Experimental Jetset,
a Type and a Future

In the winter of 2024–25 the ed­it­or­i­al team of Type Journ­al cor­res­pon­ded with the graph­ic design stu­dio Ex­per­i­ment­al Jet­set. The trio from the Neth­er­lands per­mit­ted us to pub­lish their es­say, trans­lated in­to Rus­si­an, and sent de­tailed an­swers to our ques­tions, along with an up­dated ver­sion of their auto­bi­o­graphy. We of­fer this col­lec­tion of state­ments to our read­ers.  – Ed­it­or­i­al note– Ed­it­or­i­al note

Ex­per­i­ment­al Jet­set is an Am­s­ter­dam-based graph­ic design col­lect­ive, foun­ded in 1997 by Mar­ieke Stolk, Er­win Brink­ers and Danny van den Dun­gen. Fo­cus­ing mainly on prin­ted mat­ter and site-spe­cif­ic in­stall­a­tions, EJ have worked on pro­jects for a wide vari­ety of in­sti­tu­tes – in­clud­ing Réunion des Museés Na­tionaux (RMN), Le Cent Quatre (104), Centre Pomp­idou, Para­diso, Stedelijk Mu­seum (Am­s­ter­dam), PostNL (Dutch Post), Whit­ney Mu­seum of Amer­ic­an Art, Visu­al Cul­ture Re­search Cen­ter (Ky­iv), GES-2 (V–A–C), New Art Deal­ers Al­li­ance (NADA), Stern­berg Press, Rice Uni­versity School of Ar­chi­tec­ture (Hou­s­ton), and the Mu­seum of Mod­ern Art (MoMA).

Work by Ex­per­i­ment­al Jet­set has been in­cluded in the per­man­ent col­lec­tions of Mu­seum of Mod­ern Art (New York), Stedelijk Mu­seum (Am­s­ter­dam), SF­MoMA (San Fran­cisco), Art In­sti­tu­te of Chica­go, Mil­wau­kee Art Mu­seum, Musée des Arts Dé­cor­at­ifs (Par­is), Mu­seum für Gestal­tung (Zürich), Centre Na­tion­al des Arts Plastiques (Par­is), Let­ter­form Archive (San Fran­cisco), and Cooper He­witt (New York).

Between 2000 and 2013, Ex­per­i­ment­al Jet­set have been teach­ing at the Ger­rit Ri­etveld Academie (Am­s­ter­dam). They are cur­rently tu­tors at ArtEZ Werkp­laats Ty­po­grafie (Arnhem).

Fu­ture of Print

The fol­low­ing two short art­icles both deal with the fu­ture of print in gen­er­al, and of books in par­tic­u­lar. We grouped them to­geth­er, be­cause they seemed them­at­ic­ally sim­il­ar. The first text is a short art­icle we wrote for ‘The Most Beau­ti­ful Swiss Books 2009’ (pub­lished in 2010). We were asked by Laurenz Brun­ner, de­sign­er and co-ed­it­or of the pub­lic­a­tion, to write something about the ‘the fu­ture of the book’. Oth­er con­tri­bu­tions were writ­ten by Paul El­li­man, Domi­n­ique Gonza­lez-Fo­er­ster, Will Hold­er, Richard Hol­lis, Emily King, Jürg Lehni, Norm, Daniel van der Velden, Lawrence Wein­er, and many oth­ers.

The second text is a quick note we wrote for Auto­mat­ic Books (from Venice, Italy), who asked us for a text on the sub­ject of the fu­ture of print as well, for in­clu­sion in a then-forth­com­ing book. As far as we know, this book was nev­er re­leased, so this text hasn’t been pub­lished be­fore.

Be­fore we start, first a short note about our texts in gen­er­al: we do think that they date really, really fast. Not that we change our opin­ions so lightly – as a mat­ter of fact, our opin­ions are quite stable, or so we like to be­lieve. But the ways in which we try to for­mu­late these opin­ions change quite of­ten. We con­stantly need new and bet­ter words to for­mu­late our views – it’s al­most as if all these words are in or­bit, circ­ling around something that re­mains im­pos­sible to fully ar­tic­u­late, at least for us. Words fail us, really.

So al­though our un­der­ly­ing views have re­mained pretty much the same throughout the years, our words are al­ways chan­ging, to the point where they some­times even seem to con­tra­dict each oth­er. That’s why it’s usu­ally quite pain­ful to re-read old texts in gen­er­al – we sel­dom agree with what we said.

