Taken from AisleOne
Experimental Jetset is an Amsterdam graphic design unit founded in 1997 by Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers and Danny van den Dungen. Focusing on printed matter and installation work and inspired by modernism and rock culture, Experimental Jetset has done work for clients such as the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum (SMCS), Purple Institute, Centre Pompidou, Colette, Dutch Post Group (TPG), Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN), Le Cent Quatre (104), De Theatercompagnie and t-shirt label 2K/Gingham. Since being formed, Experimental Jetset has emerged as one of the most respected studios in Europe.
Who or what turned you on to graphic design?
Definitely punk. Although we were too young to participate actively in the original punk explosion (we were preteens in 1977), we still feel it has had a very big impact on our lives. As teenagers, in the mid-eighties, we were completely absorbed by all kinds of post-punk movements: psychobilly, garage punk, new wave, two tone, American hardcore. What intrigued us was not only the music, but also the graphic manifestations of it: record sleeves, badges, patches, t-shirts, flyers, posters, magazines, band logos, mix tapes. We are absolutely sure that it were things such as these that stimulated our interest in graphic design.
Who or what are your influences?
Right now, we would say, modernism and rock culture.
These are seemingly complete opposites of each other, but the more we think about it, the more we realize they are quite similar. Both rock and modernism surfaced around the same time: blues music started in the second half of the 19th century in the US, while the first modernist movements (impressionism, art nouveau) began around that same time in Europe. Both rock culture and modernism refer to ‘primitive’ roots (African beats in rock music, African influences in Cubism), but they are both equally inspired by futurist visions (Ike Turner’s ‘Rocket 88′ is widely acknowledged as the first rock and roll song, while one of the earliest white rock and roll bands was Bill Haley and His Comets; just two examples to show the influence of technology and science fiction on rock and roll). Both modernism and rock culture have this hidden theme of class struggle: the unresolved tension between bourgeoisie and proletariat. In modernism, this theme entered through Marxism, while in rock culture, this theme has its roots in slave music. But most important of all, both modernism and rock investigate the various ways in which the individual can deal with modernity: praise it, embrace it, accept it, manipulate it or resist it. Sometimes they overlap (Pop Art), sometimes they clash (Adorno’s attacks on popular music). But all in all, we think modernism and rock culture are like twins, separated at birth. Rock and roll is American modernism.
What is your favorite typeface?
Some people might expect us to answer ‘Helvetica’ here, because this is a typeface we use often (but certainly not always). But we can’t honestly say that Helvetica is our favorite typeface, in the same way that we can’t really say that Dutch is our favorite language. Sure, Dutch is the language we use most commonly, and feels most natural to us. It is a language we feel emotionally attached to, and a language we are willing to defend. We not only speak Dutch, but also think it, and dream it. But that doesn’t mean that we necessarily think that Dutch is the most beautiful language. For example, we love Italian, because the words sound as if they are spit out, with great precision. Esperanto is a interesting language, because it is completely artificial as well as tragically beautiful. English is a great language, because it is so compact; the way adjectives can be used in English is almost magic. We adore the way Brazilians speak Portuguese; listening to Tropicalia songs, it’s hard not to fall in love with that language. So, in a way, all these languages can be considered as more beautiful than Dutch. But still, if we go to the bakery to buy a bread, we use Dutch. To order a bread in Esperanto would be nonsense. The way we use Helvetica can be compared to that. We use Helvetica not because it is our favorite typeface, but because we feel it is our mother tongue. It is our natural tone of voice, the typeface most close to us. If necessary, we use different typefaces, in the same way that we sometimes speak different languages (for example in this interview, done in English). But when it comes down to it, we speak Helvetica.
What is your favorite color palette to work with?
The color most dominant in our work is white. Or better said, the color most dominant in our work is the color of the paper. In most of our designs, we try to show the paper; this is really important to us. By showing the paper, we hope to give the viewer/reader a better understanding of the construction of graphic design. We try to design in such a way that the result is clearly recognizable as ‘just’ a piece of printed paper. We try not to catch the viewer/reader in some kind of illusion, or floating image; we want our work to be totally honest about its own materiality. It is a printed piece of paper, not an immaterial image.
Can you explain your creative process from brief to completion?
A lot of thinking, a lot of reading, a lot of talking, a lot of sketching. It’s just working very hard. We can’t describe it any other way.
Do you use a grid system when designing and how do you feel about them?
We use grids in our work, but we think we use them in a completely different way than, for example, Swiss late-modernist designers such as Josef Muller-Brockmann. Although we really admire grid-driven work, we wouldn’t dare to call ourselves proper gridniks.
In the second issue of French magazine ‘Ink’ (published by Superscript) we answered a long interview, solely about grids; so people interested in our detailed views about the grid should try to get a hold on that particular issue of ‘Ink’.
In that interview, we took a poster we designed (below) in 2003 as an example. It was a poster we designed as a contribution to ‘Public Address System’, a group exhibition that took place in the beginning of 2004 in London.
