Wim Crouwel

wim-crouwel
wim-crouwel

I was lucky enough to hear Wim Crouwel speak at the D&AD lectures last year. If you’re a type geek then you’ll already know the name and his work. The CR Blog have an interview with him here.

He’s a bit of a hero I’d contend in the design community, one of the last great designers who weren’t schooled in the age of computers, such designers were artisans, craftsmen and artists first and foremost, relying on talent, common sense and daring to get their work done and make a living. These were pioneers. A lot of the stuff we see around us today visually is drawn from their endeavours, though they retain a purity of thought and expression that subsequent commercial interests – and the methods of digital reproduction have dampened down.

For a more complete biography start here. If you get a chance to hear him speak then jump at it. He just gets it. They say the secret of success is to be passionately relaxed, I think he manages it in spades. I’m sure he confounds design tutors with his casual disregard of the rules (‘If I’m not sure then I just make it blue, that always seems to work’) but when he started out there weren’t any. You have to put his design in context, it looks modern and space age but when he put pen to paper we were still years short of a moon landing.

WC1

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