So why do we pub­lish these old texts, when we know they don’t ne­ces­sar­ily rep­res­ent our cur­rent ways of de­scrib­ing our opin­ions? We think the main reas­on for that is ex­actly be­cause we want to show these changes. By pub­lish­ing these old art­icles, we hope to cap­ture some of the shifts that oc­cur from text to text – not so much shifts in our opin­ions, but rather shifts in our ways of trans­lat­ing these opin­ions in­to words.

A Hand­ful of Fu­ture*

‘The fu­ture of’ – there’s something about these three words that we really dis­like. Wheth­er it’s ‘the fu­ture of the book’, ‘the fu­ture of ty­po­graphy’, ‘the fu­ture of prin­ted mat­ter’ or any oth­er fu­ture, there’s something about the phrase that com­pletely puts us off. What both­ers us most is the sug­ges­tion that the fu­ture is an un­change­able en­tity, something that de­vel­ops com­pletely in­de­pend­ent from ourselves. A pre­de­ter­mined path, to which we should ad­apt ourselves, wheth­er we like it or not. We don’t buy in­to that idea. We simply don’t be­lieve in ‘the fu­ture’ as a god-like force of nature, something we should humbly suc­cumb ourselves to.

‘Our fu­ture’, well, that sounds much bet­ter already. ‘Our fu­ture’ is something that is man­age­able, shape­able, change­able, build­able, doable. ‘A fu­ture’ sounds pretty de­cent as well. A plur­al ‘the fu­tures’? Why not? Just as long as we can get rid of the idea of the fu­ture as something that gov­erns us, like some kind of pre-mod­ern deity. Let us be reck­less about it: we gov­ern the fu­ture, not the oth­er way around.

If a small group of people be­lieve in something, it has a fu­ture. In the case of a beau­ti­ful book, that group can be very small in­deed: what you need is a writer, a pub­lish­er, a de­sign­er, a print­er and a read­er. Five per­sons. That’s a small tea party, a me­di­um-sized fam­ily, a quin­tup­let birth, a rock band, a youth gang, a secret so­ci­ety, a bizarre love tri­angle, a car full of pas­sen­gers, some shop as­sist­ants in an oth­er­wise empty su­per­mar­ket, the main cast of Sein­feld plus one, a vol­ley­ball team minus one, a quiz pan­el, a crew of row­ers in a boat. It is lit­er­ally a hand­ful. It is al­most noth­ing. And yet, it is enough to shape a fu­ture.

Sure, we can the­or­ize about the fu­ture. We can boldly pro­claim that the re­la­tion­ship between prin­ted mat­ter and di­git­al me­dia, as it ex­ists nowadays, is akin to the re­la­tion­ship between paint­ing and pho­to­graphy as it ex­is­ted a hun­dred years ago. Pho­to­graphy nev­er re­placed paint­ing, but it changed paint­ing in such a way that it gained a di­men­sion of self-con­scious­ness: sud­denly, the act of paint­ing be­came part of its own sub­ject. In the same way, di­git­al me­dia will al­ter prin­ted mat­ter. Print­ing will gain a self-ref­er­en­tial di­men­sion, which sig­nals not the death of print­ing, but a new state of ma­tur­ity. That is what we be­lieve. But it is our own, per­son­al scen­ario. If you see an­oth­er fu­ture – fine! Form a small group, and shape your own fu­ture. Either that, or start a vol­ley­ball team.

March 29, 2010

Af­fect­ing the Sur­face: Some quick ob­ser­va­tions on the word ‘graph­ic’

While the word ‘graph­ic’ is de­rived from the Greek ‘graph­ikos’, re­fer­ring to both the act of writ­ing and draw­ing, it can be traced back to an even earli­er, Proto-Indo-European base-word: ‘grebh’, which means ‘to scratch’ or ‘to carve’. Since early times, writ­ing has been a form of carving: wheth­er it’s push­ing a stylus in­to a clay tab­let, or cut­ting a hiero­glyph in­to stone, the act of writ­ing has al­ways in­volved the af­fect­ing (im­press­ing) of a sur­face – wheth­er this sur­face was stone, clay, wax, wood, cop­per, velum or parch­ment. This af­fect­ing of the sur­face is still present in cur­rent prac­tices sur­round­ing the word ‘graph­ic’. Print­ing still in­volves ap­ply­ing pres­sure to that what is prin­ted. Wheth­er it’s manu­ally press­ing wooden or lead let­ters in­to pa­per, or feed­ing im­macu­late pieces of pa­per to large, in­dus­tri­al ma­chines, or al­low­ing pristine sheets of pa­per to be bull­dozed between ro­tat­ing met­al rolls – the act of print­ing ir­re­vers­ibly dam­ages the fibre of the pa­per, however slightly. Print­ing is al­ways af­fect­ing the sur­face, adding pres­sure and depth to it. To print is to scar.

