Dutch Design Heroes: Gerard Hadders
By Graham Sturt
An English Creative Director in Amsterdam
The creative output of Hard Werken has intrigued me ever since I was first introduced to their Rotterdam International Film Festival posters, designed by Gerard Hadders and Willem Kars in the early 1990’s. Their self-titled arts and culture magazine, characterised by its experimental typography and illustration, although relatively short lived, also helped establish the design collectives reputation both within the Netherlands and internationally. Last Summer I was fortunate enough to meet with Gerard Hadders for an interview at his studio, ProArts Design, in Schiedam near Rotterdam.
GS: Gert Dumbar recommended that I speak with you to get a perspective on Dutch design that wasn’t just from Amsterdam.
GH: Yes, because in the past you had two design capitals — Amsterdam and The Hague. Amsterdam for obvious reasons, because it was the advertising capital of Holland. In The Hague there were already, let’s say in the wake of the eighties, many agencies working straight from industry. They saved the profession to a certain extent. Really professionalised it. In Rotterdam, when Hard Werken started, there was only one agency, which is still there I think, ARA advertising agency. In Rotterdam they did all their buying in Amsterdam or in The Hague. We were, of course, not a professional design agency at all. In my view we never became one actually, but we will get onto that later.
The first true professional design company from The Hague that settled in Rotterdam was Proforma. They were very interesting because they merged institutional public relations and were used to working for ministries. They mixed that for Rotterdam City Council, which became their biggest client. They were actually the first modern style graphic design agency in Rotterdam. Not a bunch of freaks like we were.
GS: In my research into yourself and Hard Werken two of the standout descriptions I read were are as follows: On the magazine — ‘Hard Werken was of great importance to Rotterdam’s cultural self-esteem, liberating the city from its image as a dull, culturally inferior harbour city.’ And on the work for PTT — ‘Some of the most controversial designs have come from Rotterdam based Hard Werken, whose wilful eclecticism has no Dutch precedent but has more in common with recent British graphics.’ That’s by Paul Hefting, in an article called ‘Official Anarchy’ for Eye Magazine.
GH: I didn’t know that one, actually.
GS: Both of these quotes illustrate that Hard Werken was clearly one of the more influential Dutch design agencies of its era and that it showed a different attitude towards the existing design world. Would you agree with this? And if so, what would you say it was about Hard Werken that made it influential?
GH: I have a double answer to that. You should read a book about Rotterdam called ‘Dreaming of a Metropole’ by Patricia van Ulzen. It’s a thesis work of about five years ago. It’s about the growth of the creative industry in Rotterdam. In there she puts the sequence slightly differently. You have Rotterdam television maker Bob Visser and a famous poet Jules Deelder, and in ’76 or ’77, they made an item for television in which he proclaimed to be the night mayor of Rotterdam. And then he proclaimed a great poem about the industrial heart of the city. And she sees it at that point as a kind of a shift. At the time you had also the Rotterdam Arts Foundation and they had a number of activities that actually spanned the entire cultural range, from literature to fine arts. Also a graphic workshop, which was situated in the experimental theatre, in De Lantaren in the Gouvernestraat.
And there was a guy, Willem Kars, who was working there and met some people, amongst us, but in more particular a writer, Rien Vroegindeweij. They decided I think in ’77 or ’78 to start a magazine, Hard Werken, because they thought that this arising self-consciousness should have some kind of platform. So the idea was of Rotterdam having special qualities and not just being like Detroit on the Maas, as they call it these days. It was one of the aspects that was very influential on Rotterdam’s Dutch cultural identity. But it was actually only for a few people, because it also was controversial in Rotterdam. The writers were meddling in local cultural politics. Let’s say the classical Dutch literary world and art world were still living in the fifties and they couldn’t really cope with it. The interesting thing is that Hard Werken sold better in Amsterdam than it did in Rotterdam. Which is not a strange thing, considering the fact that Amsterdam was already then a media city; close to Hilversum, where the TV was. And in Rotterdam there was virtually nothing.
Not to be too big about the thing, the reason why Hard Werken became so influential in Holland, is that we were operating on a very fresh field. It was freshly mown for us, because it was a phase in that the cultural institutions were broken up from big to small institutions.
