Joost Grootens

Like most designers, I’m a big fan of Dutch design, including perennial favorites like Karel Martens, Wim Crouwel, and Experimental Jetset. But for me, Joost Grootens is the 🐐.

What draws me most is his pragmatism. Grootens is known for information design, especially atlases, and he prioritizes large clear gestures and getting the information across over polish. Hierarchy often comes from spacing rather than subtle changes to the type’s size or weight, legend symbols are included in the running text, a chart’s line climbs into the paragraph above it, and key features spill past the edge of the map when they need to. I relate to the challenge of making technical material approachable, and his atlases are my personal favorite answer to it.

Open atlas spread titled Landscape Structure: two facing maps of Dutch soils in pinks, yellows and olive greens, with a legend of color swatches along the bottom. On the right-hand map, a grey river runs out past the map’s frame.
Atlas of the New Dutch Water Defence Line: a soft, limited palette, and a river that runs past the map’s edge
Open book spread titled Marunouchi Tokyo: a timeline from 1960 to 2020 with bars for building projects and a line for land prices that climbs up through the rows of policies and events listed above, over a table of buildings.
The Grand Projet: a timeline of Tokyo’s Marunouchi district, where the land-price line climbs into the policies and events above it
Open book spread titled Density and Urban Form: a scatter plot of red and black dots comparing city samples, above dense running text, facing a grid of six street photos tinted red. Small numbered squares from the chart’s legend appear inside the text.
Spacematrix: the chart’s legend symbols turn up right in the running text, the subhead is set apart by placement rather than size or weight, and notes are presented alongside the text they refer to