Gert Dumbar: Holland’s best-known contemporary graphic designer

The Dutch have given us Philips, Shell and Heineken; they have given the world and South Africa the adjective verkrampte

Today Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has begun to dismantle Holland’s glorious welfare system, the monarchy goes from strength to strength, and Dutch advertising remains an all-American disaster. The Dutch are conservative. They are arrogant. That is the honest truth about the Dutch, written by someone who is half Dutch himself.

But there is another side to the Dutch. What can one say of a nation whose chief left-wing theorist rejoiced in the name Comrade Pancake? Which other Continental country had Protestant trade unions that, when the occupying Germans began their deportations in the last war, organised street protests for which the political leitmotif was ‘keep your dirty hands off our dirty Jews’? It is easy to forget that, after the Great Crash, unemployment in Amsterdam ran to 40 per cent. The Dutch, prosperous burgers and traders at Europe’s hub, have had their upsets and their upsetters too.

Gert Dumbar is an upsetter. He says that his 10-strong consultancy Studio Dumbar stays small and non-hierarchical for pragmatic, not political reasons. But nevertheless he likes to cock a snook. He and his colleagues – he is careful to stress the ‘golden people’ who work with him – do humorous instruction manuals for Bayer, the West German pharmaceuticals giant. Four million manuals will tell people suffering from angina about food and angina. Another four million will tell them about sex and angina. The books are anti-medical, says Dumbar: instead of Swiss type, blacks, reds and ‘an emotional value of zero-point-zero’, they will have fairy-tale illustrations. All this, to make sure that Bayer, one of the original Prussian trusts, doesn’t lose brand loyalty when the people on its pills realise that there are alternatives on the market because the patent on Bayer’s remedy has expired at the end of a seven-year run…

‘I’m after something totally different’, Dumbar says. ‘Don’t ask me how it happens! It falls from the sky. Or, when it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t fall from the sky’.

Some of Dumbar’s views are more conventional. He greatly admires the results, if not the luncheon habits, of British advertising. He favours British graphics for its good manners, its eccentricity and its students: ‘at the RCA we learn a lot from students. Also, we should never forget that they and only they are the end product’. Dumbar has kind words for British illustration, and especially the work of Sue Coe and Adrian George. He wants to work with computers at the RCA, but believes ‘we still have to show that computers can do more than variations on a graphic theme’. Finally Dumbar calls for humour, not Helvetica, in graphic design.

So far, so familiar. But if you look at his work, it is clear that Dumbar stands in a long tradition of Dutch subversives. His new posters for Artifort, a large manufacturer of office furniture, are outrageously shaped, coloured and decorated. The small, obscure graphic devices sprinkled all over Lance Knobel’s Faber guide to twentieth century architecture he describes as ‘confetti’. Dumbar & Co have done a manual telling the management at the ANWB, Holland’s Automobile Association, how to implement the corporate identity scheme they have designed for it. But the thing about the manual is that it’s full of rhymes.

Clients, Dumbar says, are bored with slick, ‘nonsense’ presentations: he dispenses with audio-visual techniques and even the modest flip-chart, preferring to get board directors kneeling down on the carpet before a scatter of A3 sheets on the floor. ‘You can get them to do this after about the third meeting’, he beams, a bit cautiously. ‘But once they start waving the glue and scissors themselves, that’s when you call a halt’.

Is Gert Dumbar for real? Can he really put the RCA’s graphics department together after years of neglect? Being there but one day a week will make tongues wag among the RCA’s critics. Certainly Dumbar leads a frenetic professional life. But he thrives on pressure. ‘The more challenges, the calmer I get’. He is very calm to interview, and very civil too.

Dumbar is 45. In his time he has developed the corporate identity of Holland’s state railways and been a key figure at Tel, one of Holland’s leading design consultancies; now he is working on a complete graphics programme for the Ministry of Agriculture – ‘signage, housestyle, all that bullshit’. Studio Dumbar also has graphics projects with Holland’s Foreign, Economic and Cultural ministries, as well as with the railways. Based at the nation’s political capital, Den Haag, it cannot avoid public sector clients, who anyway constitute the biggest source of demand for design among Holland’s 14 million population.

The man has few ambitions. In five years’ time he wants to be better at drawing landscapes in pen and ink, but that’s all. He knows he has to turn words into deeds at the RCA, but speaks of the staff’s high morale, of big plans to share computer-aided design facilities with the college’s industrial design department (‘they’re the ones who know how to use that stuff’), and of integrating graphics properly with photography and illustration, departments which operate just next to the still furnitureless echos of 23 Cromwell Road.

Turning round RCA graphics will, Dumbar concedes, be a delicate business. But perhaps we are now in the age of the successful one-day-a-week jetting graphics professor. Dumbar concludes of his 18-month chase after IBM computer shops contract: ‘IBM Paris has asked us to do interior design, which we have never done before, for 200 shops in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. We do a lot of international work, but what got us the job was our freshness. We really made IBM open its eyes’.

If Dumbar can do this to IBM, he can probably do it to the RCA.