Let’s face it: ‘graph­ic’ is an in­her­ently un­pleas­ant word. It is part of a par­tic­u­lar fam­ily of words that all start with the let­ter com­bin­a­tion ‘gr’ and that all share the same dirty, heavy, un­pleas­ant con­nota­tions: grim, grave, grind, grisly, gritty, grey, gruelling, grift­er, grungy, etc. (And let’s not for­get Grendel, the name of the old­est arch-en­emy in Eng­lish lit­er­at­ure.) It is as if the phys­ic­al dis­com­fort of the act of scratch­ing, of carving, is ono­ma­to­po­et­ic­ally en­cap­su­lated in the word ‘graph­ic’. The gut­ter­al pro­nun­ci­ation seems a graph­ic act in it­self: en­grav­ing the word in the back of your throat, lit­er­ally scrap­ing the vo­cal cords.

Now, com­pare this to the ef­fort­less pro­nun­ci­ation of the phrase ‘World Wide Web’. While the word ‘graph­ic’ is phys­ic­ally hard to get out of your throat, the words ‘world’, ‘wide’ and ‘web’ be­have like bubbles on the sur­face of your lips. The words don’t even seem to come from with­in; the sounds ‘wo-’, ‘wi-’ and ‘we-’ ap­pear to ex­ist solely on the ex­ter­i­or of your body, float­ing like speech bal­loons out­side your mouth. And while the word ‘graph­ic’ comes with all the gut­ter­al con­nota­tions of neg­at­iv­ity, the phrase ‘World Wide Web’ is a float­ing, bub­bly cloud of pos­it­iv­ity: ‘He’s got the Whole Wide World in his hands.’ It’s not sur­pris­ing then, that the lan­guage sur­round­ing di­git­al me­dia is filled with ‘clouds’, ‘bubbles’, ‘streams’ and sim­il­ar words. From ‘the in­ter­net bubble’ to ‘word-clouds’ to ‘live-streams’, the jar­gon of di­git­al me­dia is pro­ject­ing a cer­tain ef­fort­less­ness, an air­i­ness, an im­ma­ter­i­al­ity. Where­as graph­ic prac­tice in­volves the act of phys­ic­ally af­fect­ing the sur­face (al­ways a dirty, un­pleas­ant act), di­git­al me­dia seem to be float­ing high above the sur­face – like clouds in the air.

If we wanted to sketch (or in­deed, to print) the situ­ation in black and white, the above situ­ation seems to sum up the choice that we have right now, as graph­ic de­sign­ers. Do we want to af­fect the sur­face, mark­ing it ir­re­vers­ibly, by adding pres­sure and depth? Or do we want to float high above the sur­face, like clouds in the air, without touch­ing the ma­ter­i­al base, ut­terly dis­con­nec­ted from the phys­ic­al (and ideo­lo­gic­al) bal­last of his­tory? To grebh or not to grebh, that is the ques­tion.

May 24, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From cor­res­pond­en­ce with Ex­per­i­ment­al Jet­set

In an in­ter­view for Emigre No. 65 (2003) EJ shared some thoughts on one pop­u­lar typeface. For ex­ample, ‘The neut­ral­ity of Hel­vet­ica, real or ima­gined, en­ables us and the user to fully fo­cus on the design as a whole, neut­ral­iz­ing the ty­po­graph­ic­al lay­er as a way to keep the concept as clear and pure as pos­sible.’ Years later, Eu­gene Yukechev sug­ges­ted re­vis­it­ing that pub­lic­a­tion. Ex­per­i­ment­al Jet­set re­spon­ded: ‘…we don’t re­cog­nise ourselves in these words at all. It’s not our voice any­more…’ And ad­ded the fol­low­ing.