Before that you had — like you have in London — a big opera house, a big dance theatre, a big theatre group and every city had its own philharmonic. They kind of gobbled up all the funds, and in the mid-seventies they decided to cut it up, because they wanted to give young culture a chance as well. So that’s the beginning of the smaller dance groups, the smaller art initiatives and the magazines. This all happened exactly at the same time, which means that because we were well viewed and respected by this particular group, we also got lots of clients in that particular group. And then there was this unique situation that at one moment in ’82 we were working within literature, working within theatre and in the art world. Which are now completely separated fields. Basically we were completely different and it was what you might call classic right time, right moment, right delivery. And like I said you had young people, inexperienced clients, and they all wanted to have something of the now.
Also Rotterdam is incomparable. In 1984 there was an exhibition here called ‘Art from Rotterdam’, for which we designed the publicity and catalogue as well as filling the central exhibition space. That is the last exhibition, I think in Rotterdam, that still echoes that fifties attitude. After 1985, hundreds of new artists poured into Rotterdam. They find out about it, they know there are spaces, like the Berlin thing. Then purely because it’s an open city, it attracts a lot of new things. So Rotterdam in 1980 and Rotterdam in 1990 are incomparable. And Rotterdam in 1990 is incomparable with 2016. That’s the big change of time.
GS: Did this shape your approach to your work?
GH: The funny thing is that from 1985 on it’s for me hard to judge because I was working with the PTT from the start on an incredible variety of things. This eclecticism, so to say. I think what is more important is that we were basically not a Dutch design group. We were mostly oriented on London, Paris and America. That’s where all the loyalties were and the influences as well. We were basically isolated from the rest of Holland, because we were really doing our own thing. There are no roots for us in Dutch graphic design.
GS: Was Punk an influence?
GH: No, because we thought it was silly. I think Punk was a hype. We were also too old for punk and I was the youngest of the lot.
Being 23 at the time, when I saw Johnny Rotten. I thought it was all a big joke.
No it was more New Wave, where you get this kind of energy that is coming up from Neue Deutsche Welle music, mixed with Devo and with Kraftwerk of course.
My main influence was Terry Jones in that period. And then you can see that there was a new wave in fine arts. There’s a whole new generation coming up at that point. That found a reflection in magazines. Like Impulse magazine in Toronto or WET magazine in Los Angeles. And you had Soldes magazine in Belgium, which kind of lived on the fashion, because Brussels was the young fashion capital of Europe at that time. And the magazine Façade, from Paris, from this club that was trying to be Club 54. And I think these were more important in a kind of global sense. You must also imagine it’s a time before the internet. So you have a very limited amount of reference. And then maybe around 1983, you have on the American West Coast, people like Rudy Vanderlans coming up with Emigré magazine. Then it evolves into a real international thing through people like April Greiman and such. And then shortly after that you’ve got the Cranbrook wave which fed into Dutch design via internships at Studio Dumbar.
So this was our background. And our background was London. It’s not so strange because we used to take the boat train to London. It would go through Hoek van Holland, so London was very close. All my peers, they all went to London a lot. Rick Vermeulen, even had a London girlfriend, Helen Howard. So that connection was much stronger than anything else.
And the atmosphere in Rotterdam at the time played a part too. Amsterdam is of course an extremely much more cultured city than Rotterdam demographically. Like I said, Rotterdam was open. It was empty as well, and they had deer park in front of the station. The part of the city which is now high-rise was empty for a long time, because the economy was poor until into the eighties or nineties.
GS: Let’s talk specifically about Dutch design now. Are you aware of any particular movement here in the early nineties to promote Dutch design?
GH: Well I participated in a few exhibitions. I made one myself, together with Nel Verschuuren from Kho Liang Ie Associates in 1990. It was called Rietveld’s Heirs and it went to New York and three other cities. Now that was part of it. The other thing is that you must imagine that the orientation of Dutch designers was not so very targeted.
At that time Dutch design was much more looking at Germany, Poland and France in Graphic Design. England was not really much of a focus at that particular time.
