Graphic Design: Tivoli, oh Tivoli

20 Years of Rock­ing Posters

Words: Stephen Olsen

Van Melle at One Night Out.

This year has been a festival-based ‘com­ing out’ year for impor­ted Dutch designer Ger­brand van Melle. In Feb­ru­ary he took part in TypeSHED11, the inter­na­tional typo­graphy event held on Wellington’s water­front, fol­lowed in Novem­ber by a one-man-exhibition for one night only at this Mas­sey University’s BLOW cre­at­ive arts festival.

A former senior lec­turer in Typo­graphy and Digital Media Design at the Utrecht School of the Arts, van Melle expor­ted his life to Wel­ling­ton in 2007 where he is now a Senior Lec­turer of Typo­graphy and Graphic Design at Mas­sey Uni­ver­sity, and where he has suc­cess­fully tutored a cohort of stu­dents such as Josh Barr , who took out both the Gold and Supreme gongs in the stu­dent graphic design cat­egory in this year’s Best Design awards.

2009 was always going to be a mile­stone year for van Melle, based on one of those almost lifelong asso­ci­ations that so many design careers are marked by and that often deservedly need to end with an exclam­a­tion mark!

In van Melle’s case this asso­ci­ation long pre­ceded his ascent into aca­demia, going back 20 years to Utrecht’s widely fam­ous music venue: Tivoli.

Tivoli logo.

It was there that van Melle, and his stu­dent com­rades, first found a unique milieu to indulge both a pas­sion for typo­graphy and a pas­sion for tail­or­made posters.

Ini­tially aided by the pro­spect of free beer, the pro­duc­tion of posters for Tivoli cre­ated a line of work that has pro­ceeded – gig by gig by gig by gig – over a 20 year period that matured through to the point where Ger­brand had also partnered with Tivoli as a stew­ard of its cor­por­ate iden­tity– all cap­tured as an antho­logy in a book he pub­lished called 18+, Almost Two Dec­ades of Pop­design (2007).

“Put­ting this rela­tion­ship on show at the BLOW fest­ival was too good an oppor­tun­ity to miss,” says van Melle. “There is a rare thing that goes on with music posters and so the show, which I called One Night Out, just had to be about a one night event. Hold­ing it in the Melling Morse Archi­tects’ park­ing lot in Wel­ling­ton was also the per­fect venue for exhib­it­ing street based work”.

One Night Out poster-making practice.

One Night Out poster (2009).

Through his 20s and 30s van Melle con­tin­ued his work with Tivoli while co-founding Aap-ontwerpers and later Aap­me­dia, a Utrecht-based design stu­dio work­ing with a diverse port­fo­lio of cli­ents in the cre­at­ive indus­tries. He fondly recalls one par­tic­u­lar back­han­ded com­pli­ment in the early days of Aap­me­dia was the descrip­tion from within the Dutch design com­munity that it seemed as if “somebody’s Mac exploded”.

Through­out this time the work with Tivoli was a con­stant com­pan­ion. “In the early days Tivoli undoubtedly provided a play­ground to exper­i­ment with typo­graphic and visual lan­guage and an oppor­tun­ity to delve into exper­i­mental print­ing tech­niques. This then moved on to express­ing the huge vari­ety of their pro­gramme through a more sys­tem­atic com­mu­nic­a­tion approach res­ult­ing in, for instance, my ‘black-gray-white’ series. This was developed so that the com­mu­nic­a­tion depart­ment of Tivoli could use it any way they liked in a mod­u­lar way that also has a lot of freedom”.

Left to right: Danko Jones (2009); Sarah Kelly poster, (2007); Dub Trio (2008).

Tivoli posters from 2008/09.

Sur­pris­ingly per­haps van Melle has found his punc­tu­ated trans­ition from Utrecht to Wel­ling­ton, where his new interests are inform­a­tion design and online music exper­i­ence, rel­at­ively seam­less. He says he is just as “nour­ished” in Wel­ling­ton as Utrecht, with the added attrac­tion that unlike the ines­cap­able sat­ur­a­tion of design in the Neth­er­land, “New Zea­l­and is not designed, it has dan­ger­ous nature, it is still wide open”.

“Clos­ing the chapter on Tivoli with One Night Out def­in­itely felt right… shar­ing what I had col­lec­ted and my design philo­sophy and aug­ment­ing the momentum of TypeSHED11”.

Poster install­a­tion at One Night Out.

Most import­antly per­haps, pay­ing a trib­ute to Tivoli was also a trib­ute to “every drip of energy” that had gone into the posters them­selves as car­ri­ers of stor­ies. “I love that these rare things pass out of our con­trol, the traces they leave and the stor­ies you hear back from their use”.

Van Melle ends with two such stor­ies. Firstly there is the guy who is imprisoned in Utrecht and who dec­or­ated his com­plete cell with reg­gae posters that Ger­brand had designed for Tivoli. Lastly, a rare form of homage springs to mind: the time when Eddie Ved­der, lead singer of Pearl Jam, per­son­ally hand­craf­ted his own Tivoli T-shirt to wear at a Dutch Fest­ival to pay respect to the first time Pearl Jam played in the Netherlands.

Eddie Ved­der sport­ing custom-made Tivoli apparel. Pho­to­grapher unknown.

Van Melle: “For me this all feeds into the concept of remix­ing designs in a con­stant flow of ingredi­ents that become res­ol­u­tions that become ingredi­ents that become res­ol­u­tions that become remixes of the remix… and so on it goes”.

One Night Out.

One Night Out.

One Night Out.

One Big Night.

Disco (1993).

de Rag­gende Manne (1993).

Deus (1994).

Heads Up (1990).

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