Experimental Jetset

After rising to welcome their visitor with short cups of strong espresso and a few cookies, none of them can remember, at first, what they had just been busy with. “It seems that we are working on a hundred things at the same time,” says Danny as the trio seems to slowly wake up from their mutually dreamt dream. “It’s hard to remember exactly what you’re doing.”

But slowly it comes to them. They’re just finishing up the design for a new graphic identity for the famous Amsterdam “pop temple” Paradiso, a concert hall in a former church that they’ve been working with since 1995, as well as preparing work for two summer exhibitions: one at the Special Collections Library at the University of Amsterdam, and one at Tallinn Art Hall in Estonia. And they’re relaunching a weblog about PROVO, a former Dutch anarchist movement that is one of their inspirations.

When Experimental Jetset first met 20 years ago at Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie, it was a time when everyone seemed to be heralding the end of print, and, by extension, the death of graphic design. Marieke recalls that back in 1997, the academy owned only a few computers, and the head of the department wanted to toss the printmaking machines.

“At the time I remember feeling like we were the last of something, like the last of the Mohicans,” says Danny, who takes me on a tour of the studio, stacked high with tidy white boxes all labelled in clean Helvetica typeface for their impressive clients. “I’ve always felt that we’ve been operating on borrowed time.” They’ve managed to borrow two decades so far, establishing themselves as one of the most important graphic design studios in Europe, with clients across the globe. Their work is in the collections of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, and New York City’s MoMA, which has presented their work in two group exhibitions. They have been shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and had a solo show at Amsterdam’s W139 gallery. They have created design identities for cultural centre Le Centquatre in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and, most recently, the beautiful new downtown location of New York City’s Whitney Museum, next to the High Line – centred around a dynamic W that operates as an unfolding, zig-zag line from the art historical past into the present.

Their work ranges from installation art to product design. One of their most often imitated products is the ‘John & Paul & Ringo & George.’ T-shirt. They wanted it to serve as an archetypical band shirt: four immediately recognisable names, written in Helvetica (their favoured typeface) with three ampersands and a full stop.

It’s interesting that this item should be one of their most popular, since Experimental Jetset’s designers see themselves as more of a band than a design agency.

They believe that this is because their typography-based style pays homage to the father of mid-century Dutch type and graphic design, Wim Crouwel, one of the founders of the Total Design studio in Amsterdam, which in the 1960s, among other things, created the revolutionary typeface New Alphabet. “Focusing on graphic design or print seemed like a subversive act,” says Erwin. “It was like embracing our grandparents while our parents actually kind of hated what they stood for,” adds Danny.

It should be noted that not everyone criticised them. Shortly after graduating, they were asked to design the exhibition catalog for ‘Elysian Fields’, an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2000, curated by Elein Fleiss and Olivier Zahm of the French magazine ‘Purple’. “Many people also very much liked their work and I was one of them,” says Carolein Glazenburg, the curator of graphic design for the Stedelijk Museum. “They gave a totally new twist to what people used to call the Crouwel imitation. They were brave, in a way, to do it. They stayed very steady in the lane they had chosen. But clearly they developed their own style.”

“Still,” says Marieke, “it isolated us a little bit and we felt like we were on our own little island and were just trying to survive for a while.” Danny continues: “That’s when we came up with the idea of the design company as a kind of band. We always thought we were a band basically – except we all play the same instrument.” He adds: “But the metaphor breaks down, unless you think that some punk bands always trade instruments.”

There’s certainly a post-punk quality to this way of working, because it shakes things up. “We always try to shift the work between the three of us in such a way that you avoid recurring patterns: by physically handing over files between the three of us, by talking about it while working on it, by always working on the same assignment at the same time. So we try to avoid having set roles between the three of us.”

This is part of the reason that Marieke, Danny and Erwin couldn’t exactly remember what they were working on when I walked in. Files were being passed back and forth between them in silence, with simultaneous projects moving smoothly from one designer to the next and then back again, all the time. It’s as if the trio is one single mind, simply divided between three bodies. “That’s the idea,” says Marieke. “We want to create this unity. The outcome of the idea is always from all three of us.” And how to avoid stepping on each other’s toes?

“We don’t have toes,” she says. “It’s always the thing we’re working on that’s most important. We are taken out of the equation.”