I can remember that I knew a guy who was teaching at St. Martins, later at the Royal College. I forget his name, a nice guy. He was telling me in the early 80’s that it was almost impossible to see Helvetica used in England. And I thought to myself, good for you. There was also this tension in England that you had if you look for instance at Pentagram Design. Then you see how brilliant it is in style. It will often refer to another graphic design history rather than the perpetual Bauhaus design history that Dutch designers always see as their main influence. So you see there is a kind of division.
I also think that when Gert Dumbar started teaching at the Royal College of Art in England he brought Dutch design over. In a way he was propagating his own work but he also had to propagate the quality of Dutch design in general.
I guess he must have played a role in that because you know bringing design to London is like bringing water to the ocean.
GS: Did you feel part of this scene here in the Netherlands at the time? Were you aware that there was a growing interest in the UK in Dutch design?
GH: Yes, we knew that. At the same time we were part of a big exhibition in ’89, a celebration of the French Revolution with Pierre Bernard. Rick and I together with Tibor Kalman opened the ’89 AGI meeting in San Antonio. And we were doing all kinds of talks. In Holland you had the big Icograda meeting in ’86, then you had Holland in Form, which Wim Crouwel was one the initiators. And that was also one of the first times everything was brought together in a certain way. It was also the first broad platform in which Dutch design was presented. What I liked in particularly in that time was that they also presented Paprika’s. Squared Paprika’s. And airplane wings and typography. It was about the range of what they called industrial design. Now people still call it industrial design, but it’s of course product design. It’s a whole different ball game. There were a number of those things happening, but I would say we were much more, at that point, part of an international clique. And not so much of a real Dutch group.
So we were just kind of breaking the waves, and the rest kind of came after it. Basically I think the so called Hard Werken moment lasted until ’85 or ’86. And then the company almost went broke. Before that we had actually no real business acumen. We were more kind of a co-op. After that we started to professionalise and in the end we became limited in ’88 or ’89. Also we were very much aware of this professionalisation, so you get the change towards corporate communication. But also it was in the air with agencies like VBAT, KejaDonia and some others. And it was particularly Willem Kars who wanted us to get into that direction. It wasn’t my main interest actually. Because if you look at what I did in those days already: I was making big light-works and I designed coinage and participated in the competition to develop a new paper currency. I was also doing furniture, brochures and corporate identities and stuff like that. It was so completely wide-ranged. So I mean there maybe was a kind of cult following for Dutch design but it was not because of us.
GS: It seems the term ‘Dutch Design’ was used a lot in the early 90’s.
Does it still have the same relevance today?
GH: No, I think there still comes from Holland a lot of graphic design talent, but the style is no longer Dutch. Because of the fact that everything gets completely mixed around. In the old days you would work in the style of Anthon Beeke or in the style of Hard Werken. But there are now thousands more designers you can see work from. It’s a whole sharing culture. So I think that the term Dutch design comes from a non-Dutch designer. I’m a Dutch designer, because I’m Dutch.
GS: So we should retire the term Dutch design?
GH: Yes. There is another reason for that, and that is you’re only as good as your client.
The thing that has been killing for Dutch graphic design is that the client culture has finished.
It has been taken. In Germany you have, I think, a more unique commercial structure that’s sits outside of the Anglo-Saxon commercial structure with public relations and all these kind of things. But in Holland it has completely become identical to how the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world operates. They now have the same imperatives. Then it became harder to have a niche position where you have one particular client who you can cater for. And don’t forget the PTT did it out of the people’s pocket. Every stamp you pasted, a little part of that went to them.
GS: Historically the PTT was one of the biggest benefactors of the Dutch design industry. In 1992 you designed a guide to the past and present of this great organisation. How did this commission come about and how important were PTT to Hard Werken as a client?
Well like I said they were huge, also for our profile. Over the years, it’s not so much that you make your living on it, maybe it’s just five percent of your turnover. But for a design agency it was very interesting to get a chance to design something which lies outside of a regular assignment and to work with different people.
I did some corporate stuff and I did two annual reports for KPN Telecom. This would be impossible now, because I was a single designer, then working independently.
I was trusted with that, together with my associates to do it.
