By Gabrielle Kennedy / 05-01-2010

Like a committed craftsmen in a backstreet workshop, Joost Grootens has been quietly mastering his techniques of book design for the last decade.

And no one was more shocked then he when his name was recently announced as the recipient of the Rotterdam Design Prize. “I really didn’t think I had a chance,” Grootens says.  “Recently Dutch design has mostly been about product design and when Alice Rawsthorn spoke earlier in the evening about the Dutch design climate, she didn't mention graphics.”

Grootens, who lectures for the Master’s programme at the Design Academy Eindhoven, moves without any of the usual fanfare surrounding big time designers despite winning a slew of prestigious awards.

“I think I have the sort of opposite attitude to many Dutch designers and most of the other nominees,” says Grootens.  “I see designers as intermediaries and I think we should be modest.  We shouldn’t be that present, which contradicts the trend for art designers or author designers who seem to be so much about their own ideas.”

Grootens doesn’t want to be known as the map geek - many of his books contain no maps at all - but it’s a format that really suits his mentality.  “Even in my earliest work, I’d find a way to include a map,” he says.  “The client never asked for it, but it was my way of offering information in an alternative way.”

The approach is more than just mapping locations, but about mapping and cataloguing information to make it more visual and intuitive.  “Maps are the most rational and neutral way to present a narrative,” Grootens says.  His method is to design visual cartographs of data, and then attach indexes to provide meaning.

For the Rotterdam Design Prize, four of Grootens’ books were displayed.  “I wanted to show how my approach has evolved,” he says.  “It’s important to see how I have learnt when it comes to ink, materials and typography.”

In the detailed jury report written by Louise Schouwenberg and Hugues Boekraad it reads: “The judges unanimously described Grootens’ work as of the moment and world class. They liked his attitude. Grootens attaches great importance to the clarity of the information. His design is clearly intended to serve the reader. For Grootens, designing is not a self-seeking activity, nor does it mean promulgating a particular vision. The result is at once brilliant and functional.”

Given the suffocating amount of information available in today’s high-tech world and the overload of opinion we need to sift through, presenting information in an edited and intuitive format is, as the judges unanimously stated, “brilliant”.

In the Limes Atlas, Grootens uses the northern defence border of the Roman Empire (called Limes), to explore changes in the Dutch landscape. An initiative of the Dutch Architecture Foundation, the atlas shows how Dutch history has literally sunk into the ground.  

Flipping through his other publications one can see how Grootens has technically developed.  His more recent books are printed in five original colours instead of the more usual CMYK printing technique that gives an atlas that familiar tone and appearance.  “I think the quality really got lost in printing as technology evolved,” he says.  “By using colours like day-glow orange, metallic blue and tinted varnish I can create my own identity which leads to a certain intensity … all the colours I use have a particular and familiar function.”

In the Metropolitan World Atlas Grootens challenges the very notion of what a city is through mapping characteristics like economic growth, crime, housing density and peak hour commute times in one hundred and one cities across the globe. “It’s then easy to visualize where a city stands in comparison to one hundred other cities,” he says. “You can immediately see that a city is not that big, but not that small either and then get a good feel for what that actually means.”

In his latest atlas, Vinex Atlas Grootens delves into the controversial and often vilified world of those spatial development programmes in the Netherlands called Vinex.  “Everybody has something bad to say about these neighbourhoods but most people have never even been there,” he says.  “My maps present information about them in a neutral way so people can start to learn about the places rationally and without such weighted opinions.”

Next up for Grootens is “I Swear I Use No Art At All,” a book that will map the decade he has spent designing books and take readers on a mapped journey through the people, places and events he has encountered.

Most of Joost Grootens’ work to date has been commissioned by 010 Publishers.

Images: Main and two small from top -  JG_Vier Atlassen (De Grote KAN Atlas, Limes Atlas, Metropolitan World Atlas and Vinex Atlas) - 010 Publishers, 2003, 2005, 2005 & 2008
Vinex Atlas (010 Publishers, 2008)
Zakboek voor de woonomgeving (010 Publishers, 2003)
Metropolitan World Atlas (010 Publishers, 2005)
Prix de Rome 2002 (010 Publishers, 2002)
Receiving the Rotterdam Design Prize from from Alice Rawsthorn

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