Culture, Crowding and the pleasure of Complexity; A schizophrenic presentation

Culture, Crowding & the 

pleasure of Complexity. 

Some remarks about ‘urban 

graphic design’. 

A schizophrenic presentation.

“...Urban space is, in contrast with television or the internet 

where navigation takes place through ‘exclusion’, 

the space where we encounter the maximum of ‘static’ 

and through which we move by ‘inclusion’; Inclusion 

meaning the appropriation of the visual culture of an urban 

space we do not necessarily understand, probably 

don’t even want to understand. Nevertheless this appropriation 

is needed dearly to be able to navigate through 

urban space...”

#1: 

Problem #1: Culture

Problem#1: Culture 

We all have the following experience: you are waiting 

for a traffic light to turn green and suddenly you spot 

a building that you have never seen although you have 

passed this point at least a hundred times this year 

alone. 

And worse... the building was obviously already standing 

there before you were even born.


This difference between seeing and looking has been 

described many times in science and is a thankful topic 

in literature and art but is generally neglected by the design 

community since design is very rarely concerned 

with looking at the ‘whole’ of a given environment as 

this environment is technically split up between planners, 

engineers, architects, industrial designers, media 

placement specialists, graffiti painters, greenery landscapers, 

house painters, graphic designers and so forth 

and so forth with zoning committees as a kind of general 

overseers.


This difference between looking and seeing becomes 

spectacular if you come to think of the myriad of 

different categories you can put potential users of 

urban space in: 

running from goth teenagers all the way to immigrant 

pensioners. 

They all have a different speed and need and speech...


The psycholinguist Dan Slobin did an interesting experiment 

about the preconception of perception based on 

the linguistic structures of mother tongues and I quote: 

“...We asked English and French native speakers to 

write down within one minute as many way-of-motionverbs 

as possible. The French speakers though it a difficult 

task. After just a couple of verbs like ‘courir’ they 

were finished writing, while the English speakers just 

kept on writing and writing...”


The same happens, he writes: 

“...in French novels where protagonists seem to materialize 

from place to place in a mysterious manner. 

French novel characters move into a field, where German 

characters walked, strolled, or rolled into a field...”


In short: 

urban space and thus its visual culture is perceived on an 

individualist level that is determined by age, gender, 

culture and speech.

Problem#2: Crowding

Problem#2: Crowding 

A definition: 

“...In crowding, a target is harder to identify in the presence 

of nearby flankers (...) The critical spacing defines 

an isolation field around the target. Some objects can be 

recognized only when each part is isolated from the rest 

of the object by the critical spacing. In that case, recognition 

is by parts. Recognition is holistic if the observer 

can recognize the object even when the whole object fits 

within a critical spacing...”


This is a definition from a paper called “Are faces processed 

like words?” published in Journal of Vision in 

2005 which begins its introduction with the following: 

“Psychophysical proposals for how people recognize 

objects have largely been bottom-up building on what is 

known about feature detection. 

Cognitive proposals have been top-down, reasoning 

from what is known about object categorization...”


In my view, this definition describes perfectly the battlefield 

on which designers are to perform their tasks. Ever 

since modernism raised its polished head, functionalist 

designers have willingly mistaken esthetics for science. 

So ‘fashion’... turned ‘fact’.


The problem with this fact is that it sits on a form of 

visual hygiene. And since hygiene is only achieved 

through scrubbing and cleaning I could say that 

‘exclusion’ is of vital importance for modernist – 

functionalist – graphic design.


I can hear you think: “why still go on about modernism? 

Isn’t it since decades buried under layers and layers of 

post-modern bacteria?” Well at least for two reasons, 

firstly; what hasn’t changed since postmodern thinking 

is the economic and strategic instrumentality of marketing 

and communication design - this has a dynamic of 

its own, and it’s own ‘science’,


and secondly: however postmodern architecture might 

be in its design, the engineering most certainly is not 

and the same goes for the economic structural thinking 

that lies under any kind of property development. 

In short: necessary modernist thinking is turning into 

an unnecessary paradigm when developing new visual 

strategies.


I think that ‘crowding’ – or ‘static’ as it used to be called 

in advertising – namely the loss of exclusivity when it 

comes to perception and reception of a sign or message 

is turning from a nuisance into a given. We seriously 

have to start thinking about an ‘inclusive’ way in approaching 

visual urban culture.


The effects of Crowding through graphic design is maybe 

best known to you in countries like China and India 

where the density of activities behind a commercial facade 

can be seen by the amount of commercial signs on 

the outside, highly esthetic like on Shanghai’s Nanjing 

Road or more muddled and chaotic like in Delhi’s Old 

City District.


It is my strong conviction that by looking at these 

cities we are looking to the future of European 

commercial area’s when increased small scale 

commercialism will converge with our un-sustainable 

visual zoning laws and the facades of the streets will 

start to look like the shelves of well assorted 

supermarkets.


Mind you, though; this is inherently different from the 

dazzling visual mono culture of Las Vegas or the intended 

complicated facade designs from The Jerde Partnership 

or Tibor Kalman’s 42nd street development - where 

what looks complex, actually is well parceled visual information.

Conception: 

The pleasure of complexity.

Conception: The pleasure of complexity 

A quotation: 

“...Visual complexity and urban identity are intimately 

interwoven. If we see the era of modernist design as one 

where the surface of things was cut loose completely 

from the identity of its users, and related one hundred 

percent to the logic of its production, we can now recognize 

a hyper concentration on a multiplicity of consumer-identities, 

that makes the surface and the facade 

the a-priori of the design, and no longer its ‘cover-up’ or 

envelope...”


