— Swiss Legacy

Interview with Experimental Jetset

(RMN logo redesigned by EJ)

Swiss Legacy: Could you please introduce yourself? Where are you from? What are your backgrounds?
Experimental Jetset: We’re Experimental Jetset, a small graphic design studio based in Amsterdam, consisting of three persons: Marieke Stolk, Danny van den Dungen and Erwin Brinkers. We focus mostly on printed matter and installation work.Danny and Erwin were both born in Rotterdam; Marieke was born in Amsterdam. We started working together while studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam). Marieke and Danny graduated in 1997; Erwin, who was in a different class, graduated in 1998. Since 2000,
we teach at the Rietveld Academy.

SL: How do you work on a project? Alone, collective?
EJ: Always collective, never alone.

SL: Why did you choose the Helvetica typeface as your primary tool?
EJ: We started using Helvetica around 1995/1996, while we were still studying at the Rietveld Academy. The first time we used it on a large scale was in 1997, when we were asked to redesign the Dutch lifestyle magazine ‘Blvd’, also known as ‘Boulevard’. (We were still students at the Rietveld around that time; we managed to do the whole redesign as our graduation project).
Blvd used to have this really layered, baroque style. We stripped it down completely, using only Helvetica, and trying to separate text and image as strictly as possible.
The critics hated it. We were still students, not even graduated, and already the large newspapers completely attacked the redesign, saying that Blvd now looked like a medicine packaging. (A few years later, all these newspapers had glossy weekly style supplements that looked exactly like our redesign of Blvd).

At first, the reason why we used Helvetica for the redesign of Blvd was purely practical. Because Helvetica consists of such a large family (different weights, and different styles: extended, compressed, etc.), it enabled us to use all these different sorts of
Helvetica for all the different sections of the magazine, while the magazine still looked consistent. (Remember, this was in 1997.
Nowadays, we usually only use two weights for each project).

The moment we first used Helvetica, it felt like coming home. In the early Nineties, a lot of students, including us, were really
interested in the more ‘deconstructed’ look of magazines like Raygun and Emigre, and designers such as David Carson, Frank Kozik, etc. As much as we found that whole movement interesting, we still also felt slightly disconnected from it; it was a way of designing that was heavily linked with the Californian surf scene, skate magazines, grunge, etc. All things that hugely fascinated us, but still, it felt too much like a ‘borrowed’ heritage to us.
When, in the mid-Nineties, we first started to use Helvetica, we suddenly felt connected to our own roots, the environment we grew up in: Dutch society in the Seventies, our own education, the institutions of our youth, social democracy in general. It was as if we were suddenly reunited with our own heritage. Fact is, we didn’t grow up near the beach, or near Las Vegas neon signs; we grew up in cities such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam, cultural environments designed by people such as Wim Crouwel, heavily relying on Dutch social democratic thinking. To us, using Helvetica was a way to be true to that heritage, but also to come to terms with it, and to investigate it actively.

Now, after using Helvetica intensively for over ten years, we still find it an intriguing typeface. What we find interesting about
Helvetica is its paradoxical nature: on the one hand, it is a neutral typeface, or better said, it is perceived as such. On the other hand, it carries this very heavy ideological baggage. There is this really interesting tension between its functionality, and the meaning that it gained over the years. It is a typeface that is empty and loaded at the same time.

Download the entire interview here (pdf)