovanni battista bracelli, and many designers followed with creative applications for the alphabet. a fine successor to the alfabeto Figurato (illustration right) is the human typeface (aIr) which anthon beeke made in 1970. nowadays, many alphabet creations are floating around on the internet. we have made a selection.

Above left: B for Obama by Matthew Lebaron. http://www.spellingchange.com/ browse-alpha-bet.php Above: Human Typeface (AIR), by Anthon Beeke. Above: Furniture Typeface, the Butler Bros. The furniture typeface is specially intended for a shop. Above: Alfbeto Figurato, by Battista Bracelli. Left: Toilet paper Alpha-bet via Central Saint Martins, England. Below left: Soldiers Alphabet: Fire in the Hole by Oliver Munday. http:// www.olivermunday.com Below: Mincemeat letters, project Value Pack by Robert Bolesta.

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chocolate Letters, per 100 gr, € 3,50. terrorist tea pot, jackie piper for suck Uk, € 29,95 scrbbL, rené knip, € 29,50. Letter stamp kit breezy, words & crafts., € 24,95. add & subtract magnets, magnetic poetry, € 17,50. colouring dress, michiel schuurman, € 230,00. pantone espressoe cups, pantone, € 49,95. ah bag pvc, wouter klein velderman, € 58,00. Letter chains, rené knip., € 29,50

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alphabet Ice, suck Uk, €19,95. typochair, bomdesign, € 625,00 t-shirt t is for shirt, Designpolitie, € 10. birthday card printing set, worldwide co., € 8,95. sleeping mask, Invotis, € 12,95. salt & playtime, fred, € 8,95. Letter stamp kit classic, words & crafts, € 8,95. pixel tape large/small, random for suck Uk, € 8,95. alphabet button stickers, worldwide co., € 3.95

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Café Sandberg in the Graphic Design Museum has been given a complete restyling. The new interior and new Coffee to go formula are a cross between Starbucks and sixties psychedelia. Michiel Schuurman designed the merchandise and the new interior, including the patterns on the mugs, condiments and bags.

Coffee and WiFiCafé Sandberg is not only open to visitors of the museum. Everybody can walk in for a cappuccino, fudge brownie or a beaker of real coffee to take with them. The café offers free internet to people who bring a laptop with them.

Kids Design CornerA special Kids Design Corner has been created for the children. There is a chil-dren’s table at the back, where they can play Mijksenaar Memory and the letter and shape game Tabletto. Using these they can, for example during the children’s parties organised by the museum, make a large greetings card with all kinds of words and shapes. Café Sandberg is open from Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm.

Michiel Schuurman: “I was actually asked to make a parody on the house style of Starbucks but I thought that was a little too easy. As starting-point for the designs, I allowed myself to be inspired by the anonymous beakers and napkins that you get, for example, at the snack bar round the corner. Designers, by now long forgotten, once thought up the squares on the chip bags and the spirals on the cardboard beakers and I thought it would be fun to develop those original designs further. I refined the patterns and made them more organic. In this way I have made a house style that is not based on a recurring logo but on a unified vision which is implemented in various ways in various colours on various objects.”

“The tapestry is something of an odd-man out. It is intended as background to the beakers but also had to have an auton-omous character. I think the contradiction between something that almost hurts your eyes while at the same time you want to touch it very successful.

The tapestry was woven by Brechje Trompert of the Audax Textile Museum in Tilburg.”

CoffEE To Go!in het Graphic Design museum

The colouring dress“The colouring dress is one of those proj-ects that got out of hand - in a good way. Last year I was approached by Berber Soepboer to make the design for her colouring dress for a relatively modest show in the famous textile mill of De Ploeg in Bergeick. The dress has since become a hit on various design blogs throughout the world, has even been fea-tured in Die Zeit and can be seen here and there in an exhibition.We received so many positive reactions that we decided to bring it out in a limited edition of fifty and it is now also for sale in the shop of the Graphic Design Museum.”

