Throughout this month, Creative Review has been following the activities of design studio Build. On 28 June, Michael and Nicola Place, who make up Build, travelled to Dublin for a screening of Helvetica, followed by a panel discusssion and talk by Wim Crouwel. The following morning Build caught up with Crouwel to conduct an interview for CR.

Excerpt :

MCP: Looking at your work, I always think it’s so incredible; the form, the typefaces, the layout. It’s very influential and yet we are seeing this out of context from the time it was created. At the time, did it seem shocking or was it accepted by those around as just good design, or were people quite indifferent?
WC: It was an amount of luck, we had the right clients who embraced this sort of thinking – mainly the director [of the Van Abbemuseum, and then of the Stedelijk Museum] who was a great and long term client. We met through my art school in Southern Holland [Groningen] where I was teaching in 1954 (up until then I was painting, i didn’t really know what to do) – the head of the school knew the director – and six months after I had started teaching I got a phone call, which was the beginning of a long relationship with him. He wanted to represent artwork with a more advanced way of thinking that reflected what was happening with Modern Art. We were very interested in the abstract at that time. He was very supportive, as I dealt with him directly, and he dealt with the curators, who always wanted to have a say in the way their shows were promoted or represented. I just dealt with him, and he was very supportive of my ideas, as they fitted with the ideas of abstract paining, so my ideas were really quite accepted.

Read the interview here.

[tags]Graphic design, Wim Crouwel, Michael C. Place, Build, Interview[/tags]