Then there was the big design exhibition in Seville, the world exhibition. Tom designed the exhibition and I designed and co-edited the book. To my surprise this was the first book ever made on ‘kunst en vormgeving’. I convinced Paul Hefting that we should make a different kind of book where the images would be leading. It meant that there were some empty pages, because there were some pages with images running without the running text. But that gives a different attention to the images. I’ve done a lot of art catalogues and was alway irritated by the fact that art historians write a number of articles and they put the images almost like footnotes. Most people look at it from a different perspective though. Since only five percent of people that buy catalogues read the articles I felt it would be important to have it the other way around.
This book is infamous, because on the cover it says PTT and in the introduction text it says ‘our company will be called KPN’. So it’s lost it’s value as a corporate tool.
GS: And this was designed within the house style that Dumbar created?
Did you have any limitations? When I spoke to him he said that he gave all the tools to the designers to do what they like with it.
GH: Yes, I didn’t have anything to do with the house style. But I didn’t mind, because it was one the best house styles ever made.
GS: We touched on this earlier. What are the major differences you see between Dutch versus British design?
GH: This is a big topic. I think you can say that in Holland more experimental stuff gets to be made on a certain level. And then you could say British design — graphic design — is much more about imagery. Even working with texts. Whereas Dutch graphic design still has that legacy of Wim Crouwel and later on with Mevis en van Deursen for instance.
It’s all structure. It bores the hell out of me actually someway or the other.
I think that would be the main difference. But at the same time a lot of Dutch designers are also creating work for clients all over the world. Again, as I said earlier, design is no longer limited to the place.
GS: Let’s talk about you and your early life. In my research I read that you studied visual communication and fine arts at the Academy of Visual Arts in Rotterdam, graduating as a fine artist and photographer in 1979. Tell me about your early life and the choices you made that led you to follow a creative education and ultimately to follow a career in graphic design.
GH: Well I am the son of a sea captain. I sailed a lot when I was a child. And I got in contact with a lot of non-Dutch culture. From lemonade to magazines. Well, not too many grandfather stories, but soda pop was almost unimaginable in Holland in the early sixties. What I have said more often is that I only wanted to become two things in my life. First I wanted to become a soldier until my tenth birthday. After that I wanted to become an artist. I think design is somewhere in the middle basically.
I wouldn’t call myself a graphic designer in the true sense though. Not because I have any thing against that, but just because I grew up like a professional border-liner.
That has more to do with what we did in art school and what the possibilities were in that atmosphere. Also because Rotterdam Art School wasn’t really so much a school with heavyweight designers in it as the Rietveld Academy was. We couldn’t really copy people because there was nobody there to copy. There were some pretty good coaches though. So we influenced each other a lot. And we had a very good year. Then I took a year out of school and came back again. In the end I was doing photography and stone printing. Ironically speaking the moment I started my final year, I got my first assignment to design a book cover.
And the other thing which was interesting was to have new kinds of clients. That brought you into contact with all different kinds of disciplines. We were not only doing graphic design, but were also making and inventing exhibitions. I did a television programme with Bob Visser for a year in ’84. For arts videos. I did theatre sets. I did film sets too in ’83 or ’84 for a German director, Rainer Kirberg. You could simply go everywhere. It was a very active time. So the fact that I was working for literature, fine arts and in the theatre world, that would be unthinkable these days, because it’s all very much divided up.
I’ve also been working with light since I was 21. Still do, basically. So, graphic design has never been such a big influence. Also when you are young and ambitious you think you are the best. Some way or the other. You are not worth anything if you don’t think it.
GS: So let’s talk about the magazine Hard Werken specifically.
Between 1979 and 1982 only ten editions of this highly influential arts and culture magazine were published. Tell me how the magazine came about and why you think it became so well-known.
