BB The Werkplaats Typografie (post-graduate school of graphic design in The Netherlands), has been awarded a Honorary Mention at the 26th Brno Biennial 2014. The jury has awarded this prize on the basis of your work, which has been selected for and exhibited as a part of the International Exhibition: Student Work. Could you tell us a bit about what that school meant for you and the influence it had on your work and practice?
GB & IC & AH & CN Our view on graphic design was definitely influenced by our time at the school, its structure and non-structure, and its communal participatory nature. Perhaps a few know by now, Werkplaats stimulates a two-folded practice – one that is centered around commissions and one’s own research and projects. Everyone can choose how to calibrate their focus. Arnhem is a rather secluded place, so it offers a lot of time to spend with each other and/or alone. Precisely this time is a huge catalyst in conversations about/around design, that eventually produces physical results – visual language. This language, without doubt, is also influenced by a broader context and history of Dutch design.

BB You all work independently (Anna, Goda, Ines) or as a member of a small design studio (Corina). Can you tell us a bit about the, fairly recent, transition between the school and the practice in the, so to say, real world?
GB & IC & AH & CN The four of us already had some design education and also work experience before studying at Werkplaats Typografie (WT) (as most participants do). The fact that while studying at WT one is already working on practical assignments but also dedicating time on self-initiated projects probably helps on one hand to start a network and on the other hand that the transition from school to the ‘real’ world does not feel like a big jump but a continuation of how one learned to work.

BB We have asked you to use the collection of graphic design of the Brno Biennial as a point of departure for your exhibition. Did you come across any surprises? What are the differences between graphic design now and graphic design of 50 years ago?
GB & IC & AH & CN The archive of Brno Biennial is spread around different locations in town, so getting hold of the actual material can be quite a task. You could say it has many points of departure. And it’s definitely how it can feel when you start discussing the question posed regarding the differences in graphic design.
Eventually, we relied on the catalogues of the past Biennials to provide us with the most complete (and compact) overview of what is/was out there. Browsing through the material shown in the biennial catalogues, what’s shown appears somehow flattened, serial, out of context and with its origins obscured – in a way equivalent to images on an Instagram account or a Tumblr page – yet the details of the designs still speak to us. That friction between the flat and vivid is fascinating. But we wondered what do these decisive details reveal of the origin in a thinking process?
In order to make that ‘conversation’ with the archive more alive, we decided to use its details to begin an examination of our own respective practices, clashing the material from the biennial’s archive with our own work, ultimately asking questions about the kind of decisions we make as designers: on a formal level; on a conceptual level, and in response to the social, cultural, economical and technological conditions of our times.
You could say that it became an introspective process, that finally took the shape of the exhibition. It’s definitely a subjective take on the material of the archive or history of visual language, which looks at the examples of reproduction of form and ways of thinking.

BB Have you discovered something for yourself when working on your contribution to this Biennial, and when going through its archive?
GB & IC & AH & CN While going trough the extensive collection of posters from the archive we discovered we could relate to many designs and graphic ideas while comparing it to our own practice. Although running four different studios we came to the conclusion we could almost always agree on whether a design still works for us or not. Since we were looking to (mostly) black & white representations of the real posters, the selection was taken very intuitively. Still, we agreed. This is where we thought about our time at Werkplaats Typografie as a shared experience – it felt like we weren’t four different designers having different opinions but one body, selecting one body of work.

BB This edition of the Brno Biennial responds to the metamorphoses and the state of contemporary graphic design; its multitude, variety, vagueness and apparent superficiality. Can you identify some of the basic parameters, current themes or motivations of contemporary graphic design?
GB & IC & AH & CN Graphic design and visual language spreads so fast these days, it can hardly be traced back to one place, school or person anymore. That’s also why we choose to look into the catalogues of the Brno Biennial as an equivalent to an infinite stream of new visual material, from which we can extract formal details that we find still relevant today. What was difficult to find out when looking at the catalogues were the ideas and concepts behind the works – which we feel is similar as perceiving graphic design when browsing on the web.
By talking to each other about our own concepts and designs in comparison with the archive images, we developed one linear story, told by one voice. The collection of extracts is shown in the exhibition space as ‘one body of work’ crawling through the exhibition space as a linear associative chain of posters. By combining extracts from the historic archive and our own contemporary visual language and ideas, we want to open a dialogue on what represents graphic design today.