Dutch Profiles: Wim Crouwel

Wim Crouwel is the grand seigneur of the Dutch design world. Now, at the age of 83, he can look back on a extremely productive career. As a highly influential designer; as one of the founders of Total Design, Holland's first real multi-disciplinary design studio, a studio in which complex issues were analysed from different angles offering a totally integrated and systematic design solution; as a professor, educating generations of students at the Technical University of Delft; and as a director of the renowned Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Crouwel is especially admired for his systematic approach in which the use of grids plays a very important role in his lay-outs.

Here Wim Crouwel and the prominent design critic Max Bruinsma visit an exhibition on 100 years of poster design at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Since the beginning of his career, Wim Crouwel has been strongly influenced by the modernist notion of Functionalism. The principle that architects should design a building based on the purpose of that building.

Wim Crouwel designed posters, brochures and catalogues for 2 major art museums, first for the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven - and from 1964 to 1985 for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Dutch Profiles is a series of short documentaries focusing on the conceptual and research based background of well-known icons of Dutch design.

Dutch Profiles (Vimeo)

Dutch Profiles: Wim Crouwel
Dutch Profiles: Wim Crouwel
Dutch Profiles: Wim Crouwel
Dutch Profiles: Wim Crouwel
Dutch Profiles: Wim Crouwel
Dutch Profiles: Wim Crouwel
Dutch Profiles: Wim Crouwel