From the Socialist Party of the Netherlands to Public Museums: A Dutch Design Vendor's 26 Years of Watching the Trade | 100 People With Ideas

"Designers are machines that manufacture visibility." But who decides what deserves to be seen? And how much does the vendor weigh in that?

If a museum wants to promote itself, graphic design would seem to matter little. Cultural institutions only took up brand-building recently; before that, most people preferred to let the collection speak. The works, the artists, the exhibitions — a museum's value was self-evident. Typefaces, colors and packaging, by contrast, made people wary. Wouldn't such changeable, commercially charged elements break the purity of art?

What can a graphic designer do beyond supplying an eye-catching logo? In 1996 that question landed in front of two Dutch designers. Nikki Gonnissen and Thomas Widdershoven, both young, teamed up and founded a graphic design studio called Thonik, a name stitched together from their two first names. After a scattering of small commissions for artist friends, they finally landed their first big project: a new set of posters for the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.

They used five C's for the museum's five collections, and the C's kept moving — sometimes scattered over a Renaissance religious painting by Jan van Scorel, sometimes planted squarely on the tip of an artist's nose. Unlike the traditional art world with its air of mystery, these C's seemed to observe no taboos. They could turn up anywhere, which created the impression that even artists can take a joke.

For the next eight years, people kept spotting the five C's on the streets of Utrecht. The exhibition announcements, refreshed on a regular cycle, looked no different from a clothing brand's new-season campaign — which was exactly the wall Thonik wanted to knock down. Why shouldn't people drop in on cultural venues as regularly as they browse a department store?

"We wanted museums to prove themselves on the street, in public space — to show that this cultural infrastructure is visible, that it is part of daily life, and not just something a small, obscure circle talks about."

In 2018 Thonik published Why We Design, which discusses that first project. More than twenty years on, cultural institutions around the world have become about as approachable as the two of them once hoped. The Amsterdam studio now has clients everywhere — Europe, the US, Asia, even Latin America.

"Why do graphic designers design? We don't often ask ourselves such an ultimate question," Thomas told QDaily. Their solo show opened at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai in late March. Twenty-six years after founding the studio, this vendor to cultural institutions wants to talk about what it has seen.

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After Utrecht came Rotterdam. In 2003 the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen invited Thonik to design a new visual identity. This time they were bolder.

Thonik paid homage to the mark Lance Wyman, the New York graphic designer, made for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, reworking the Schulbuch typeface — cutting out the diagonals, adjusting the stroke weight and the color. But this black-and-white line lettering no longer sat obediently on posters. It invaded the museum wholesale, and one atrium was painted black and white.

People were not sure what to make of the shock. Some said it amounted to stamping a postmark across the collection — the black lines really did look like one. Was this accessible or was it kitsch? People were already asking that more than a decade ago.

Design critic Hugues Boekraad once argued that these years were a "revolution" in visual communication. For years people had known two kinds of visual presentation. One was corporate identity: relatively static, which is why a new logo always sets off argument. The other was media promotion: seasonal, fresh, all over the streets. Art institutions, especially those living on public subsidy, were more at home with the first.

But as private institutions kept appearing, some public ones began trying new ideas to raise their profile. Government attitudes played a part too. European governments used to stress the collection; now they stress public education. A museum's job is no longer to repair and preserve old objects but to tell a good story. Some governments even tie public education to a museum's public funding.

"In the late 1990s Dutch design entered a golden age — architecture, cities, graphics. We were the generation that grew up inside it," Thomas said. The boom across the whole design industry brought them new clients.

The three red X's now visible all over Amsterdam, the city's identity, are Thonik's work as well. To get there they scrapped 55 chaotic, mutually incompatible identity systems; the difficulty was not persuading the public sector but working out how the new system would connect to the old symbols.

In these years international biennials and triennials kept appearing and had not yet decayed into industry parties that people breeze through, so Thonik had more room to work.

In 2012 the ninth Manifesta was held in Genk, Belgium, in a hall inside a disused coal mine. As in many heavy-industry cities in China, the mine and the city had risen and fallen together.

By the time curator Cuauhtémoc Medina arrived, only broken ground was left. The theme he chose was The Deep of the Modern: beyond the fractured surface, what else can you see?

Nikki remembers the trip to Genk as a piece of anthropological fieldwork. What they delivered in the end was an intricate design.

The Manifesta 9 mark splits into two halves: solid black letters above, and below them a run of lines standing for the lifts and gangways that carried miners down the shaft — and for an exhibition that wanted to trace the tangled threads buried under the surface.

The catalogue and the website were designed to read as an "underground encyclopedia."

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"Designers don't usually think about 'why' — we'd rather leave that philosophical question to artists. We talk with clients constantly, but usually about specific details. Everyone seems to assume that a (graphic) designer can wave a wand and solve everything. Why We Design takes a subtler position. We hope it pushes people to step outside and look hard at our trade."

"Designers are machines that manufacture visibility," Thomas told me. But who decides what deserves to be seen? And how much does the vendor weigh in that?

