Wim Crouwel

Although Wim Crouwel trained as a painter at the Academie Minerva (1947–49) in his hometown of Groningen and at the Kunstnijverheids Onderwijs in Amsterdam (1950–52), he rapidly gravitated to the field graphic design field, establishing his own firm in 1954. A major turning point in his professional development came when he met the Swiss-trained designers, Karl Gerstner, Gérard Ifert, and Ernst Scheidegger, who impressed him with their rationalized design and typography, particularly the sans serif font Akzidenz Grotesk, a forerunner to Helvetica. From the Swiss model, Crouwel adopted the practice of the grid as a way of creating visual order. He later acquired from his colleagues the nickname... more.