The photos of the Graphic Design Museum are by Charlotte Markus. The photographer of the dress is unknown.

mICHIElSCHUURmAN

ing the comments, are apparently actually read, display, just like a novel, a psychic template for human fears and desires. We write because we want to be read. We read because we want to see ourselves. Spring 2007. In the early evening, I am racing through the dark Kunuku in a four-wheel drive with six people in their twenties. We

are on our way to a poetry evening, be-cause my companions had decided to set up a “Young Poets Society” in the cultural wasteland of post-colonial West Indies. The standard languages spoken there are Spanish, English, Dutch and Papiamento. This multilingualism echoes through the poems, which are generally written on a mobile phone. The poems are sometimes long, sometimes extremely short. The young poet Wilfred Jansen mounts the stage. “This poem is called: this is not real.” For the next ten minutes, he repeats the same sentence. Increasingly ecstatic. Groaning on the ground. “This is not

oNly THRoUGH lANGUAGE ARE THINGS mADE REAl

When people talk about reading and how it is in decline, they are generally referring to the novel. Reading novels is surrounded with an aura of silence, contemplation and maturity so that it seems as if, with its dis-appearance, we have taken leave of some-thing eternal. Something that was always there, and now, just like the tropical forests of the Amazon, is being destroyed for ever.

Nothing is farther from the truth. The novel is a fairly recent art form, made possible, in order of appearance, by: humanism, printing and an elite which, in addition to education, had suffi-cient time and money to read novels.

In addition to all the things it is, one can-not possibly call the novel an economic art form. Millions of books are written, and only a few thousand of these with-stand the test of time. Even reading the top 5000 is an impossible task for most mor-tals. And even then, an incredible amount of essential reading will escape our atten-tion. The novel is, in its historic complete-ness, a terrifying monument to our igno-rance. A discouraging reality about which those who would like to get us reading all too often prefer to remain silent. The novel is not just an art form, it is also a blueprint for the lives of its readers. Who apparently have time to spare. For they do not have DVDs and internet. Who have an irrepressible urge to see themselves, long before the discovery of photography unmasked everybody, portrayed in ex-pansive narratives and captured in highly literary means of intercourse. It is not the art form but the specific person who has nearly died out and has, in fact, kept itself alive for quite a while. Those who were born in the second half of the twentieth century still stand with one foot in that tradition. After this, a new reality began, in which, as Gore Vidal once said, it was not the great writers who disappeared but the great readers. But he too only refers to the novel, because in the mean-time we read ourselves silly on slogans, subtitles, newspaper headlines, packag-ing, emails, instructions for use, traffic signs and messages on our mobile phone. Just as the vegetation of a certain area is dictated by season and climate, so the form which the language chooses in which to present itself constantly adapts to the possibilities and wishes of its us-ers. The number of very extensive public diaries on the internet, which, consider-

real!!” The crowd of people there follow his actions carefully. As if he doesn’t keep saying the same thing, but says something different each time. Because there is con-stantly the threat that the following sen-tence will deny all that has gone before. Meanwhile he has, writhing in unreality, the attention of his audience. For words, no matter how much they lie, are always true. Because only through language are things made real, even those which people claim are not real. And that is why we, ad-dicted realists, will always read. Because our reality is one of words and because with the birth of each new word, the de-sire is born for the next one and the next.

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WE WRITEbEcAUsE wE wANt to bE READ

by Dick Tuinder

Our realityis oneof words!

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Purchase for 100 Years of Dutch Graphic DesignThe retrospective exhibition 100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design was set up to give a concise picture of 100 years of Dutch graphic design. For that reason, it is a good starting-point for creating a repre-sentative collection. An example of such a purchase for the retrospective exhibition is the complete set of the magazine Wendingen. This magazine for architecture and other art forms, which was published between 1918 and 1931, mainly achieved fame because of its unusual and eye-catching design: a large square format, bound in the Japanese way, and cleanly laid-out texts with decorations of setting material. The person responsible for the design of the magazine was the architect Hendri-cus Theodorus Wijdeveld. He designed the inside and produced several covers. For the remaining covers, he approached various artists and architects. A number of covers are remarkable be-cause of their architectonic appearance. The covers appear, as it were, to be built up of concrete or bricks. Just like the ga-bles of the Amsterdam School, they are made up of letters and abstract decora-tions. The letters on the covers are remi-niscent of the letters on the buildings of the Amsterdam School: they are geomet-ric, decorative and sometimes almost illegible.

lETTERS IN THE CollECTIoNthe collection of the Graphic Design Museum is shaped in different ways. Purchases are made and objects are donated. that doesn’t, of course, happen indiscriminately: the museum has drawn up criteria for develop-ing a collection in the area of graphic design. by way of illustration, some examples forming a collection in which letters play an important role.