In 2006 Thonik met an unusual client: the Socialist Party of the Netherlands.

The Socialist Party had always been a marginal figure in Dutch politics. In 2002 a politician from an anti-immigration party was shot dead by a left-wing radical, and the left, the Socialist Party included, came to be seen as lunatics and extremists. To change its public image, the party turned to the cultural world for help.

Thonik was invited to a roundtable, where Thomas objected to the party's existing mark and its campaign slogan. The old mark was a tomato in mid-throw, the designer having drawn in the arc of its flight. "A tomato that confrontational puts distance between you and people. It carries violence. It even calls up the Cold War and totalitarian rule."

The slogan had the same problem. The original ran "Vote Against, Vote SP" — vote for the voice of opposition, vote for the Socialist Party. "But shouldn't the better line be Vote For Something?"

Thonik drew a new mark: a bright, full tomato, cute and a little funny. Playing the villain became fashionable, even if you couldn't tell whether it might slide into populism.

In a later discussion they settled on a narrower subject: home care for the elderly.

The topic came from MP Agnes Kant. After 2000 the Dutch government considered bringing market mechanisms into public health. Dutch seniors had been receiving fairly stable home care, but as budgets shrank, work once done by one dedicated caregiver was cut into separate tasks handed to different people. Growing old lost any privacy at all.

"That is the problem shrinking pension budgets create. To push every cost to a minimum you need an industrial division of labor, chopping everything into pieces."

"I understood all of this and wanted more people to know, but a friend at a television station told me: old people? That subject isn't sexy at all," Kant said, exasperated that nobody cared about elder care. So Thonik made a one-minute video with an 88-year-old woman, Mieke Mink.

Mink's own life was being affected. Facing the camera, she said: "For years Mary looked after me. Then they said Mary was too expensive, and a stranger I didn't know came instead. After that, another stranger." As she spoke she took off her clothes in front of the camera, until she was completely naked. "I might as well strip in front of the whole country."

Persuading Mink was not hard. In her youth she had been an actress, and she had once worked as an extra in a film by the British director Peter Greenaway.

"In political arguments and big policy shifts, actual people are replaced by abstract numbers, and lives end up governed by budgets," Thomas said. They wanted to hand power back to the people who get turned into abstractions in political debate, and to show their situation as it is.

The spot set off a fierce argument once it aired. "At first people thought the Socialist Party had lost its mind — why make an old woman do this on camera? But then they started asking what was actually going on." In 2010, pushed by Kant, a new home-care law passed.

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In 2008 Thonik came to China for the first time, with a Shanghai solo show called Power, where the one-minute video was screened in public. "You could see that Mink's body was already frail, but her eyes were full of power. As if she were full of anger."

The video did not appear in this year's show. "Is nudity still off-limits in China today?" Nikki asked. They have done several Chinese projects by now, and the new market still makes them curious.

"The Netherlands is simply too small — you could say design already fills it up. Here is a whole new world, and we're still learning."

As Europe's art market has faded, the ones who went out ahead of them were their old friends, the architects and the curators. On a map of art activity moving outward, it looks like a beach landing.

After the 2008 Shanghai show, Thonik worked with the Power Station of Art, splitting the Chinese character dang — the "contemporary" in the museum's Chinese name — into five lines shaped like the tall smokestack of the old power plant. Variations and combinations of those five lines turn up on the website, on posters, on promotional material and on merchandise. "Remember the five C's in Utrecht? We used that idea again."

Thonik has also stepped in front of the camera, joining exhibitions as the subject. At the 2015 Brazilian design biennial, for instance, they produced 28 flags for the host city, Florianópolis. Each flag carried a close-up of a detail from a local building — a window, a railing, a decorative line on a wall.

"Flags are usually about the group, but this time we wanted to make a flag for each single person," Nikki said. It also touches the city's history: Brazil's first large public demonstration against the military regime of the day broke out here, right outside what is now the Dutch consulate.

Nikki and Thomas travel constantly. Lately they have spotted interesting movement in both Latin America and India. "Those may turn out to be the emerging markets."

Shenzhen is another gathering point for designers. Thonik did the visual design for the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008, curated by the American architecture critic Aaron Betsky, who was also one of the co-curators of the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Thonik did the visual design for that biennale too.

Design Society in Shenzhen is another Thonik partner. Its director is Dutch as well: the well-known curator Ole Bouman.

Cuauhtémoc Medina, curator of the ninth Manifesta, was one of the chief curators of last year's Shanghai Biennale. As in 2012, the theme he set for it, Proregress, was again an answer to modernity. Is history really moving forward? Or is it going round in circles?

"We want to be a machine that manufactures visibility," Thomas said. "Maybe that is one way to describe the age we live in: what can't be seen doesn't exist."

There is another question, of course. When the same group of people always asks the questions, will their knowledge and their class produce permanent blind spots?

Unless otherwise credited, all images in this article are courtesy of Thonik.