Design Commissions
Design agency 75B has created a new routing to guide Het Nieuwe Instituut's guests and employees through the foyer during the corona crisis. 75B (Rens Muis and Pieter Vos) is a graphic design agency known for its colourful, bold and playful designs.
Routing Het Nieuwe Instituut
"Abstract electric chemistry," is how Pieter Vos sums up 75B's wayfinding design for Het Nieuwe Instituut. When the request came in to design the routing , the designers realised that the new reality, created by the arrival of Covid-19, calls for a new language. The graphic design agency didn't want to impose a rigid grid or work with peremptory arrows. "We searched for a form of communication that's inviting and not overbearing," says Vos. "A new graphic language to help people develop new patterns of behaviour for a new reality."
The starting point for the design was the coding used to record and communicate chemical and electrical processes and systems. When someone comes close to another person, their heart reacts to the other with electrical signals. "There's a lot of scientific research on this," explains Vos. The designers combined the coding which records the molecular structures of chemical processes with that which identifies electrical systems in architectural working drawings. "It's a graphic language that people intuitively recognise," says Vos.
The result is a playful, personal routing system that invites people to independently adapt to the new reality and take each other into account. The design consists of a toolkit with different parts that can be used in different places and in different ways. The design of 75B is combined in Het Nieuwe Instituut with a spatial intervention by Frank Bruggeman, who marks the movement space of the visitors with plants and flowers.
The 75B design is intended as an investigation, a graphic exploration of a new reality. "We especially need new rules for interiors, where people come together in delimited spaces," says Vos. "Outside, it's generally easier to keep a sufficient distance; inside it's more difficult. Graphic design manifests itself mainly in places where many people come together." Leading to the question, he stresses, of how long this reality will last. Are we going to have to redesign and reinvent spaces where many people gather together? Or will the adjustments be temporary, and can we make do with relatively minor graphic and spatial interventions? These are the questions that will occupy us in the near future.
75B
75B (Rens Muis and Pieter Vos) is a graphic design agency known for its colourful, bold and playful designs. As you walk from Rotterdam Central Station to 75B's studio in a side street off the Witte de Withstraat, the agency announces itself with a one-to-one portfolio. On the corner there's a poster for pop venue Annabel, and a bit further along the facade is the Codarts logo. The Rotterdam International Film Festival's tiger follows on from the moving screens of the façade of concert hall de Doelen, and continues through the campaign for bag designer Susan Bijl's new collection, just behind the Kaapse Brouwers brewery's van parked outside. The designers are good at creating a recognisable image, but they are also happy to work on a carefully worked-out house style, for the Mondriaan Fund, or a new routing for de Doelen, which is serviceably incorporated into the architecture.