“Absence in design is very important”: Karel Martens on paying attention to the things we don’t see

He may be 81 years old, with a career spanning 60 years and counting, but Karel Martens is still of the mindset that his work can always be better. It’s what drives the self-professed workaholic, he tells us over a video call, and it’s the reason he’s updated his historic monograph several times. Originally published back in 1996, the monograph was an instant classic in its extensive survey of the prolific graphic designer’s career. As well as co-founding the two-year master’s programme at Werkplaats Typografie, with Wigger Bierma in Arnhem, Karel, a central figure in the Dutch modernist movement, seems to have designed it all. Throughout his impressive career he has turned his hand to stamps, coins and films – not to mention every other graphic design staple, from books to corporate identities.

Flicking through his monographs provides a tireless flow of inspiration, including most recently the one published on the cusp of 2020 by Roma Publications. Featuring an open Japanese bind and double-sheeted spreads, this most recent monograph is different to its predecessors for its play with borders, as Karel puts it, an interesting area “where two worlds meet”. A philosophical interpretation for someone more renowned for their technical, more specifically typographic precision. Beyond this distinction with borders, however, which Karel has designed “as close to the edge as possible”, and beyond the visual impressiveness of each comprehensive spread, Re-Printed Matter remains resolute in its detail and beauty. It’s also a testament to Karel Martens’ unyielding and ever-curious approach to creativity.

Karel could have easily developed an ego, so it’s refreshing to hear someone of his stature freely admit that “sometimes you still make the same old stupid mistakes.” It’s this criticality that drives him to keep making work, but that also on the flip side prevents him from looking back at old projects with nostalgia. For him, mistakes give rise to unexpected surprises, especially those made on the computer, a technology established decades into his career. “It can be a nice surprise or not so nice a surprise,” he says, “but by making mistakes, sometimes you feel like, wow, where did that come from?”

“I am from the generation where the computer came to us later in life, even though it’s not that long ago in historical terms. But I am thinking it’s not for me, it’s for the new generations. There is a lot of knowledge that I don’t understand,” he says. To process this, he made a movie, a way for him to do something with the experience. At the time, he was working on a university lecture and as he always does, he pinned reference images on the wall as an “extension of memory”, an archive of sorts. Karel’s daughter – who incidentally is also a graphic designer – took pictures of the wall, every ten centimetres to make into presentation slides. And after the lecture, a pupil asked to have a copy of the slides, which for Karel, meant using a scanner for the first time.

“So I started making scans of the slides and it ended up being the wrong resolution, the wrong cropping,” he says. When those first attempts at scans landed on Karel’s computer’s desktop, it was “a mess” – as he puts it, “full of shit, full of the wrong things”. With help from a technician at the computer lab, hundreds of Karel’s scans suddenly came to life as they were organised in a folder. “Let me make a movie out of it,” he thought, as he imagined the scans as frames, edited together in an ordered sequence. “It was exciting. And it was also done with new technology.”

Arguably, what Karel is describing is the result of our Instagram-centric design scene today, a medium which calls for instant gratification as you scroll through your feed. In turn, this can lead to an overload of visual stimuli where all the answers are seemingly in one place. By comparison, when Karel started out his career in what he calls “the classical time”, design called for, literally, a more measured approach.

To create a beautiful piece of work, the designer had to centre the text, align the capitals, space each glyph perfectly and so on, all by hand. Of course, doing this on the computer also requires a lot of creative expression and aesthetic sensibility, but it’s a different set of skills. Some could say that modern technology has made the designer “lazier”, but on the other hand, for Karel, it doesn’t make sense to go back to analogue methods. What we have today works for a reason. The past has been done.

In this way, says Karel, “it’s surprising that people are still making classical typefaces.” It would go against his belief in modernism to say otherwise; a school of thought he is famous for and which, above all, embraces the new. Though he makes astute comparisons on how different the industry’s processes are today, he does not claim a preference for one over the other, and respects the creative values of the time. Instead, he merely offers his observations in relation to his own experiences. Like this one: “It’s stupid to make a book in a way that nobody can make anymore. It’s passé, it may be beautiful and it’s still beautiful if it’s repeated. But after the second or third time, I believe you should start something new.”

While Karel duly acknowledges that tradition is important, he also points out the necessity of criticality. A designer can still be part of a long tradition while questioning their purpose or process at the same time. Why should something change? If a laborious, drawn-out process no longer offers benefits in its efficiency, economy or concept, then what is it a stylistic expression of? “For me,” says Karel, “that’s the starting point or a kind of measurement.”

He takes the example of the colour black; an undying staple in design. In terms of Eurocentric design history, however, the colour black, in principle, originates from the bible. It was used as a representation of the human voice where there was no reason to give it a colour. Today, “it’s important to have that knowledge in history, so some people can form an argument to change it.” All that being said, as he pointed out later on in a conversation about how designers often play with distinctions, “When all the world is in colour, a black-and-white movie is a relief.”

He’s just as much a teacher as he is a designer in the field. And this is where his remarkable breadth of knowledge comes in handy. Confident in his own opinions and values, as a teacher, Karel prefers to guide students rather than “teach them things” in the definitive sense. It’s a philosophy Werkplaats Typografie was founded on: to guide. If he sees a student who is always making the same kind of thing, perhaps avoiding a certain element of their practice, Karel will say “why not, that’s one of the qualities of your voice. Nice voices don’t necessarily have to be perfect.”

Teaching is “a kind of broad way of gaining information,” he says, explaining that learning is a two-way street between pupil and professor. Every autumn (with the exception of 2020, given the pandemic), Karel usually journeys to New York to lecture at Yale School of Art. He notes the multiculturalism of the student population – people from all over the world, from differing cultures and backgrounds too. And when such a wide-ranging group gathers together in one place, “you can learn a lot.” It goes back to his quintessential view that curiosity is key, as now, for a man who has done so many wonderful things and inspired so many people, he concludes: “I’m regretting more of the things that I didn’t do in my life than the things that I did.”