poisongalore

The WC Alphabets
In an experimental series called Kwadraatblad – because of their format (25 x 25 cm), as well as their ideal and theoretical content –, the De Jong & Co. printer of Hilversum (Holland) published in 1967 a booklet with a bright red cover, entitled new alphabet in the English edition, nieuw alfabet in the Dutch. In the colophon we can read, among other names: ©Wim Crouwel (Total Design) Amsterdam. The series of Kwadraatbladen (known in English as Quadrat-Prints), had begun in 1954, on the initiative of a designer highly active in the promotion of the visual culture: Pieter Brattinga, the son of the De Jong & Co’s owner. This initiative ushered in one of the most interesting experiments in letter design of the second half of the 20th century. “In 1967, with the introduction of the first electronic devices for photo-typesetting” – Crouwel was to comment in 1988 – “I proposed a monoalphabet font in response to these new functional needs. Mine was a proposal of an essentially theoretical nature, as some of the letters bore no resemblance to the usual ones. The thing attracted a lot of attention but the attempt was fairly futile, in a period in which functionalism, as it was understood in the spirit of the Bauhaus, was under attack and being declared anti-human and out of date.”
Born in Groningen, the thirty-nine-year-old Willem “Wim” Crouwel in 1967 was already one of the most prominent Dutch visual designers, with an established international reputation. Completing his higher education at the Minerva Academy (1946-49), a reknown school of applied arts, and his army duty (1949-51), Crouwel attended the evening course in typography at the Ivkno (1951-52) in Amsterdam; there he started working, with an apprenticeship at Enderberg (1952-54), that brought him into first contact with the so-called Swiss graphic design. Opening his own studio in Amsterdam (1954-57), he began a collaboration with Kho Liang Le (1956-60), the interior designer. Then he worked again freelance (1960-63), before founding Total Design (1963-80), with Friso Kramer, Benno Wissing and the brothers Paul and Dick Schwarz. This partnership made him famous worldwide and Total Design, under the ideological leadership of Crouwel, impressed a deep mark onto the international visual scene of the Sixties and Seventies. Crouwel was also a consultant and advisor (1980-85) for the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, before being appointed director in 1985 (until 1993), then we went back to freelancing in 1994. As a matter of fact, Crouwel has combined a successful professional career with teaching, initially at the Royal Art Academy in Den Bosch (1954-57), then at the Ivkno in Amsterdam (until 1963), and finally at the Technical University in Delft (1965-85) and the Royal College of Art in London (1981-85). So the experiment with the “new alphabet” came at a watershed in Crouwel’s career.
While continually dealing with letters in his work, Crouwel is not (and has never considered himself to be) a designer of typefaces. The “new alphabet” in the QuadratPrint makes clear from the beginning, as the subtitles on the cover, that it is “a possibility for the new development,” i.e. “an introduction for a programmed typography”: new alphabet is a “new typeface, better suited than the more traditional types, to systems of composition based on cathode-ray tubes.” So “the amount of information that has to be printed every day, necessarily, has grown to such a point that mechanization is indispensable (…) But letters have never evolved with machines. The proposed unconventional alphabet here shown is intended merely as an initial step in a direction which could possibly be followed by further research. The means of production that is taken as a starting point is the cathode ray tube, which corresponds to the same principle as television.” It would be worth verifying the degree to which these statements correspond to the actual artifact in the Quadrat-Print. To give an answer, we need to take another look at the booklet. Even on the cover page, not one but two alphabets: one (positive, black on white) made up of solid orthogonal lines, with joints at 45 degrees; the other (in negative, white on black), made up of dots (one per unit of the module), where the junctions are simply those dots set at the points of articulation. In the type literature, the name of “new alphabet” is assigned only to the positive alphabet. The reproductions of sketches and studies for the alphabet (prudently dated “circa 1967″) reveal a great variety of solutions in progress. Looking back, we find that Crouwel had used the same letters of the