Last week I went along to see Wim Crouwel give an iSTD talk about his work and clients. It was a celebration of the iSTD being 80 years old, but the most staggering thing is that at 81, Wim still stands as one of the most interesting and progressive designers and typographers. He’s a nice guy too.

This guy was excited about pixels before there were pixels:

He showed us a lot of his work, which he was producing from the 1950s to the present day, and it’s amazing to see things that this guy was doing 50 years ago still look cutting edge. You don’t have to have a Hoxton fin and listen to Hot Chip to be knocking out devastatingly original work, reassuringly you can just be yourself and care about getting it right.

From a personal perspective, Wim’s interest in typography and his love of grids in particular mirrored the sorts of things that I get a kick out of too.

In some ways I think there is some common typographic DNA in there with things like Vodafone Music, Alfa Mito and England United. All of a sudden my love of grids and patterns is looking positively charismatic.

The most reassuring part of the talk was when Wim freely admitted his most celebrated typeface ‘Neue Alphabet’ was completely illegible. Lovely but illegible. Perhaps his real gift then, was in getting his clients to say yes to it, another art I have definitely yet to master.

Apologies for the poor mobile phone photos, you can see clearer pictures of his work here.