Hansje van Halem's design and typography work springs from ongoing experiments with digital and hand-drawn textures. In Sketchbook she shares ten year's worth of pattern-play...
As sketchbooks go, this is one of a kind – beautifully bound, perfectly ordered, with a visual index and glossary showing work classified by year, client and type. Its 440-plus pages are saturated with Dutch designer van Halem’s lettering and pattern experiments, some made using a digital drawing tablet, which she says “allowed me to reach inside the computer with my hand”.
Other work is done by hand, but there is no apparent loss of depth and detail. Indeed, six years of intensively drawing digitally appears to have embedded a taste for testing the impact of mechanisation on drawing. After being inspired by a book on lace-making to draw a detailed filigree alphabet in fine-liner pen, van Halem graduated to learning bobbin lace-making, which has in turn inspired a computer-generated ‘woven’ drawing style.
In van Halem’s hands, letterforms become fields in which to play with form, pattern and repetition, pushing the bounds of readability. Patterns and textures are a way to explore systems and rules – “the urge to decorate is freed”.
Despite its breadth and polished presentation, however, this truly is a sketchbook, because the work within is a background to the designer’s wider practice – a playground for ideas and a springboard to new projects. The book records works from every stage of the creative process from failures, rejects and unfinished experiments, to fully-formed client commissions.
www.hansje.net
