The benevolent grandfather of graphic design, Karel Martens observes the magic and wonder of language, mathematics and colour and then translates them into design classics. Angharad Lewis and Robert Urquhart went to meet the man who’s given so much to the world and yet still remains very much in awe of it.
Anybody—especially a designer—could learn a lot from Karel Martens. As well as being a very experienced teacher (he has been teaching graphic design since 1977 and co-founded—and still runs—Werkplaats Typographie, the very well-respected Masters course for typography in the Netherlands), Martens’ way of working, his way of living and the symbiosis of life and work in his designs seem a parable in motion. Martens is seventy years old but still full of genuine wonder about things that less curious souls take entirely for granted—he finds numbers endlessly fascinating, the alphabet is “a miracle” and the fact that you can make any colour out of just three primary colours is “magic.”
Many Grafik readers will be familiar with Printed Matter, the book that was published to celebrate his winning the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art in 1996. It is considered something of a classic in the world of design publishing and rare copies (only 4,000 were printed) sell on eBay for jaw-dropping sums. Such adulation as the graphic design community is apt to bestow on certain designers is often at odds with the unassuming nature of the ‘legends’ themselves. The Karel Martens who warmly welcomes us into his studio in Amsterdam and who, after the interview, goes off down the road waving to us from his bicycle, is a wonderfully human legend.
As the jury’s introduction to Printed Matter puts it, “his work is characterized by workmanship and simplicity. He is not one for glamour.” In Martens’ studio on the water in Amsterdam, we find an industrious set-up. In a bright, high-ceilinged room there are workbenches, a coat stand for his printer’s jacket and a huge wall covered in collected ephemera, and he is busy making preparations for the end of term at Werkplaats. Tomorrow there will be the last few interviews for this year’s intake and he and James Goggin, the newest addition to the Werkplaats staff, will make the final decision on which ten or twelve prospective students will join the prestigious course in the autumn. Werkplaats applications come from all over the world. Martens runs through his current students individually by name—there are people from the UK, Brazil, the Balkans, Belgium, Korea, USA, Australia and the Netherlands. The students often feed in from other design schools in Europe and commonly they have already been working professionally as designers. At the Werkplaats studio everyone—both students and teachers—brings in real commissioned projects for real clients. This has been a part of the way Werkplaats has been run since Martens founded it with former student Wigger Bierma in 1998 (more recently he has worked alongside Armand Mevis) with the aim of responding to what they saw as problems in the existing model of design education in the Netherlands. At Werkplaats Martens wasn’t interested in churning out identikit ‘professionalised’ designers, but rather in giving students space and time to develop their own interests and find a personality as a designer.
He draws on his own experience as an art school student in the early Sixties. “I’m not educated as a designer,” he points out. “I started my practice in 1960 and at that time graphic design didn’t exist. I was in an art school [Arnhem School of Art] where I was educated for five years and there were a lot of disciplines—painting, sculpture-making, all sorts of classes
—and only one day a week they mentioned illustration and publicity. The teacher was a fine artist. It was a very nice time.” So there is a balance sought in the Werkplaats educational model between personal expression and practical application. These play out against a background of discussion and of enquiry into the world beyond design. “A little bit what I’m regretting now in design education,” Martens continues, “[is that] it’s design, design, design, the students always looking in magazines, looking at how other designers are doing it—it’s incestuous… Students often see inspiration in copying things, not in the energy of [the work] or the mentality behind the design but the flavour [of it] and the superficial work.”
So an awareness of design is something to be mindful of but not reliant upon—as you see when you look at Martens’ own work: it is not design movements or trends that stimulate him, or find their way into his work, but fundamental things about the world and how we make sense of it, such as language, mathematics and colour. In turn, Werkplaats students are encouraged to seek their own sources of wonder with which to fuel their practice. “Our school is not, in a way, about celebrating design, it’s more discussing design,” Martens says. “I see tradition and convention more as a reference—I see design as not only questioning design, but also questioning the tradition and the convention.”
When Martens launched the workshop (as part of postgraduate education within the ArtEZ Institute for the Arts in Arnhern), he also had his studio based on the campus. One project that he has consistently shared with successive groups of students is the design of OASE, the architectural journal founded by the students of Delft University of Technology in the early 1980s, and which Martens has been designing since 1990, when he dispensed with a standardised logo, instead creating an entirely new visualisation of the word ‘OASE’ on the cover of each issue, directly based on its content. This somewhat rebellious design approach was significant to Martens in 1990. “This magazine is a kind of dialogue with the contributors,” he tells us. “For me this is very important: I’m from a modernist background and, as you know, in the beginning that was always working with a grid, and using Helvetica and every company had the same logo and colours—a kind of uniformity. For me [OASE] was a good reason to break from the uniformity of the modern movement, although I still believe in the modern movement but not all aspects. So I started without a logo.”
