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The Dutch designer’s iconic typography can be seen everywhere from posters to postage stamps – and, now, in a brilliant exhibition at the Design Museum Wim Crouwel’s iconic typography – seen on posters, postage stamps, exhibition catalogues and telephone directories – sums up Dutch design and perhaps even the Netherlands itself. Crouwel’s rational, modern visual world of grids and pure lines feels as intriguingly artificial as the painstakingly constructed Dutch landscape. His revered body of work, which spans 60 years, has a deep humanity and an artistic quirkiness that combines precision with emotion. You can see for yourself by joining the crowds of graphic designers who have been making a pilgrimage to London’s Design Museum to pay homage to the Dutch master’s work in the first major retrospective of his career held in Britain. Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey is an exhibition that anyone with the remotest interest in typography and graphic design will find utterly engrossing. There is a fascinating tension at work in Crouwel’s prolific output: between the rational and the irrational, the logical and the illogical, the scientific and the waywardly artistic. Crouwel, born in Groningen in 1928, began his career as a painter. His expressionist paintings were a stark contrast to the delight he took in the Bauhaus-inspired typography of the Swiss designers Karl Gerstner and Gerard Ifert. And yet, while he believed in the machine aesthetic espoused by the Bauhaus, he is on record as saying, the best part of 60 years ago, “the machine cannot replace the precision of the human eye and human feeling”. This is why he was also influenced by the work of Eric Gill, the English letterer, sculptor, sex maniac and type designer whose epochal sans-serif typeface Gill Sans (inspired by Edward Johnston’s display face for the London Underground) showed how a machine type could also be imbued with a humanity that came from craftsmanship. When Crouwel took to typography on an almost industrial scale with the founding of the Total Design studio in 1963, he honed a distinctive approach to design that has captivated fellow designers since. Crouwel’s work for the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam from 1964 showed how seemingly cool typography could be used to subtly evoke the characteristics of the artists on show. He had, in fact, been working on this approach since the early 1950s: his poster of 1957 for an exhibition of Leger paintings held at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, is so in tune with the artist that it’s not surprising that, while not quite commanding the price of a Leger in auction rooms today, you would have to pay handsomely for an original Crouwel poster. In day-to-day service, perhaps the best-known Crouwel typeface is Gridnik – a digitised version of the Politene face he designed for Olivetti in 1974. Shaped on a square grid, each letter has an elegant machine quality balanced with a playfulness that makes you want to look at it for its own sake as well as read the messages it was designed to give, most famously on the standard issue postage stamps issued by the Dutch PTT between 1976 and 2002. The Politene that became Gridnik was originally designed for Olivetti’s latest generation of electric typewriters, but as these became outmoded almost immediately, the typeface was rescued to live another life. Crouwel’s eye-boggling New Alphabet of 1967 was another historical accident of sorts. It was meant to be a purely experimental design based on cathode ray tube technology, with each letter abstractly composed of vertical and horizontal lines, some of them – g, j, s, w and z – all but unrecognisable. “The New Alphabet was over the top,” Crouwel has said, “and never meant to be really used. It was unreadable.” But, it was also great fun in a space age, computer-era way. Crouwel, busy today as an adviser to the company that has become Total Identity , is aware of the seeming contradiction in typography: the fact that many of the best-loved typefaces are looked at for their design rather than the written messages they convey. But that’s the joy of type. You can read words on the page to gain understanding of what they impart while still enjoying their form. If they become too fussy, and you spend more time looking at the curves of individual letters than reading, the type designer has failed you. Crouwel has never disappointed. He is the first to say his work shouldn’t be fetishised, but see if you can visit Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey and not be caught in this Dutch designer’s captivating grid. Design Typography Jonathan Glancey guardian.co.uk