Paul Mijksenaar by : Roots April 21, 2020
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Paul Mijksenaar By : Roots April 21, 2020 Born in the last year of the war but one, Paul comes as a surprise to his parents, who already have three daughters. He grows up in a house on Watteaustraat, while his father works as head of press and information for Amsterdam’s municipal government, his expertise and skills so valued that a meeting room at the city hall is named in his honour. Meanwhile Paul saws open his toy cars, removes or combines various parts and paints ‘Mijks 1’ or ‘Mijks 2’ on them. On the upper ledge of his folding bed, he builds an aircraft carrier out of paper and plastic with planes he equips with lights using slide contacts. Engineering fascinates him. Creative team behind ‘Freedom of the Press’, published by ‘Grafisch Nederland’, 1976, l. to r.: Paul Mijksenaar, Piet Schreuders and Nico Scheepmaker. In 1956 he enrols at the Montessori Lyceum in Amsterdam and spends most of his time drawing planes, cars and tow trucks for ‘Garage Mijks’. He has to repeat a year and continues his secondary schooling in 1959 at a three-year secondary school with a commercial training programme on the Roelof Hartplein. He is just as bored with this school. On Sundays his mother goes to church and his father takes him out in his official car, a blue Ford Zephyr with a ‘permit for exemption from visible official vehicle identification’, driving through the new garden suburbs, over bridges and along the expanding docklands. In these docklands, deserted on Sundays, his father teaches him to drive. At 16 he is chauffeuring his parents all over the Netherlands. IvKNO His school helps him choose a profession by having various training and academic programmes give presentations. The moment he sees the one by the product design programme at the Institute for Applied Arts Education (IvKNO, now the Rietveld Academy) he knows one thing for certain: this is it. Back home, his mother’s reaction is ‘I’d just as soon throw you down the well’. His father makes inquiries on this programme at city hall and, with his approval, Paul draws an Amsterdam cityscape and a launching platform for rockets and composes a letter explaining why he wants to go into product design. Whereupon, in 1960, still 16, he is accepted by the school’s director, Mr Vis, backed by instructor Wim Jaarsveld, who teaches product design. His other instructors include art historian Fred Zimmerman, sculptor Jos Wong and painter and graphic designer Theo Kurpershoek, who teaches him calligraphy. The lessons given by draughtsman Piet Klaasse go well as long as machines, rather than people or animals, need to be drawn. Graphic and industrial designer Charles Jongejans teaches graphic design and Jaap Kruijff teaches technical drawing as a meticulous preparation for the production process. This fascinates Paul, as does the annual two-week field trip organized by Jaarsveld to various Dutch and Belgian industrial firms. He drives one of the two hired vans. While the curriculum fits in better with his interests, it still doesn’t really excite him. To pass his subjects, he knuckles down just a couple of weeks a year and becomes a master at presentation. The rest of the time he wanders around the city, along the displays in hardware shops, strolls about the stalls on the Waterlooplein flea market, looking everywhere, even in scrap heaps and junkyards, for anything that seems useful to him. In an Amsterdam becoming ever more boisterous as a changing political awareness emerges in a restless society, Paul pursues his own interests. His approach to the world is not so much emotional as rational. Collecting and combining bits of knowledge to turn them into ingenious engineering. He loves to read about that aspect of the world. Like the 1963 article on the work Jock Kinneir did on traffic signs on British roadways. This combines many of his interests: crystal-clear communications through painstakingly constructed graphic figures, such as lines and arrows in a variety of colours, functioning in combination with letters and numbers within a strict typographic system. Hoornsche Metaalwaren Fabriek, 1965 Golden Form At the end of five years at the applied arts school, he sits in his student room with his diploma. Getting swallowed up in a company doesn’t appeal to him. What to do now? His father secures him several commissions for his municipal information work. His former teacher Charles Jongejans provides him with an introduction to the Hoornsche Metaalwarenfabriek, a metalworking factory that wants to expand its line with household products. Mijksenaar comes up with these and cuts and folds them out of coloured paper or plastic. Sometimes they are actually put into production, like the ashtray with an anti-smoke flap and his tea light. He receives the ‘Gouden Vorm’ (‘Golden Form’) award for both, but his designs are too minimalist, too lightweight and too inexpensive to serve as desirable