Ensemble DonationAn ensemble is a collection of objects with which the main line of the collection is supplemented or deepened. These are objects that are not top works, but which offer context for that type of work and give a broader insight into the profession of graphic design. An ensemble that was recently donated to the museum is the headed letter paper of the design agency Tel Design. This collection of headed letter paper, which was donated by the designer Rene van Halter of Tel Design, gives information about various developments and subjects from the profession. The headed paper not only shows the emergence of design agencies in the sixties, it also says some-thing about the development of headed letter paper and the way in which that can reflect the identity of an agency. The headed paper of Tel Design clearly illus-trates how the character and the views of a design agency can be reflected with typefaces, with or without a reinforcing illustration.

lETTERS IN THE CollECTIoN programme is also recorded using ob-jects. In the framework of the temporary ex-hibition Thonik: made in China, made by You, in which the work of the design agency Thonik was exhibited in the form of tapestries, the museum purchased a tapestry showing the house style assign-ment for the Central Museum. The let-ter C is characteristic for the house style design for the Central Museum. The whole identity of the Central Museum is captured in this letter being featured five times: each C stands for a collection and a curator of the museum. The typeface of the C is the Avenir by Adrian Frutiger, a typeface that Thonik used from 1996 to 2003 for all its designs.

The desing processArchives belonging to designers and de-sign agencies are an important source of information. After all they offer - unlike an end product such as a poster or a post-age stamp - insight into the design pro-cess, into the way design became profes-sional and into the background ideas and opinions. Archives, however, occupy considerably more space than single objects. Archives are stored in their entirety and, since ar-chives not only contain documentary material but also end products, there will always be an overlap or less relevant sec-tions. For these reasons, the Graphic De-sign Museum is looking for other meth-ods of preserving design processes, ideas or developments. Interviews are a good alternative. When the story of designers is captured in word and image, based on their archive material, the story is re-tained with the work. Such interviews are treated as a collection: it is stored in such a way that it remains permanently acces-sible.One of the interviews in the museum’s collection is an interview with LettEer-ror about the design of their typeface Beowolf. This typeface was the result of a first project by the designers Just van Rossem and Erik van Blokland (LettEr-ror). Beowolf is a letter that constantly changes when it is printed. The design has the effect that a text printed in Beowolf has an irregular, human character. Each letter was unique but clearly belongs with

the other letters, just as in handwriting. What is remarkable is that new computer technology made it possible to develop a typeface with a handmade appearance which had disappeared exactly because of the emergence of the computer. In the interview, which is shown in the retrospective exhibition, the designers of LettError extensively discuss the Beo-wolf design process. And so the Graphic Design Museum has a unique piece of information that goes a lot further than would have been the case if only the typeface had been purchased.

Purchase public programme Finally, the Graphic Design Museum builds up its collection based on the con-tents of the public programme. By tak-ing the temporary exhibitions and other public activities as thread for collection purchases, we work on the collection in two ways. Not only is the graphic design collection supplemented, the public

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BUSINESS ClUB Companies with or without a direct link with graphic design can support the museum by becoming members of the Business Club. Four meetings are or-ganised annually specially for the mem-bers. The main aims of the Business Club are generating more funds and stimulat-ing collaborations between museum part-ners. Stimulating collaborations between the museum partners and members of the business club is of vital importance. You can become a member of this active club for 1000 euro per year. Would you like to become a member? See our website www.graphicdesignmuseum.com or con-tact Carola Drontmann 076 529 99 00.