GH: When we started out you had the university in Rotterdam being built up. It was built into a real university with an academic medical centre etc. They then poured a lot of money into what they call ‘Studium Generale’. I don’t know if it means anything in English. But ‘Studium Generale’ was a kind of extracurricular program that invited people from different disciplines and then brings them together. And usually they worked outside of the universities a lot. So they did this in the venues of the Rotterdam Arts Foundation. They would have festivals and stuff like that. They always would aim for the student body, but also for other people. Everybody was invited. Some of the contributors that became part of Hard Werken were academics who were part of that ‘Studium Generale’ thing. They were intellectuals, but they could also produce articles on various topics from prostitution to architecture. The first issue had 23 people as editor, which is a lot. In the end we had 7. All the writers had run away. The first issue was in February ’79 I think. Just before that I had finished my final exams. It was paid for with 12.000 guldens with 9000 gulden coming from the Dutch Art Council. It was printed at the printers there. We intended it to become a monthly but nobody had ever made a magazine before.
It was all very funny and the writers that were there soon found out that we had as much to say about the magazine’s content as themselves which of course made them not very happy to say the least. Some people kept on writing for the magazine but it gradually shifted. There was also this development at Hard Werken we called ‘vereniging’. It was already operating as a kind of a designer group. And then there was a kind of connection with international magazines. We would have contributions being shared with other magazines.
In the end the last magazines were mostly made by Willem and I. The last magazine that was made had a circulation of 12.000, which was a lot.
GS: How did you come up with the content for each issue?
GH: One recurring theme was Rotterdam politics. And for the rest you have publications about topics like a local music hero — guy who has the best record company in town. Or the first Turkish or Moroccan night shop owner in Rotterdam. Or artists. We would also have artist pages where people could contribute themselves.
GS: So why did it stop after only ten issues?
GH: No money.
GS: The subsidies ended?
GH: Yes the subsidies ended and I think everybody was fed up with it. Particularly because it was not a professional organisation. In that sense in the end I did it mostly with Willem. Some other people contributed a little bit of this or that. And frankly people also got very busy.
GS: Let’s move on to the design group then. In 1980 yourself, Rick Vermeulen, Tom van den Haspel, Henk Elenga, Kees de Gruiter and Willem Kars founded Hard Werken as a design group, focusing primarily on work for the cultural sector in and around Rotterdam.
GH: There were actually two more. Those were Helen Howard and Jan Willem de Kok.
But it is like I said — I worked a lot for Museum Journaal, which is in Amsterdam. I’ve made in the eighties, together with Rick Vermeulen, about 1000 book covers. Also for Bert Bakker Publishers in Amsterdam. And then, I think in Rotterdam it was the Rotterdam Art Foundation. We designed and initiated exhibitions for them.
GS: What is the meaning behind the name?
GH: Hard Werken means ‘hard work’. And it had to do with the fact that Rotterdam was a city without culture so to say. Only people with their rolled up sleeves etc. Those clichés. So that is why we did that. But it was also controversial in another way. I remember at a certain point I calculated that, from the ten friends around me, only myself and one other had a job. The rest were on the dole. That was the high time of the Dutch social welfare state. And I remember that we had stickers that we put on our jackets. ‘Hard Werken’ it said. It made people angry, like we were fascists or something.
GS: It was a statement about the situation in Rotterdam at the time?
GH: No, but it was unique to have a Dutch name. Because you had Total Design, Tel Design, et cetera, et cetera. We called ourselves Hard Werken and didn’t even yet consider to be a design company. It was also the first era where Dutch pop music came up and you have bands coming up with names like De Kast (The Chest) or you would have Doe Maar (Go Ahead). So all of a sudden you get all kind of Dutch names. But basically it was a name for the magazine and it turned out to be a name that stuck. And we did make issues number eleven and twelve for Lecturis Publishers together with Beekers, Schröder, Ros who were communist designers. And then they decided it was a mixed issue. They decided to have two front pages. That read against each other. And they decided to call themselves Wild Plakken. So they coined their name after the name Hard Werken so to say.
GS: What was the initial intention when you collectively set up the group?
GH: Just to have a place. That’s why we are compared with start-ups these days. You know, like an incubator. The only thing we had in common was an administration and a space. Also strangely enough we hardly worked together. We were together in one space but everybody had their own clients.
I was the first one to take an assistant, who worked exclusively for me. I think it would be after 1985, when we started professionalising as a real studio, that you got a structure with an art director and with teams.
GS: What was it like working there?
GH: Fun. And it was very chaotic. I can remember that when Henk was still there, he had a Moog synthesiser, which he didn’t know how to operate.
