dot-font: Material Type

dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

In my hands is an odd artifact: a small, elongated printed book, in landscape format, about the work of the Dutch typographic designer René Knip. The spine is flexible, but each cover is a slab of thick, stiff cardboard that makes the whole thing feel less like a book than like some sort of industrial object.

The book has two titles: “A.R.K./A.B.C.” It’s really two books in one, each side back-to-back with the other; you can read in from one end to the middle, then flip the book over and read in from the other end. One side is “A.R.K.,” a catalog of design projects produced by Atelier René Knip (ARK) in collaboration with other designers; the opposite side is “A.B.C.,” showing specimens of Knip’s many alphabets and typefaces. (Calling them “typefaces” is slightly misleading, since he doesn’t manufacture them or distribute them; they are only for use in his own projects.) There’s a bit of concise, lucid text in each half by the design writer Jan Middendorp describing Knip’s work.

This book was produced to accompany an exhibition of 10 years of René Knip’s “exploration” and “investigation,” which is currently on display (until May 30, 2004) at the Scryption Museum in Tilburg, in the Netherlands. The book was designed by Knip himself and by Rens Martens. (It’s available from Nijhof & Lee, the Amsterdam design-book dealers, for €29.50.)

One of the two front covers of the double-sided book ‘A.R.K./A.B.C.’ about the work of René Knip.

Built Lettering

Knip’s letters are architectural, built and constructed rather than drawn or written. And the architectonic nature lends itself very readily to use in real architecture: in buildings, on walls, as floor tiles, etc. The relationship between the letters and their surroundings isn’t clearcut; it’s as though the letters themselves were part of the built environment. Sometimes they are.

Knip takes inspiration from various existing letterforms left over from the 1920s and ’30s, especially those that he has found in the streets of Amsterdam. Others have mined this same vein; the squared-off echoes of Art Nouveau, De Stijl, and Art Moderne remind me of the lettering of cartoonist Joost Swarte, and some of the constructed shapes are reminiscent of alphabets done by Max Kisman. Knip’s genius is in melding the letterforms and their immediate environment, making each a part of the other.

Knip’s lettering as used in the Anna van Toor chain of fashion shops.

Shapes in Space

Knip studied with the renowned Dutch letterer and type-designer Chris Brand, at the St. Joost Academy of Art and later in private lessons at Brand’s home. Although Brand’s letters were always quite traditional in their form, he encouraged Knip’s very different style and taught him to pay attention to the “white of the letter”: the space inside (the counter).

Knip takes this quite literally in the way he sees letters and other objects: “When looking at a landscape, I like to single out forms which have a strong graphic character, such as trees and fences. Letters are similar: to me, a letter is a form that rises up from the background.” In Jan Middendorp’s text, he describes Knip’s letters as having “a brutal physicality that is rare in today’s digital world.”

Knip came into his own when he began working on environmental projects with the architectural firm of Merkx + Girod, where he could integrate his lettering ideas into the physical materials of a building’s interior. When he does signage, it tends to become part of the material around it, rather than just appearing as two-dimensional lettering on the surface.

Signage letters for the basement of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

Brotherly Objects

It’s entirely logical that more recently René Knip would have gone into business with his brother Edgar as Gebroeders Knip (“Brothers Knip”) and turned his letters into tangible objects. As Middendorp puts it, “Gebroeders Knip specialize in graphic objects that use type in a way that is both decorative and functional, integrating form and function in hybrids that have a poetry all their own. Each of the products developed so far—clock, fire basket, type lamp—projects two-dimensional lettering onto a three-dimensional structure, thus creating a kind of two-and-a-half-dimensional result.”

A clock and a ‘fire basket’ made of letters, produced by Gebroeders Knip.

Knip designed an alphabet for the Anna van Toor chain of fashion shops that was intended to make these new shops look contemporary yet established. The simplified shapes, made up almost entirely of rounded oblongs and angular straight strokes, suggest an updating of the Art Nouveau aesthetic, as though Anna van Toor had been around since the 1920s or earlier.

The alphabet that Knip designed for the Anna van Toor shops.

One of his environmental typographic projects was a “time-based lamp” that he designed with Evelyne Merkx for La Ruche restaurants. It’s a long, single line of back-lit letters that spell out phrases associated with each of the meals of the day, in turn; as the hours pass, the light behind them moves along from the first meal to the last, keeping time with the human cycle of the day.

A less dynamic but similar project is the square-tile lettering he developed for another chain of restaurants, in the Hema department stores. These are used not only for signage in the store but for the names of everyday Dutch foods displayed suggestively as tile friezes around the walls.

Street signage designed by Knip for the newly developed IJburg district of Amsterdam.

At Least Two Dimensions

Appropriately enough, the covers of this book reflect the two natures of Knip’s work. On the cover of the typographic half, the name “A.B.C.” is printed, white on black; on the cover of the other half, dealing with environmental projects, “A.R.K.” is die-cut into the cardboard, with a bright-colored background showing through. This does in a small way what Knip’s work tends to do on any scale: blend the flatness of print with the tactile, physical reality of the material object.

If you’re in Tilburg between now and the end of May, I suspect that a visit to the exhibition would be well worth your trouble.