gift items. In the end the factory goes bankrupt. His friendship with Joost Elffers brings him into the home of the latter’s father. In 1967 Dick Elffers asks for his assistance putting together the ‘Colour and Motif’ Christmas issue of the weekly printing industry periodical Drukkersweekblad en Autolijn. This publication gets him in touch with the Royal Netherlands Federation of Graphic Enterprises, which subsequently gives him all kinds of commissions. Paul Mijksenaar goes into graphic design. ‘Grafische Revue’, 1971 / Lecturis documentary, 1974 / Lecturis documentary, 1991 For the first periodical he designs, the Monroepost, the house organ of an American manufacturer of – then still entirely mechanical – calculators, he draws detailed vignettes. Together these form a series; individually their meaning is revealed in combination with the text under them. He co- founds his second periodical in 1971. Its cover says simply Graficus Revue – ‘Graphic Arts’. Its contents deal with such subjects as graphic design, typography and wayfinding signage. Frits de Winter is its editor- in-chief, Aart Clerx draws the comic strip and Mijksenaar does the layout, produces some of the illustrations and writes articles. Like the long, exhaustive article ‘Typography in Wayfinding Signage, or the Battle Between Aesthetics and the Slide Rule’, in which he discusses the legibility of typefaces and research into reading, compares the wayfinding systems of Britain, the United States and the Netherlands, and challenges the ANWB, the Royal Dutch Touring Club, about the poor quality of their road signs at the time. After six issues the Graficus Revue folds, because there are not enough subscribers to support the magazine. Metro Mijksenaar continues to write alongside his graphics work and remains interested in wayfinding signage. On his page in the illustrated members’ list of the GVN (Netherlands Graphic Designers) he states: ‘The “wayfinding signage” of the Netherlands still leaves a lot to be desired in cities, neighbourhoods, commercial estates and buildings. This is what led Paul Mijksenaar and Gerard Unger to work together. We provide consulting advice on visual and non-visual route information systems, in interior as well as exterior environments.’ A year later they jointly publish two lengthy inventory articles in an issue of Plan, a monthly periodical for design and spatial planning. Their thorough analysis does not lead to any commissions, whereupon they close their ‘Sign design’ agency. Pieter Brattinga, however, is impressed. In 1974 he invites the two men to join the specialist team with which he is advising Amsterdam’s municipality on the visual aspects of the city’s first metro line. The other members are Paul Laarhoven, Anthon Beeke and Siep Wijsenbeek. Mijksenaar focuses on the systematics of the planned metro network. He recommends numbering the metro lines (this advice will be followed 30 years later), designs a map that shows a schematic representation of the metro lines and places a line map above the doors in the metro trains that also shows connections to other public transport. Metro GVB Amsterdam, 1976 That same year the Lecturis printing house in Eindhoven begins publishing its ‘documentaries’, with Wim Crouwel as editor-in-chief. He invites Mijksenaar to produce the first instalment, incidentally entitled Is There a Point to Graphic Design. In it he analyses the range of graphic media and the encoding and decoding of messages. He discusses various communication processes and theories, such as semiotics, in relation to the functioning of our brain. This makes it clear to the reader that graphic design can be more than just form. In 1990 he will take over the editing of the series, publishing the documentary Exploded Images, an ode to the technical drawing, a year later. In 1976, with Piet Schreuders, Mijksenaar edits and designs the Grafisch Nederland Christmas issue, entitled ‘Freedom of the Press’. Meanwhile he advertises ‘Garage Mijks’, a fictional business inspired by the garage built out of painted triplex where he used to take his toy cars for repairs, in Schreuders’s periodicals Furore and De Poezenkrant. Advert for ‘Garage Mijks’ in ‘Furore’ magazine, 1976 / Routext typeface system. Typography: Gerard Unger, 1976 Routext As a student of Charles Jongejans at the Institute for Applied Arts Education, Mijksenaar made models of signs on which you could compose all kinds of text using individual letters. He starts working on a plastic variant in 1976, in collaboration with the Kemperman company. It takes many years to make the injection moulding of the plastic blocks seamless and to silkscreen the smallest characters in a single saturated pass. Gerard Unger is recruited to do the typography. He simplifies the typeface horizontally into eight widths. Vertically he gives each line sufficient spacing to guarantee legibility and positions the x height away from the midpoint, so that reversible letters immediately stand out.