Willem Hendrik Crouwel was one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century. Born in 1928, in Groningen, Netherlands, Crouwel was an inspiring figure who had an inventive spirit and vision for design. Despite his ideas being somewhat Bauhaus inspired, Crouwel was not a dogmatist, unlike many designers in his era. He was fascinated by the ideas of serial and mass production and stated that “we need the machine since we have no time.” However, he also believed that “the machine cannot replace the precision of the human eye and human feeling.”
Crouwel’s designs typically consisted of two essential elements: emotion and rational. After leaving art school he start- ed painting in an expressionism style. However, after designing his first poster, he discovered how visual information can be organised in an aesthetical context. As a functionalist and a purist, he focused on type and the readability of his work. However, if he were to make a choice between functionality and aesthetics, his default position was always aesthetics. Crouwel commented that he sees himself being a modernist and a functionalist, but aesthetics always stands in the way. Throughout his career between 1950-1970, he started to experiment with non-typographic elements such as line-work, slight changes in direction and reproductions. These developments in his work can be explained by Crouwel’s non-dogmatic view. Whenever receiving commissions, he consistently took the clients wishes seriously, while also matching the design with his own fundamental typographic principles.
