Blog

Door Albert Lammers

I once had a friend who worked at VUGA, a scientific publisher in the Zeestraat in The Hague, where I would later also work for the neighbor Panorama Mesdag. Handy of course if your friend is a designer, then you can more easily convert the brochures you write into a usable product.

COVER
After doing this for quite some time, I had to come by for something other than a brochure.

During the discussion it became clear that this time it was a cover of a magazine for the traffic police called “Knooppunt”.

I started working with the indicated points for a new cover for the traffic police junction and quickly came up with a striped construction that ran diagonally together with an acute angle at the end to end straight again - vertically or horizontally. This was a strong presence for a cover along with the headline.

Personally, I didn't think my design for the cover was entirely successful, except for the "knot" and I threw these magazines out of my saved hardcopy files. The digital files are also so old that I can no longer open them. I haven't seen the friend in question in decades. So you might think that this story is completely contrived to be interesting. That seems obvious, but I can assure you that this is not the case and the hard copies are still stored somewhere in someone's archives.

PUNCHED OR INSPIRATION
During the period when these stripes were used for the magazine, and before of course, the stripes on police vehicles were not yet available. When these appeared there was some surprise. This construction was undoubtedly “borrowed” from me or provided quite a bit of inspiration. It is common knowledge that forms and inventions are sometimes invented at the same time. The spirit of the times, fashion and current affairs can sometimes lead to this. However, this form was 1 or 2 years old and was for a traffic police magazine. Then some sirens go off.

WHO OH WHO
It is not entirely clear who created this version of the stripes. It can be found on the net that Aad Voermans from Aangenaam Ontwerp in Utrecht and Studio Dumbar may have something to do with the stripes. I haven't worried about the issue either, a little boy like me won't get far. There is no point in arguing over who is the spiritual father of these stripes, because before you know it you will see them up close and this design is so old that there is no point in creating a story anymore.

I do hope that someone has a version of my design with the knot, and I will come back to it in this blog.