When we just star­ted out as graph­ic de­sign­ers, back in 1997, we mo­tiv­ated (to ourselves) the reas­ons for us­ing Hel­vet­ica in a couple of dif­fer­ent ways. First of all, we liked the ‘pseudo-neut­ral­ity’ of Hel­vet­ica. To be clear, we have ab­so­lutely nev­er be­lieved that Hel­vet­ica was a ‘neut­ral’ typeface (we don’t be­lieve any typeface is ‘neut­ral’), but we did find it in­ter­est­ing that Hel­vet­ica was some­how re­garded as such. So we thought this was an in­ter­est­ing phe­no­men­on to ex­plore.

At the same time, we also liked the fact that Hel­vet­ica, be­cause it’s such an icon­ic typeface, seems to refer to the no­tion of graph­ic design it­self. This is what we mean by ‘self-referentiality’. By us­ing Hel­vet­ica, we tried to let the no­tion of graph­ic design refer to it­self, to its own ex­ist­en­ce as a me­di­um, to its own ‘thing­ness’. In that sense, we re­garded Hel­vet­ica as an al­most ‘Brech­tian’ gesture, re­veal­ing the ma­ter­i­al con­struc­tion be­hind graph­ic design it­self.

In the in­ter­view we answered for Emigre, we were boun­cing back and forth between these two view­points (‘pseudo-neut­ral­ity’ and ‘self-ref­er­en­tially’), without really com­ing to a solu­tion.

The above two reas­ons (for us­ing Hel­vet­ica) are in it­self quite dry and con­cep­tu­al. While more and more we star­ted to real­ize that our re­la­tion­ship with Hel­vet­ica also had a strong emo­tion­al di­men­sion.

That’s when we star­ted to ex­plore the no­tion of Hel­vet­ica as an au­then­t­ic ‘moth­er tongue’, al­most a ‘folk art’ of the Neth­er­lands.

Fact is, we grew up in the ’70s as work­ing-class kids, in cit­ies like Rot­ter­dam and Am­s­ter­dam – dur­ing a peri­od in which the graph­ic land­scape of the Neth­er­lands was dom­in­ated by struc­tur­al­ist de­sign­ers such as Wim Crouwel, Ben Bos, etc. Our school books, the stamps, the tele­phone books, etc.: a large por­tion of the en­vir­on­ment around us was de­signed in this typ­ic­al, so­cial-demo­crat­ic, struc­tur­al­ist way. So more and more, we real­ized that we still are typ­ic­al products of this spe­cif­ic en­vir­on­ment; and we real­ized that this whole late-mod­ern­ist lan­guage, of which Hel­vet­ica al­ways has been a big part, is in fact our lan­guage – the lan­guage that made us who we are. So we feel that we now have the right, or al­most the duty, to ex­plore this lan­guage, to ex­pand it, to add our own ac­cents to it, to tell our own stor­ies with it. And that is where we are now.

So that’s our view­point now. To us, Hel­vet­ica feels like a moth­er tongue, a folk art, an in­tu­it­ive choice. But it’s also our own (per­haps fool­ish and na­ive) way to keep in­vok­ing, in these cur­rent neo­lib­er­al times, the spir­it of so­cial demo­cracy.

In one in­ter­view, type de­sign­er Ro­man Gor­nit­sky was asked: ‘How much did the de­vel­op­ment of Gram­atika in­flu­en­ce the visu­al iden­tity of V–A–C Found­a­tion, and vice versa?’ He replied: ‘As for the im­pact of the typeface on the iden­tity, I think it’s a ques­tion for EJ them­selves – I’m not the right per­son to judge, really.’ Eu­gene Yukechev de­livered the ques­tion to the team, and, at the same time, asked EJ to share some ad­di­tion­al ex­amples of pro­jects where they’ve had some kind of sim­il­ar ex­per­i­en­ce with typefaces.

Dia­gram­atika didn’t in­flu­en­ce the de­vel­op­ment of the graph­ic lan­guage that we cre­ated for V–A–C. In fact, we de­ve­loped the whole concept of the ‘dia­gram­mat­ic lan­guage’ (as we named it) with the typeface Prag­mat­ica in mind.

Our first sketches, pro­pos­als and present­a­tions were all made with Prag­mat­ica. We loved the whole back­ground of the typeface: that whole bur­eau­crat­ic sphere around Para­Type, Para­Graph, Poly­Graph­Mash, etc. We liked the fact that Prag­mat­ica was widely re­garded as a pir­ated ver­sion of Hel­vet­ica, al­most like a So­viet bootleg (or at least, that’s how the typeface is in­ter­preted by some). So our ini­tial idea was to cre­ate the whole ‘dia­gram­mat­ic lan­guage’ us­ing trusty Prag­mat­ica.