There is a short text by Martens in Printed Matter entitled “What design means for me” and within this he writes about the role of the graphic designer: “Graphic designers act as intermediaries… There is always talk of a given message (the job) and of the one who is to be informed (the public). Between them stands a designer with a specific outlook and knowledge of things. For good things to happen there has to be a dialogue, with mutual respect, between the client and the designer.” Martens places great import on the relationship with the client or the commissioner in the ‘game’ of design. As well as teaching this relationship in the most practical way at Werkplaats, Martens has a rich history of relationships with clients—many long-standing—where discussions about the design of a project have advanced the form in which he presents the content. One of the biggest companies Martens has worked for is the Dutch PTT Telecom company, for which he designed a series of telephone cards in 1994. “It was an ideal job,” Martens recalls. The rectangular, widely distributed, pocket-sized format would make the now-obsolete phone card something of a dream job for any designer, rivalled only by stamps or coins (both of which Martens has also designed). “The PTT office for design had very good people and good commissioners at that time,” he recalls. After he submitted his initial ideas, however, a committee rejected his proposals and he had to go back to the drawing board and develop them a bit further. This was no bad thing though, as he sees it: “Designers can be arrogant so actually I see it that commissioners are part of the deal. I always see the commissioner as a valid person— a good commissioner is very important. If a commissioner just says everything’s okay all the time that sometimes makes designers a little bit lazy.” Martens had been given a brief by PTT to create a standard, everyday card design for seven denominations, so he joined up the dots between the client, the format, the audience and his own ever-present fascination for numbers and awe for colour to find a solution. “For me it is a miracle that I can press a number and another number in combination and get in touch with you or you—we take it all as normal. Another fascination for me is the nature of colour—that every reproduction can be made by the use of three primary colours—that’s unbelievable in a way. So I put those things together…”
Each card features a pattern of numbers overprinted in different colours. They are not random, but based on a clever code where different combinations of colours and numbers represent a letter of the alphabet. On the cards this spells out the words of the Dutch national anthem. The project is an example of the beautiful way Martens synchronises logic and order with a sense of wonder and an emotive response to the world. He enjoys the beauty of mathematics, which is something he first encountered at school and has led to more recent explorations into how mathematics can formalise visual representation, such as the Arabic system of counting that is the basis for the intricate patterns and variations that are used as decoration in Arabic architecture.
The alphabet is another phenomenon for Martens, something that is reflected in the very type-oriented nature of his practice since the 1960s and the presence of a great many books and book cover designs in his oeuvre. “I see the alphabet as a miracle—twenty-six characters and you can make them do so many different things,” he says. “There is no one page in all the books in the world that is the same — not even one line—that’s unbelievably fascinating for me.”
At the heart of Martens’ studio, and perhaps at the heart of his current practice, is the workbench where he spends time making monoprints using found flat metal objects (discarded car parts, Meccano, mysterious discs, things he finds lying in the road) to print ink onto found paper. This ‘free’ practice (he seldom makes these prints to commission) distils Martens’ way of working. Carefully, slowly, by hand—elongating the printing process to an almost meditative speed—he builds up a print from carefully chosen elements, printing one colour one day, waiting for it to dry and printing the next colour the following day. “Still I’m surprised that red and yellow becomes orange,” he marvels.
“It’s a kind of refuge,” Martens continues about his monoprinting, “a garden for design, a try-out garden. And I’m my own boss when I am printing… it feels good to do it.” When we visit, Martens is in the middle of printing the diplomas for students at Werkplaats—every student gets a handmade print by way of a certificate. He shows us the paper he’s using to print them—salvaged archive papers from the Stedelijk Museum from the time Martens worked there one day a week with Wim Crouwel. The Stedelijk catalogues were in the process of being digitised and the old archive cards (which had been designed by Willem Sandberg during his time at the museum from 1945 to 1963) were being thrown out. Martens liberated them from the trash and has been using these unique documents as substrates for his prints ever since. Thus each print tells a fascinating design story, documenting not only the details of an artifact in the Stedelijk’s collection but also embodying layers of Dutch design history, from Sandberg, through Crouwel and Martens, to the Werkplaats students
who will receive it as their diploma.
“Design determines the quality of our common life,” Martens wrote in Printed Matter, and it’s clear that here is one designer who truly lives by such a mantra.
www.werkplaatstypografie.org
Magazine Issues
Share
