Jan Van Toorn vs Wim Crouwel - The Debate

In 1972, Wim Crouwel and Jan van Toorn brought a divide in the design world when they went head to head debating the importance of design beign objective or subjective. The impassioned debate took hold in the Museum Fodor in Amsterdam where Crouwel and van Toorn argued about they're strong ideologies of whether a design should or should not follow objective design.The debate paints van Toorn as the protagonist with his rebellious notions of how design is about involving personality and and politics where as Crouwel is the somewhat the antagonist, explaining how playing by the rules of design is the only way to be a true graphic designer. 

This debate personally inspired me and helped distinguish the type of designer I am, that beign a subjective designer, with this in mind I'm on Jan van Toorn side of this design debate. Being a student who has studied both Fine Art and Graphic Design, I find combining the both together creates stronger meaningful pieces of work referring to how van Toorn states "In fine art, experiments have been done for centuries, perhaps we should pick up more from that tradition and use more from it".

In terms of how Crouwel approaches how design should be, its seems that he see's design a simple listen and do process, without having any form of personal creative overviews on design, seeing the design as more of a machine. He goes on to explain how "Many designers are living with the dilemma of wanting to be a visual artist rather than a good graphic designer" - this clearly juxtaposes van Toorn's ideologies.

The debate doesn't reach to a conclusion, identifying a winner to this debate, however years later both van Toorn and Crouwel hold true to their words, as Crouwel states "Although we are all children of out time, and our ideas always have a certain reflection of that time, generally my ideas have not changed that much. I have always believe that graphic design is a discipline thats should translate a message in an aesthetic and straightforward way, without personal interpretation that have no connection with that message."

In my opinion any form of graphic design work has to involve some form of subjectivity. if you were to give a group of people who follow strict design principles the same brief, the design will not come back identical to each other, this clearly proves that being unique ourselves, we all create subjective design.