Was Adolf Loos a criminal? According to the art-historian 

Gombrich he was merely preaching an new Anglo- 

Saxon style idiom to the ornament-obsessed natives of 

Austria. And as Robert Venturi remarks in his ‘Learning 

from Las vegas’: 

“...Less may have been more, but the I-section on the 

Mies van de Rohe’s fire resistant columns, is as complexly 

ornamental as the applied pilaster on the renaissance 

pier (...) modern ornament has seldom been symbolic 

of anything non-architectural since the Bauhaus 

vanquished Art Deco and the decorative arts...”


Venturi already showed in the sixties that the visual exclusiveness 

of modernist architecture stood in the way 

of a comprehensive – understandable – architecture(•). I 

am not an expert on the matter – I am not a theoretician 

– so I will subside to personal observation and experience.


In 1991 I was asked by the Dutch PTT to create a neon 

fries on the basis of their then newly developed corporate 

design. This resulted in a work called ‘The Rise 

And Fall Of The House-style Of The PTT’. It was a large 

scale graphic comic that tells the story of the death of 

the typeface ‘univers 45’ as the sole signifier to carry the 

identity of the former postal en telephone company as 

it had been since the mid-sixties. In the last ‘frame’ it is 

swallowed up by the neo suprematist figurations that 

largely made up the 2nd and 3rd level of the house-style.


It was not my first light work so the general confusion 

about the work – was it a corporate house-style neon, or 

was it monumental art? – got me interested as it did my 

client at the time because it wasn’t for long before I got 

the next question. And it was this question that got me 

started.


The brief in short was to develop: ‘a series of identical 

signs - for a series of identical PTT buildings - that 

should carry elements of the house-style but should not 

represent it integral’. I started with making a visual essay 

about architecture as sign in which I gratefully started 

with Venturi’s analysis from Las Vegas. This I mixed 

with rhetoric elements of the company and the architecture 

and created this proposal: a single boxletter filled 

with chaotic ‘carnival style’ lightbulbs. But, the way 

how it is in the corporate world: strategies change, and 

so do projects.


In the late nineties there were two retail concepts born: 

the house-in-house concept and the combination megastore. 

They were to be taken as an example to develop 

a chain of business supply stores that centered around 

mail and logistic services supplied by what was then 

called TPG-Post. These stores were to be developed market-conform: 

generic buildings - owned by a third party 

– that could also be rented to other clients than the PTT 

without significant changes in layout and finish.


A problem with the mega-store concept was that they 

forced various brands ‘together’ in one place and on one 

facade. And – furthermore – the partnership between 

brands seemed to be prone to constant change. 

I developed a concept that was deceivably simple. The 

logo’s had to be represented in equal ‘weight’. Retroreflective 

prismatic foil applied in dots would represent 

the different brands, it was cheap, easy to apply and easy 

to remove.


TPG found an architect to develop the perfect ‘box’ to go 

with the solution and a new form of architecture-integrated 

signalization was born. 

When the matrix for the dots was developed interesting 

things happened: it became clear that a matrix typeface 

‘behaves’ differently from type-elements in a logo-type, 

in other words a logo-type is more image than text; furthermore 

a logotype could be reduced to a minimum 

amount of dots or the logo could be deformed severely 

before it lost its cognitive value. What you see, is what 

you remember.


Apart from this last interesting lesson another notion popped 

up in the following project for an affiliated client: TNT express 

mail. I designed a large sign for them next to a freeway at their 

main office. Many people were to pass there daily, and most 

likely driving very slowly. To merely enlarge a logotype to huge 

proportions is not interesting. It will tend to look like a print 

media version of the logo so other strategies need to be developed. 

To make people stay interested the design is deliberately complex. 

With six neon filaments that slowly switch in patterns 

and a prominent grid carrying the logo in plastic dots, it looks 

like a slow-motion version of a Las Vegas casino sign.


The last project I will present is the light-wall that I developed 

for the Dexia Tower near the Amsterdam Passenger 

Terminal. 

With developing related projects, like the WiMBY! Binnenstebuiten 

exhibition I had found the s.t.i.p.-matrix to 

be generally working for images as well. I was astounded 

about the small amount of actual visual information 

you need to piece a representation together.


When developing the concept for Dexia, I was first 

asked to merely design a kinetic light-wall, as a kind 

of ambient lighting. After some experiments I decided 

that it could be an iconographic wall. Through a mix of 

desired possibilities and budget space we settled on a 

resolution of 77 x 120 pixels, each pixel divided 40 smtp 

led’s. (10 red, 10 blue and 20 green). The engine is the 

– ancient – VLC format in 256 colors. The refresh rate is 

16 frames per second so animation is possible.


I made some 2 hours of test movies – called A-versions. 

To test possibilities of the wall in conveying iconography 

and this is where unfortunately the story ends. The bank 

got into trouble through a scandal around stock-market 

speculation products and the further development of 

possibilities has been halted up to now.


The wall is actually the television reinvented. Because of 

the rough resolution – and the fact that the led’s were 

spread out in stead of clustered together like in traditional 

video-walls a interesting mix of kinetic activity 

from close-by with the memory driven perception of the 

films made it for me the new stepping stone towards the 

realization of an old Robert Venturi dream: ‘Towards 

Electronic Imagery On Generic Building’. 

I am waiting for the next economic boom to take place...

Culture, Crowding & the 

pleasure of Complexity. 

Some remarks about ‘urban 

graphic design’. 

A schizophrenic presentation.

Culture, Crowding and the pleasure of Complexity; A schizophrenic presentation

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