In short, the given theme of the exhibition was ‘speech’, or ‘spoken word’. We decided to make a poster showing a text by the writer Stefan Themerson: “My lord archbishop; your excellencies, your graces; my lords, ladies and gentlemen, men and women, children; embryos, if any; spermatozoa reclining at the edge of your chairs; all living cells; bacteria; viruses; molecules of air, and dust, and water… I feel much honoured in being asked to address you all, and to recite poetry — but I have no poetry to recite.” (What we liked about this text is that it is like one big introduction, an introduction that could be seen as the opening words of every speech in the exhibition). As you notice, Themerson’s text is quite hierarchical: it goes from large (‘archbishop’) to small (‘molecules’). So in our poster, we wanted to make this hierarchy clear, by putting all the words in the form of a list. In the middle of the paper, we put the list of nouns, from ‘archbishop’ to ‘molecules’. On the left, we put all the adjectives and prepositions (‘my’, ‘living’, etc.), and on the right, we put the conjunctions, adverbs, verbs etc. The actual grid that exists in the poster is completely dependent on the length of the words. The longest noun is ‘spermetozoa’, so this word determines the width of the middle column. The longest adjective is ‘all living’, so this word determines the width of the first column. And the longest word on the right column is ‘reclining’, so that determines the width of the third column. So what you have here is a completely irregular grid, each column in a different width. The first column is narrow, the second column is wide, and the third column is narrow, but not as narrow as the first column. The leading (the space between the lines) is determined by the simple rule that the descenders shouldn’t touch the ascenders. In the poster, this basically means that the word ‘graces’ shouldn’t touch the word ‘lords’. So all the leading in the poster is fully dependent on the relationship between those two words: ‘graces’ and ‘lords’.
So how we see it, here the grid is completely generated by the poem. If the writer would have written ‘sperm’ instead of ‘spermatozoa’, the whole grid would be different, and the whole poster would have looked completely different as well. The most important formal decision was the choice of the poem. Any other poem would have resulted in a completely different poster.
So that is, in short, the role that grids play in our work. Every situation results in its own grid. And those grids are often irregular, generated by language. Definitely not the way proper gridniks would do it.
Taken from Geotypografika
1. How do the Bauhaus ideals such as “form follows function” influence (or not influence) your design work? Do you take these teachings into consideration during your design process?
We really don’t see “form follows function” as a Bauhaus ideal! In the conclusion of Reyner Banham’s ‘Theory and Design in the First Machine Age’ (1960), Banham calls “forms follows function”, an empty jingle (more precisely, he calls it “Louis Sullivan’s empty jingle”), and an example of the “revival of 19th century determinism such as both Le Corbusier and Gropius had rejected”.
In other words, Banham sees “forms follow function” as something that goes AGAINST the true nature of Bauhaus (and other early modernist movements). For him, this emphasis on functionality is something that was projected onto Bauhaus much later, by late- and post-modernists. This narrow idea of functionalism neglects the more philosophical and conceptual (Banham would say spiritual and symbolist) ideals of Bauhaus. And we tend to agree.
If there’s one thing that we took from Bauhaus, it’s the spirit of making things. In that sense, it is specifically the founding Bauhaus manifesto that had a big influence on us. Take for example a sentence like “the world of the pattern-designer and applied artist, consisting only of drawing and painting, must become once again a world in which things are built”. This idea, of a world in which things are built, has a big influence on our work. We are not interested in creating images: we produce things.
From that same manifesto: “Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists!”. Another sentence that is really inspirational. Although written almost 100 years ago, it describes the role of the contemporary designer astonishingly well.
We really like the metaphor in the first sentence of the manifesto: “The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building!”. Society as a building, as something being constructed continuously, through a collective creative activity.
2. How have the ideas of “New Typography,” introduced by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and furthered by Herbert Bayer (and his “Universal” type) found their way into your designs (or have they not)? What about the color theory studies
of Josef Albers?
As we wrote, we are especially inspired by the spirit of the original manifesto. All the individual theories (colour theory etc.) we see more as specific applications of that particular spirit. Applications that were often very specific for particular contexts and situations. So, even though we do think that our own design work is a manifestation of the Bauhaus spirit, the way we apply it is very different, because we are dealing with our own specific contexts and situations.
3. How do you feel the Bauhaus’ modernist aesthetics are influencing other graphic designers in our world today?
We think that all these young students and designers that you see nowadays, on websites such as FFFFound, Flickr and MySpace, holding their posters proudly in front of them, are the true heirs of Bauhaus. This current DIY/punk explosion, of stencilled posters, bright geometric shapes, homemade shirts, etc. etc. : it really is a manifestation of the Bauhaus spirit, of this idea of shaping your environment through creativity, in a very direct way. Actually, we were recently interviewed by this New York weblog called AisleOne. In that interview, we spoke in more detail about our thoughts on this whole FFFFound phenomenon, and how it relates to early modernism.
To read it, go here and scroll to the question ‘who do you feel is currently doing innovative work?’
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