Wim Crouwel at the Design Museum

If you get the chance, take an afternoon out to visit the Design Museum where the Wim Crouwel retrospective is showing until July.

Regarded as one of the leading designers of the twentieth century, Crouwel embraced modernist principles, producing a wide range of typographic designs that influenced the course of graphic design through the 50s and 60s and continues to have resonance today.

Heavily influenced by the Bauhaus and the modernist design work of Jan Tischold and Josef Muller-Brockmann, Crouwel’s initial work as an exhibition designer gave him a great sense of spatial awareness that he brought to his poster and programme designs, first for the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, and later for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Wim Crouwel's work at the Design Museum

Gifted with a sympathetic museum director who allowed him the freedom to develop a signature look, Crouwel developed a structured grid system which acted as a unique template for the Stedelijk Museum's graphic identity. The logic of his designs distil the subject down to its absolute essence, yet often the poster layouts contain an experimental element or visual pun, playing off the exhibition title or the subject artist's style.

In 1963 Crouwel founded the multi-disciplinary design agency Total Design creating the identity for numerous Dutch companies, working for clients such as IBM, and typeface commissions for Olivetti. He was instrumental in leading a controversial redesign of the dutch telephone book using only lowercase letters - offering major savings on ink and paper - but one which failed to find favour with its audience.

New Alphabet (redrawn)

Whereas his strength lay in designing one-off grid-based posters and wordmarks, primarily supported by easily readable sans serif type, his interest in letterforms as graphic objects led Crouwel to design the radical New Alphabet typeface as a visual experiment. Based on the look of type as seen in emerging computer systems, it appeared almost alien, a cipher script of vertical and horizontal lines. This almost Illegible font challenged the design establishment and provoked debate amongst modernists - a debate which Crouwel was happy to engage in - openly admitting to placing visual aesthetics above function.

(Although never meant to be really used, New Alphabet was subsequently redrawn by Brett Wickens and Peter Saville for the Joy Division album, ‘Substance’ in the late 80s.)

Some of his work has dated, but there are many pieces that still retain a freshness and vitality and demonstrate a clarity of thought. Set beside contemporary work by design groups 8vo, Cartlidge Levine, Studio Myerscough and Peter Saville, the influence and legacy of Wim Crouwel can be clearly seen.

Structured writing

Be clear what you want your writing to say before you start to write it.

What impression are you trying to create? Are you just giving information, or do you want your readers to do something? Who is your audience? Who will read your writing? Think about these groups, what interests them and what you want to say to them. How do they like to receive and use information? Is the visual impact important to them or not?

Inverted pyramid writing
Most people are taught to write by setting up a proposition, building an argument and coming to a conclusion.

However, this presupposes that your reader has the time to read your content all the way through to the end. However, most people skim and scan text in order to extract the salient points as quickly as possible.

Journalists and web editors recognise that their readership is transient and have adopted the concept of inverted pyramid writing to communicate with a time-poor audience.

This style places the most newsworthy information at the beginning of the story and orders the remaining content based on relative importance.

• Story lead (who, what, why, where, when) > Supporting information > Details

Using this structure enables the viewer to grab the core message quickly. In turn, your design should clearly frame the content and enable skimming and scanning.

Writing for the web
People don’t read websites in the same way as they read books or newspapers. They tend to scan, looking for the information they want, and ignore long documents and large blocks of text. You can make it easier for your users by following a few simple pointers:

• Put the most important information at the top of the page
• Use sub-headings, bullet lists and links, so people can find topics easily
• Use plain English and avoid jargon (remember, you are writing for everyone, including people whose first language may not be English)
• Keep it brief – internet users like short bites of text
• Keep pages short – don’t make people scroll down too far on any page. 
• Use short sentences
• Make sure your content is relevant – do I really need to include this?