But he could make it play zooming sounds with a slow beat and stuff like that. On a hot summer evening the windows would be open and if you were on the street below you would hear the Moog. Walk up the stairs and it got louder and louder. And then you start to work there.
And ‘Hard Werken’ was literally what we did. I worked my ass off. We were very ambitious and would be there seven days a week, twelve hours a day. Practically lived there.
We worked hard, very concentrated, and listened to music.
GS: Who were your most interesting clients at that time?
GH: I didn’t work for PTT yet but I worked for Stichting Dansproductie, which was a dance group. I also worked for Hauser Orkater, which was a theatre group where Alex van Warmedam, the filmmaker came from, VPRO television, The Rotterdam Arts Foundation and Lijnbaancentrum gallery (RKS) for whom I also made an exhibition on Guigaro, a car designer. In 1983 for their art foundation I did an exhibition design and also went to New York to pick out some artists together with the curator. I did the graphic design for that, the catalogues and advertising. That was very chic.
GS: One of the most memorable pieces of work that triggered me to get interested in Hard Werken was your work for the International Film Festival Rotterdam. There’s one particular poster, I think it’s number eighteen, where the tiger’s head is made out of neon. Between 1986 and 1992, you created the imagery for that event. How did you come up with each year’s concept and what was your favourite design?
GH: Well, the tiger was there since the mid seventies, I think as a counter image to the MGM Lion. In 1981, as a collective, we did the festival in its entirety. And then they came back to us in 1985, and Rick and Tom did a design that was of a trophy which was very camp. It’s a miracle they still came back to us after that. I was very much into film and my friend was an aspiring film maker — she later studied at The National Film and Television School Beaconsfield. I liked very much special effects and I had read a fantastic book about it in cinema. This is mostly pre-digital then, of course. Just matte painting and stuff. And I found out that it took George Lucas to get American moviemaking back to the technical skills they had in 1939. What they did around 1940 was so incredibly well done technically. So I thought, why not dedicate this poster to visual culture?
To the visual, so to say. A materialisation. Which was I think a very strong idea. So that’s what we did. I did a neon one Rick did one with mosaic.
Other ones I did, I did one with steel with a gas flame and then I did one with flowers. One of the last ones I did was cut out of wood and set alight. I burned it down. Interestingly enough, that was complete corporate thinking. To take that repetitive symbol, and execute it differently each time. So they are the same but all look different.
GS: That’s lived on too hasn’t it? The graphic form of the tiger has carried on being versioned year after year to this day.
GH: Yes, and after that they had Max Kisman and after that 75B did it.
They still do it. Only this year, almost 20 years later, they again brought in visual elements. In the sense that in the campaign there is light again and movie qualities of seeing. For over twenty years there has just been text and graphic imagery, which is I think is crazy for a film festival.
No but we also worked with high-end photography. Our posters were made with 20 by 25 slides. It was all we worked with. We did it from scratch, but worked with a professional photographer. Otherwise you would never have achieved that kind of technique.
GS: In 1994, Hard Werken merged with the packaging design agency Ten Cate Bergmans and were relocated from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, subsequently changing its name to Inízio. Why did this merge come about, and as such a group with strong ties to Rotterdam, how did it feel to relocate to Amsterdam?
GH: You shouldn’t really ask me that question because I had already dropped out by then. Basically, when they merged I was already out. It took great chagrin off the Ten Cate Bergmans guys.
It was very hard for Hard Werken to really play in the same game as VBAT or Keja Donia did because we came from such a different background and marketing by design simply wasn’t a claim we could make work.
We got in a business partner, Bart Jan Jansen, who had been working at Unisis. He came from a family of entrepreneurs. He was interested in us because his brother, Robert Jansen, was an advertising man. So he was fed up with automation, and he wanted to do something else. He brought with him some hard needed qualities and I thought it was a very good idea for him to join Hard Werken. The partnership then grew from four to five, and I had been Creative Director for some three or four years. And I thought I’m fed up with this because I was Creative Director and had to design high profile things for PTT. On the other hand I was an artist and made this huge neon in the north east of Rotterdam, on a PTT building, one hundred metres by eight metres. I was stretched immensely, so I beheaded myself as the Creative Director. And we brought back the partnership with Bart Jan, Willem Kars and Tom as the main partners, and Rick and I, became junior, so to say. They also chucked out my responsibilities. That was just before I started to teach at the Jan van Eyck academy. I was really ready for something else.
