FRS draft: Experimental Jetset: Club Paradiso 1995–1999

Note: I am currently hustling to wrap up work on a book about the new minimalist, brutalist and modernist typographies. I have a few entries on designers left to write and since I find blogging less initimdating than Microsoft Word I will be writing these last entries on jnamdevhardisty.com. This particular post is on the early work of Experimental Jetset and may or may not be here in the future. So, read it while the reading’s, um, good. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks, Namdev

All images courtesy Experimental Jetset

The Dutch design studio Experimental Jetset officially formed in 1998 when collaborators Marieke Stolk and Danny van den Dungen asked Erwin Brinkers to help them re-design the lifestyle magazine Blvd. Since then the group has developed a body of work and a trail of texts and interviews that have established them as one of most influential design studios of the last 10 years. Projects like “Kelly 1:1”, the “John&Paul&Ringo&George” t-shirt, SMCS identity and a slew of posters for various themed exhibitions showcased the group’s talent for creating profound graphic works from simple concepts while also propogating their bold almost “Pop” take on Modernism (I think many people believe Experimental Jetset’s work to be a wholesale appropriation of 60’s International Style design and I would argue that they couldn’t be more wrong. There’s a bold expressive-ness to Experimental Jetset’s work that is the result of high-contrast elements: black on white, Bold versus Light, big versus small. What makes their work the opposite of minimalism is that the elements that are present are so high-impact there’s no need for anything else. Compare this to 1960’s Swiss design which tended to be much more even-keeled.). While there is variance in their work, in general, they have developed an aesthetic that is recognizable as the Experimental Jetset.

In 2008, they re-launched their website and with it documentation of their earliest work—flyers and posters for the rock club Paradiso. Marieke Stolk and Danny van den Dungen began collaborating on promotional material for Paradiso in 1996 and the studio continued to work for them through 1999. The Paradiso work, which has not been seen widely outside of the Netherlands, not only shows a side to Experimental Jetset’s work that hasn’t been seen but it also provides a glimpse into the developement of the Experimental Jetset aesthetic in both its formal and conceptual elements.

The earliest series of flyers resemble little of the Experimental Jetset of today. These pocket-sized flyers for the club night Paradisco are image-heavy using appropriated imagery from the 70’s and 80’s to support the disco theme (and there’s no bold Helvetica or Futura in sight). But, traces of their thinking are present here. The flyers were conceived of as two-sided “frames or slides”* and while there is an aura of kitsch (especially in the intial series) they are an attempt at creating “visual poetry” and each has a core integrity even if the subject matter is silly. This is even more apparent in the second series as they move away from the disco associations and begin to explore visual/verbal puns, sampling of modernist forms, leaving white space exposed and even the self-referentiality that has come to mark their work.

Over the course of a few years (roughly 1996 to 1998) more of the ideas and gestures that have defined their work come to the fore. The program posters begun in 1996 explore more of the idea of graphic design as an object. A kind of check-box sits next to each event except its die-cut from the paper; when these posters are hung the layers of posters and flyers underneath show through. If these weren’t die-cut the “pill” would be purely ornamental but by making it a physical mark in the paper it now becomes a reference to its surroundings and context. These posters also mark the introduction of Helvetica into their work and as much as it seems that Experimental Jetset are synomous with Helvetica, they are actually synomous with Helvetica Neue 75 Bold and a particularly brutalist use of it. The Program posters use the extended weight and coupled with the all-lowercase typesetting and muted color palettes, these pieces have the feel of “vintage” Modernism. In addition, its used in a very traditional manner—a great deal of typographic detailing in terms of hierarchy, scale changes and color usage—which gives it a feeling of “fussiness” when compared to the visual brashness that their work has increasingly dealt in.

The flyers for the hip-hop night Bassline are where their aesthetic—the combination of form and langauge they are known for—really begins to emerge. The Bassline flyers originally began as a riff on Filofax sheets and a “cold” corporate identity was devised so that that they would read as the intended object. The backsides would contain a play on Filofax function—ruled paper, lined paper or other types of information holders. It seems that these pieces are the first instances of the group working with Modernist forms in a significant way. After all, both the stripped-down information design and the highly recognizable corporate identity used here were both key developments of the International Style design of the 1960’s and 70’s. The frontsides of the flyers are pitch-perfect replicas of 70’s corporate identity with an ambiguous logo  that could be interpreted as nearly anything and its flexible yet monolithic approach. It references the desire to inject “humanity” into corporate design by pretending that a continuous re-interpretation of the identity (within an extremely rigid framework) would create a more “friendly” appearance. Its exactly the kind of graphic design that Experimental Jetset do not practice.

Around 1998, the Bassline flyers changed dramatically. Through the introduction of Helvetica Neue, color overlays and found images that evoke the 60’s—they became softer, brighter and simpler. Its at this point that they began to find an alternative Modernist form. While many regarded the reductive visuals and simplified typography of high-Modernism as cold and impersonal, Experimental Jetset, (like Mike Mills at roughly the same time in the United States) found within it something friendly and bright; a so-called “soft modernism” that was certainly more “human” than the post-modern ideology of the time. This work is where we see the Experimental Jetset of today come into frame. The late Bassline flyers explore the language play of earlier Paradiso projects to a fuller extent. Now rather than support the theme explicitly the headlines are free associations—“BassLine. Lemon and Lime.” or “BassLife/LazyWife/BuckKnife/HighFive—layered on top of evocative photography with tenuous connections. They also begin to explore the use of color in ways that draw attention to the printed object primarily through over-printing one color on another and using the white of the paper as a third color (white always existed in their design but up to this point it had not been used to this degree of impact).

By the time the studio stopped working on Paradiso in 1999, they had laid the framework for the iconic work that would come over the next 10 years, defined by a bold elemental typography, an emphasis on the materiality of graphic design and an open-ended play of language and visual form.

*Experimental Jetset; http://www.experimentaljetset.com/archive/paradisco2.html

Tagged as: experimental jetset, frs, graphic design, paradisco, paradiso, typography