Wim Crouwel fonts
Galerie Vivid, Rotterdam, NL
March 17 – May 2, 2002
Statement: «An exhibition dedicated to the fonts designed by Dutch designer Wim Crouwel. Wim Crouwel is one of the founders of Dutch design office ‘Total Design’ and he was director of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The exhibition shows the complete alphabets of the typefaces designed by Crouwel [computer cut and mounted on a wall of 13×3 meter].
Together with eight original posters from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam the exhibition at VIVID features unique first publications and graphic experiments of Crouwels work. His latest work, VIVIDs own exhibition announcement, will be there too.
The designs of Wim Crouwel are still fresh. It contains the original spirit on which a lot of contemporary design is based. Therefor his work is both inspiring and influential for present and future generations. VIVID wants to demonstrate this creative continuity.
An example is the famous experimental computer font ‘New Alphabet’ (1967), a radical experiment conceived in response to his experience of the first device for electronic typesetting. The characters were designed to follow the underlying dot-matrix system.
‘Gridnik’ (1976) was designed as a single weight typewriter face. A modified version was used for the low-value postage stamps of the PPT, Dutch post office, which feature the stamp value only, displaying the numerals to full effect. The font is named Gridnik because of Crouwels devotion to grids and systems in his work to create visual order. In the 1960s he was often affectionately referred to as ‘Mr Gridnik’ by his friends and contemporaries.»
