Critical Practice

by Rick Poynor

Jan van Toorn is one of the most significant and influential Dutch graphic designers to have emerged since the early 1960s. His designs persistently call attention to their status as visual contrivances, obliging the viewer to make an effort to process their complexities. Van Toorn wants the public to measure the motives of both the client and the designer who mediates the client’s message against their own experiences of the world. He hoped in this way to stimulate a more active and skeptical view of art, communication, media ownership and society. Projects such as Van Toorn’s posters and catalogues for the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and his long-running series of calendars for the printing firm Mart.Spruijt are powerful demonstrations of graphic design used as a means of commentary and as a tool of critique. Later, as director of the Jan van Eyck Academy, Van Toorn drew together all the strands of his critical practice into a multi-levelled educational initiative that urged designers to think harder about design’s role in shaping contemporary reality.

Genres: Design

240 pages, Hardcover

Published April 30, 2013

About the author

Rick Poynor is a British writer on design, graphic design, typography and visual culture. He began as a general visual arts journalist, working on Blueprint magazine in London. After founding Eye magazine, which he edited from 1990 to 1997, he focused increasingly on visual communication. He is writer-at-large and columnist of Eye, and a contributing editor and columnist of Print (magazine).

In 1999, Poynor was a co-ordinator of the First Things First 2000 manifesto initiated by Adbusters. In 2003, he co-founded Design Observer, a weblog for design writing and discussion, with William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand and Michael Bierut. He wrote for the site until 2005. He was a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, London from 1994 to 1999 and returned to the RCA in 2006 as a research fellow. He has also taught at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. In 2004, Poynor curated the exhibition Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. The exhibition subsequently travelled to four venues in China and to Zurich.

Poynor's writing encompasses both cultural criticism and design history and his books break down into three categories. He has written several monographs about significant British figures in the arts and design: Brian Eno (musician), Nigel Coates (architect) and Vaughan Oliver and Herbert Spencer (graphic designers). Other books document and analyse general movements in graphic design and typography. Among these are Typography Now, the first international survey of the digital typography of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and No More Rules, a critical study of graphic design and postmodernism. Poynor has also published three essay collections, Design Without Boundaries, Obey the Giant and Designing Pornotopia, which explore the cultural implications of visual communication, including advertising, photography, branding, graphic design and retail design.

Poynor was a prominent interviewee in the 2007 documentary film Helvetica.