PARTNERSMany companies and private persons have, in recent years, made a contribution to administering the heritage of graphic design. These partnerships will continue to be of crucial importance to the muse-um in the future. With external help, we will be able to purchase collections, carry out research into graphic design and op-timise the exchange exhibitions and the education programme. New enthusiastic partners are more than welcome. We de-velop in consultation a collaboration plan with partners. For more information: visit our website www.graphicdesignmuseum.com or phone Carola Drontmann 076 529 99 00.

fRIENDSIf you are interested in graphic design and would you like to be kept informed of the international developments in this interesting profession, then you can be-come a friend of the museum. With your support, the Graphic Design Museum can continue to surprise visitors with an ex-hibition programme, rich in content. You stimulate the interest for graphic design and support educational aims. The mem-bership of the association of friends is € 20. You receive our magazine twice a year and an invitation for the openings. More info: www.graphicdesignmuseum.com or phone 076 529 99 00.

BUSINESS NEwS

Rainbow for rent! Credit on Color will go on tour from february 2010 Until February 8, 2010 the Graphic Design Museum is presenting the exhibition Credit on Color, with thousands of credit cards, free cards, discount cards, gift cards and credit card lookalikes on one wall, arranged by colour. The design of each card is unique, yet the standard size with the rounded corners make the cards readily recognisable. Credit cards give you a social or professional status. They represent your taste, your world and they are the face of your possessions. You are what you buy, you are what you have access to. All the cards in your wallet together determine your identity. From February 2010, the exhibition Credit on Color will go on tour to banks, museums, companies, organisations and private individuals. Would you like this remarkable work of art in the form of a rainbow of credit cards for a time on your wall? For more information, please contact Carola Drontmann via carola@graphicdesignmuseum.com or 076-529 99 00.

DIARyof activities and preview in the Graphic Design museum

17 t/m 25 october 2009 Dutch Design week EindhovenThe Graphic Design Museum is present at the Dutch Design Week (DDW) in Eindhoven. Mieke Gerritzen, director of the Graphic De-sign Museum, will give a lecture during the DDW. The Graphic Design Museum Maga-zine is also available at the most important locations in Eindhoven where the designers exhibit their work. There are designers from both the Netherlands and abroad, both es-tablished agencies and talented newcomers. There are daily exhibitions, workshops, semi-nars, lectures, prize awards, design dinners and parties. www.dutchdesignweek.nl

3 November 2009lecture by jeroen Smit for the Business ClubIn the framework of the exhibition Credit on Color, Jeroen Smit, author of the best-seller De Prooi, will give a lecture exclusively for members of the Business Club, on 3 Novem-ber at 5 pm in the Graphic Design Museum. More than 30,000 copies of his book about the fall of ABN AMRO have been sold. With Credit on Color, the Graphic Design Museum is currently exhibiting one of the causes of the worldwide financial crisis. Members can reg-ister for the event via a mail to annemiek@graphicdesignmuseum.com. The lecture is not open to the public.

9 November 2009 Recording AvRo Between Art and kitschThe TV team Between Art and Kitsch will be visiting the Graphic Design Museum. On Monday 9 November, the experts of the AVRO programme will appraise valuable ob-jects and other items belonging to visitors. The thousand tickets for the recording session in the museum have all been sold. The broadcast will be shown early in 2010 on Netherlands 1. You can find the exact date in December on www.graphicdesignmuseum.com.

ColoPHoN mAGAZINEThe Graphic Design Museum Magazine appears twice a year in a run of 75,000. For advertisements you can phone Mrs. C. Drontmann 076 529 99 00. Would you like to receive this magazine at home, free-of-charge? Phone 076 529 99 00 or become friend of the museum for at least 20 euro per year. You then support the museum and receive the magazine at your home address.