So for me, I could imagine that for strategic reasons they would want to get closer to a company like Ten Cate Bergmans.
They were not like VBAT or Keja Donia, they were much more still in the packaging business. And they had been branching out into furniture design. So they had a lot of experience, but they had also made an incredible amount of money and that went to their heads. I think one of their partners had three Chinese restaurants and the other one was basically a sculptor. And they choked on a project they did for Knoll International. They had designed a chair, and they had brought it to Knoll International. But they didn’t read the small print, so when the project failed, they were in debt for twelve million guilders. They barely got over it, and then Hard Werken decided to merge with them, which I think was a stupid mistake. Also because they then brought the partnership back to five again, which was not good for the company. Hard Werken, by then Inízio, relocated to Sloten, south of Amsterdam. I think it was intended to be a strategic merge, but so many things were happening at the same time. Because then the internet came up in 1993 or 1994. Bart Jan, having his background in automation, quickly got some other people in who were also more knowledgeable about this. So they were constantly changing. I think after three years, they didn’t exist anymore. They called themselves Carre Noir, I think. That’s the last name stage, then Willem was out and Tom was out, as well. Rick I think as well. I’m not sure. After 1990, Rick is just lingering a little bit along, he’s not really part of the heart of the matter.
GS: In 1995, there was a retrospective of Hard Werken’s work. First in Frankfurt and subsequently in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. How did this exhibition come about?
GH: Yes, we were picked up by a man called Professor Friedrich Friedl. He’s an interesting guy. He’s a teacher at Offenbach School of Art in Germany. And he is a big collector, of prints, print work and graphics that range from Robert Indiana to Gunter Rambow. Somehow he got interested in Hard Werken.
I met Friedel in Frankfurt in 1994 during the Buchmesse. I was there because Holland was the focus country and I had just won the competition for the house style for the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Later he introduced us to the Karmeliterkloster Museum in Frankfurt to do an exhibition on Hard Werken. In the end the Karmeliterkloster was more a true exhibition on Hard Werken. Unfortunately the later Kunsthal show became more of a product design exhibition. It got merged with stuff from Ten Cate Bergmans, that however professional in its outlook, didn’t really sit well with the work of Hard Werken.
GS: An archive of Hard Werken’s projects is held for future reference by NAGO, the Netherlands archive for graphic design. Are you proud of this recognition of your work, and how important is it that an archive like this is available for future generations?
GH: Yes, it’s interesting but then they unfortunately went broke. They were handed all the material, but hadn’t yet started to describe it to make it into a real archive. Now the stuff is safe in the Rotterdam City Archives. At least the NAGO has some of the work online, and that’s good.
GS: What would you say is Hard Werken’s legacy?
GH: It’s hard to say. There was a reunion some months ago at the Rotterdam Art Academy. It was astounding to hear that so many people, particularly from Amsterdam, said you guys don’t have a clue how much influence you’ve had. I would say that I couldn’t really judge it very well, in that sense.
You have this immense body of work that gets made in the nineties, by lots of people. I think we might be a legend in the Amsterdam advertising community, something like that. And now with people getting over digitalisation you see a lot of stuff coming up again.
People wanting to make things by hand again, or at least imitating the printing processes that we did in the eighties. I think when the book by Ian Horton (Hard Werken: One for All: Graphic Art & Design 1979–1994) is published then there will be a kind of new focus on Hard Werken.
GS: What are the key characteristics of your work that sets it apart from other designers?
GH: This is a very big topic but three things are very important. Monumentality, for which light plays a very big part, I make very big light works. And education. I did a lot of teaching with Edith Gruson at a master’s course at St. Joost in Breda until it got re-organised and we couldn’t see any use for ourselves anymore.
The other thing is process. I’ve always been working process wise since the eighties. We developed a way of working for that we adapt into a lot of things. It’s called ‘Visual Essay’. It comes out of our own practice, but was also developed further on for students at St. Joost, because we are living in a world where all technology is intermediate.
