The career of Dutch designer Wim Crouwel spans six decades and covers an extraordinary journey from designer, teacher, curator to museum director.
Based on modernist principles, Crouwel's lucid and systematic approach to design is underpinned by a grid-based methodology. His process distils a subject down to its absolute essence and in doing so he achieves great impact and purpose in both his exhibition and print design. Through his long and productive career he has produced exemplary work in exhibition design, and designed posters, calendars, typefaces, trademarks and stamps.
In the infancy of digital typography—as lead type, set by hand in heavy lead blocks or by machines that generated lines of metal type, was giving way to text set on screens—Crouwel saw an opportunity for an interesting experiment. Early computer screens—cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors—rendered images in fairly large pixels, making traditional curvilinear letterforms difficult to reconstruct, and so Crouwel set out to redesign the alphabet using only horizontal lines. NEW ALPHABET is, in Crouwel's words, "over-the-top and never meant to be really used," a statement on the impact of new technologies on centuries of typographic tradition.
In 1988, however, Peter Saville Associates used a stylized version of the font on the cover of Substance, an album for the band Joy Division. NEW ALPHABET was digitized for contemporary use in 1997 by Freda Sack and David Quay of The Foundry, closely based on Crouwel's original studies.
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