The following people worked on this edition: Mieke Gerritzen (editor in chief, art direction), Fran van de Bogaert (editor), Annemieke van Dongen (final editing), Fabienne van Beek (collection), Esther Cleven (collection), Britt Grootes (collection), Imke de Jong (design), Marieke van Oudheusden (education), Max Bruinsma, Dick Tuinder, Annelys de Vet, Wim Crouwel, Jan van Toorn, Harmen Liemburg, Hedy ‘d Ancona, Ed Annink, Erik Kessels, Hendrik-Jan Grievink, Experimental Jetset, Richard van der Laken, Bas van Lier, Jos Houwel-ing, Denise Ghering, Niels Schrader, Erik Boldt, Strange Attractors, Michiel Schuurman, Lotte Meijer, Mickey Mayo, Thonik, René Knip, Aaf van Essen.

19 December 2009 Symposium Culture & Criteria in ParadisoThe Graphic Design Museum is organising a symposium about changes in art and design on Saturday 19 December in Amsterdam. About the future of museums in the midst of transient digital media, cultural democracy, amateurism. Text becomes image, analogue becomes digital and physical becomes virtual. Amateurs take over the work of professionals, and various cultural disciplines fuse together. Please consult the website for the programme and to reserve tickets.www.graphicdesignmuseum.com

22 january 2010Culture Night BredaDuring the first culture night in Breda, last year, 1500 people visited the Graphic Design Museum. On Friday 22 January, the museum will be opening its doors until midnight for the second time. Programme information fol-lows on www.graphicdesignmuseum.com. Make sure you’re there!

Exhibitions 2009-2010

17 october 2009 – September 2010 letterlabLetterlab is all about letters in the broadest sense of the word. The exhibition is an exciting do-environment and has been made in close cooperation with design duo Strange Attractors.

Until 8 february 2010 Dutch Design DatabaseThe Dutch Design Database exhibition shows how the profession developed in the past half century. The exhibition is a database with 17,000 designs, which is displayed in both a physical and in a digital, interactive form. Designers can upload work themselves via www.dutchdesigndatabase.com.

Until 8 february 2010 Credit on ColorCredit on Color presents thousands of credit cards, free cards, discount cards, gift cards and credit card lookalikes on one wall, arranged by colour. All the cards in your wallet together determine your identity.

100 years of Dutch Graphic DesignThe core of our museum is formed by the semi-permanent exhibition 100 years of Graphic Design in the Netherlands. Three halls offer a unique historical retrospective that clearly shows how Dutch graphic design is inextricably linked with the modernisation of society in the twentieth century.

INfoDECoDATAfebruary 2010 INFODECODATA: No words but images. Data visualisation is one of the most impor-tant trends in the field of graphic design. INFODECODATA presents a survey of information design with image icons, scientific data visualisations, graphic design and experimental computer graphics.

School holidays 2009

18 oct. t/m 1 Nov. 2009 - Autumn holidays19 Dec. t/m 2 jan. 2010 - Christmas holidaysDuring the school holidays children can go to work in the new children’s room with the exhibition Letterlab. Every day we organise two design workshops for children in the Museum Lab. In addition there are family tours through the retrospective exhibition 100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design. Adults can visit the exhibitions Dutch Design Database and Credit on color, lunch in Café Sandberg or buy a gift in the Graphic Design Shop. You can register for the holiday activities via info@graphicdesignmuseum.com or via the website.

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GDM-SHOPKado promo(feestda-gen)

publicatie // expo // partyWat // GreyTones - MyCityWaar // Graphic Design Festival - BredaWanneer // 08 t/m 30 mei 2010Meer informatie // www.greytones.nl of www.graphicdesignfestival.nl

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GRAPHIC DESIGN MUSEUM

Boschstraat 22, 4811 GH BREDAT +31 (0)76 529 99 00F +31 (0)76 529 99 29info@graphicdesignmuseum.comwww.graphicdesignmuseum.com

ENTRANCE FEES

Adults € 7,50Children under 3 jaar FreeEducation and students with college pass ,De Nieuwe Veste course participants, Members of BNO € 3,75MJK, Friends of the Graphic Design Museum, Members of our Business Club Members of ICOM, free 65+ pass is not valid

OPENING HOURS

Tuesday to Sunday 10 AM to 5 PM The museum is closed on Monday. Opening on Mondays is possible is possible and room rental for groups of one hundred or more persons who have at least one months advance notification.