We want designers to think independently from technique. So we take them out of the execution and bring them to conception and to interaction. The work of the designer is not exclusively his own, at most you work 50 percent on your own. And if you realise that, you have a different outlook towards what you do. It doesn’t diminish the output or the quality of the output. The quality gets better.
GS: Since 2012 you’ve been part of the design group ProArts Design, established together with Edith Gruson. Who are your clients now?
GH: It varies a lot. The classic graphic design work is quite limited these days. Our profession changed dramatically in that sense. Edith is an exhibition designer and has also always worked on cultural stuff. So we’re now doing a mix of exhibition design and art works. We just did ‘Rotterdam Viert de Stad –Seventy Five Years of Rebuilding The City’. I did a lot of graphic design for that, but then I am my own client. And the graphic design is very important. I only have two classical graphic design clients left and strangely enough I’m going to make stamps again.
Also last year for Droog we did a great exhibition in the Museum of Sex in New York. The museum in New York is really an interesting place. It’s not like the crummy place you have on the Damrak in Amsterdam. They really have a proper board of directors and they have a kind of a mission so to say. So that was fun to do, and we did everything from the concept to the interaction design.
GS: I was interested to see your work spread across the internet in various different media. On YouTube, for instance, you’ve got a collection of experimental animation tests.
GH: No, those are films I did. The last big corporate thing I did was for the Philips Concert Hall in Eindhoven. What I did there was big design, big art works, big light works outside. And I created hundreds of animated samples as a backdrop using soft led technology. But I also did the house style of course, the collateral and some magazines.
GS: If you see these things out of context it’s difficult to know what they are about.
GH: Yes. But it’s almost impossible to represent. It’s the same with this laser program we did as well. It looks great but it’s almost impossible to photograph it right. So it’s very difficult to make a good registration.
GS: Okay so to close, what are the biggest changes you’ve witnessed in the Dutch design profession over the years?
GH: You know it’s interesting, I was once on an advisory committee with Michel de Boer, then of Studio Dumbar. And I was talking with him and I said I’ve experienced three major technical revolutions in my lifetime. That was in 2005 only. And he said what do you mean? He didn’t realise it because from the onset of his professional career he had been a studio leader. So he would always be outside of the process and had never felt ‘the pain of change’.
When we started offset and phototypesetting had just become mainstream and affordable. We considered these techniques as the norm. After that the big automation revolution came with Apple and the Quantel Graphic Paintbox and ROM interactive media, which all had a profound effect on the entire design, imaging and production chain.
Then, of course, you’ve got the internet which didn’t even exist for Hard Werken. Now we are on version 4.0 or something. So this is something that changed very rapidly. On the other hand, regarding change, when I left Hard Werken I think we had around twenty people at the time.
I remembered this Jewish proverb that says, ‘I wish you a lot of personnel’. It’s a kind of curse.
So when I started my own company, called Buro Lang Haven I only took one secretary, and she was on a freelance basis. And I never took any personnel anymore, which was considered anti-social in those days. But I built teams around clients, and found out rapidly that this was very much liked by the people that worked for me. I had had so many disappointments with people who came into the Hard Werken system, and who then came to sit there comfortably.
GS: What in your opinion is your greatest achievement and what would you hope your legacy to be?
GH: My god!
GS: That’s a big question isn’t it?
GH: Yes. It’s probably better suited for Wim Crouwel though.
I am not there yet, I am only 61. I’ve had it with the service industry though so am trying to see what I will be doing next. I will not be sitting still though.
On one hand this professional border liner attitude is something I am proud of actually and am still working like that. And that I’ve not been driven into one particular niche. It would be nice to make a book again, because I very rarely make them these days. The other thing is you have this pendulum that’s progressive. Conservative, progressive, conservative. This is a very big thing that you cannot really influence in that sense. Sadly I think we’re now in a very conservative situation.
GS: Thank you for your time, it’s been great speaking with you.
About the author:
Graham Sturt is an English Creative Director based in Amsterdam.
Originally from England, he lived and worked in London for more than a decade before relocating to Amsterdam in 2007 to follow his passion for Dutch design.
