I Am Still Alive

Super heavy, geometric and counterless (or nearly counterless) type is everywhere these days. I was reading this interview yesterday with Wim Crouwel in which he spoke about the type in his poster Hiroshima from 1957.

Q: If you didn’t know that, you might think that it was conceived on the basis of a woodcut. Real printmakers, such as M C Escher, also did this.

A: Yes, of course, woodcut artists did the same thing, a black pane with fine lines. But I did not start out with black, adding white lines. I went about it the other way around. It was absolutely the construction of the letter itself that caused it to be spaced so tightly. It became a closed block, as it were. I wanted a word image that was itself very heavy and threatening. I had a sort of monolith in my head, in which the white had as humble a role as possible, which is why I chose this form, which would work from a distance as a black, total form, with those scorched chimneys rising up out of it.

From Wim Crouwel Alphabets

Crouwel makes some interesting points (tho he loses me at “scorched chimneys”), but I actually found the question by Kees Broos a bit more interesting. I have dabbled a bit in woodcut recently. The thing I am quickly realizing is that carving into a block of wood takes significant effort; the fact of that exertion (a time as well as physical commitment) pushes you towards a sort of minimal expression – trying to get at what you are trying to get at with the least amount of work (actually not unlike programming).

It’s a bit different in Crouwel’s case, obviously (he says so himself), but the type forms produced by woodcut printmakers back in the day must have been at least partially influenced by this desire to minimize effort while working in the medium – something which is a bit lost in newer incarnations of bold, geometric type, I reckon.