However – it was the great Ly­o­sha Krit­souk (at that time, head of the in-house design de­part­ment of V–A–C) who con­vinced us that we had to look for a typeface to re­place Prag­mat­ica. In his view, Prag­mat­ica was already over­used by many oth­er cul­tur­al in­sti­tu­tes in Mo­scow.

To be hon­est, this was not something that we found prob­lem­at­ic – we ac­tu­ally prefer to use typefaces that every­body uses.

We al­ways dis­like the idea of ‘ex­clus­ive’, ‘tail­or-made’ or ‘cus­tom­ized’ typefaces – it sounds much too ex­pens­ive and dec­ad­ent for us. We love typefaces that are widely used, cheap, and demo­crat­ic.

Still, Ly­o­sha con­vinced us that we should look for an­oth­er typeface, and he set up a meet­ing with Ro­man Gor­nit­sky.

We ac­tu­ally all met up in a bar (or per­haps it was a nightclub) in Mo­scow – Ly­o­sha, Ro­man, and us. We can still re­mem­ber en­ter­ing the bar, and see­ing Ro­man sit­ting there, while he was wear­ing a sweat­er that dis­played a quote by Tschich­old: ‘In the fu­ture, every­body will write cyril­lic’. That made quite an im­pres­sion. Any­way, we really liked Ro­man and his work, so we de­cided to ask him to cre­ate a typeface for us, to use with­in the ‘dia­gram­mat­ic lan­guage’. We ac­tu­ally really col­lab­or­ated with Ro­man on the typeface, try­ing to cre­ate an al­most ‘mutated’ ver­sion of Prag­mat­ica (with a su­per-tall X-height, su­per-tight kern­ing, etc.). In the same way that Renzo Pi­ano’s team trans­formed an icon­ic Mo­scow build­ing (GES-2) in­to a new art space, we wanted to trans­form an icon­ic So­viet typeface (Prag­mat­ica) in­to a new font (Dia­gram­atika). So to make a long story short – in the case of V–A–C, it was the concept of the ‘dia­gram­mat­ic lan­guage’ that in­flu­en­ced the de­vel­op­ment of the typeface, and not the oth­er way around.

To cla­ri­fy the point even more. It’s not only the first sketches, pro­pos­als and present­a­tions we de­signed with Prag­mat­ica, but also the first ac­tu­al prin­ted items. For ex­ample, the design of the ‘Time, For­ward!’ ex­hib­i­tion (in­vit­a­tion, sig­nage, posters, cata­logue, etc.) was com­pletely done us­ing Prag­mat­ica. Dia­gram­atika ar­rived quite late in the de­vel­op­ment of the graph­ic lan­guage of V–A–C as a whole…

However, we can give you a very con­crete ex­ample of a graph­ic lan­guage that we de­ve­loped, and that was in­flu­en­ced by a typeface. In fact, it was in­flu­en­ced by a typeface cre­ated by Ro­man.

So, while Ro­man was work­ing on Dia­gram­atika (which would later be­come Gram­atika), he also showed us his plans of cre­at­ing an it­al­ic (‘shif­ted’) ver­sion – a ver­sion that was cre­ated by cut­ting up the let­ter, and shift­ing the parts. We liked this ver­sion a lot, but we didn’t think it was use­ful with­in the graph­ic lan­guage of V–A–C, which is why we nev­er used it. But we did keep the shif­ted let­ter in mind, as we real­ised it could be ex­ten­ded in­to a whole graph­ic lan­guage in it­self.

A few months later, we were asked by an Am­s­ter­dam-based on­line ra­dio sta­tion (Echobox) if we wanted to cre­ate a quick, com­pact graph­ic lan­guage for them, and we im­me­di­ately thought that Ro­man’s typeface would be per­fect for that. Moreover, we real­ised we could use the meth­od (the cut­ting-up of parts, and shift­ing these parts) could also be ap­plied to im­ages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In oth­er words – in the case of V–A–C, we feel that the typeface was in­spired by the graph­ic lan­guage. And in the case of Echobox, the graph­ic lan­guage was in­spired by the typeface.

Feb­ru­ary 11, 2025