Neutrality

My graduation project at the Royal Academy in Tha Hague, was busy with finding, defining, capturing neutrality through a book, a neutral typeface, an exhibition and its own website.

This project puts forward the question of neutrality in graphic design, especially in typeface design, and shows the way towards one possible answer.

One main part of the project is a research book, that, after an intensive ‹meditation› and discussion of the meanings of ‹neutrality›, shows the development of the concept (and its execution) that will lead to the second main part of the project, a neutral typeface. During the discussion of the problem, in which Daniel van der Velden (NL), Experimental Jetset (NL), Uwe Loesch (DE), Bernd Kuchenbeiser (DE) and Helmut Schmid (CH/JP) are involved, I tried to get a hold of the blurry and slippery notion of ‹neutrality›. I finally came to this definition of neutrality:

Neutrality is nothing but an auxiliary construction that lets us describe things that fulfill the expectations of the members of a specific social and cultural group at a specific point in time. Because naturally these socio-cultural backgrounds of any of the members of a group differ from one another, the size of the group (that agrees on something being neutral) decreases as we begin to zoom in on something, as we start to discuss details. In that, I concluded, neutrality is also a paradoxon, because the closer I wanted to approach neutrality, the less universal would this neutrality of my typeface be. Through this inherent problem, I knew that I would always have to fail the attempt to create a typeface that is completely and totally neutral for anyone but the smallest possible group: myself.

Made as my graduation project at KABK.