first alphabet in the Quadrat-Print already in April 1967, for the congress Mechanisierung en automatisering in het grafisch bedrijf , organised by an association of young Dutch graphic designers and, in September 1966, for a brochure to the Commission on the Use of Computers. Going further back, two similar examples of lettering were designed for the Venice Biennale in 1960 and 1962. Here the word “Holland” is composed in letters that are direct predecessors of the “new alphabet”. A variation to the junctions at 45 degrees then appears on the cover of the Stedelijk Museum catalogue dedicated to Brusselmans, in 1960. Its earliest formulation perhaps may be recognized in the logo of Rijnja copy center in Amsterdam (circa 1958). So at the beginning of the Sixties, Crouwel had already found a solution that eliminated curves from the letters, in order to develop the cathode ray idea – i.e. a geometry of a higher order than straight lines.
Crouwel rarely made use of the “new alphabet”: indeed he utilized it solely for the July-August 1968 cover of the Italian magazine linea grafica. Afterward, Crouwel came up with other modular and elementary letters, such as the ones designed in 1968 for the Vormgevers exhibition, or in 1969 for the Visuele communicatie Nederland exhibition. In the opposite direction, many of Crouwel’s experiments deal with the design of letters, such as the poster for the Stedelijk van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven in 1963 and the Crouwel’s own personal greeting cards in 1957. Then, in 1997, the contemporary renewal of interest for typefaces led to the digital edition of Crouwel’s four typefaces: New Alphabet, Stedelijk, Fodor and Gridnik.
However, first question, which kind of affinity with contemporary “cathodic” fonts does the “new alphabet” display? And, secondly, where do these austere forms originate from?
To answer the first question, we can say broadly that there is no such affinity. To the second question, we can answer by pointing out that the “new alphabet” is derived solely from the minuscule: in historical terms, this means the half-uncial script (5th century), with its tetrachord arrangement.
But Crouwel’s subtractive process of lettering implies a visibility principle driven by strong visual abstraction, rather than attention to readability. This “new alphabet” ignores a basic perceptiveness principle: the halves of some letters are anything but recognizable and, in some cases, the unorthodox “new alphabet” type design makes it hard to identify the letters, and in particular letter a, g, j, k, s, x and z. This situation is not even made easier by the upper horizontal bars used in for capital letters: therefore, the use of minimal lettering material does not necessarily imply a maximum, or even a normal, legibility. If anything, Crouwel’s case is more a question of respecting the a-priori structural norm at the grounds of the shapes, in a logic of congruence, while rather indifferent to the standard criteria of legibility, that would require upper and lowercases. The “cathodic” universality of the “new alphabet” therefore, is blatantly contradicted by its scant respect for the historic forms of letters.
Crouwel studied his “grammar of forms” in Groningen, reading the design manuals by Jan Hesselt de Groot, for decades (from 1896) standards in the Dutch schools, and he still owns it in his personal library. As a matter of fact, it would now be interesting to study the Crouwel’s article on the tradition of lowercase letters in the Netherlands (Lowercase in the Dutch Lowlands in Octavo, 1988, 5, pp. 6-13) or the lecture he delivered in The Hague in 1996, on the history of the “new alphabet” (“Regarder, apprendre, savoir… douter,” in Etapes graphiques, December 1996, pp. 33-8). Moreover, it would be worth going back to the words of Roland Barthes in Variations sur l’ecriture: “The letter is precisely something that resembles nothing: its very nature is to inexorably elude any similarity; the absolute intention of the letter is in itself counter-analogical. Of course this is an extreme statement, since everything eventually ends up being resemblant to something else (and what resembles to nothing ends up having an affinity with a letter). So we have to consider that the letter is not ‘unconnected’ to the pictogram, but rather, that it is opposed to it.”

Note
A different and longer version of this essay has been published in S. Polano, P. Vetta, Abecedario (Electa, Milan 2002), but it was originally conceived as an introduction text for Paolo Palma’s graduation thesis on Crouwel’s New Alphabet at the Urbino’s Isia (2003).

[in “Idea” (Tokyo), 2007, 323]