James Cooney O’Connor

NIVAL Archive:
Dutch Gold

The Archive(ist) project is a collaborative project with with  2nd year students of NCAD—us—and NIVAL ( the National Irish Visual Arts Library).

The project is aimed to instil the importance of repositories of knowledge and use them as a conduit for an introduction to typography and book design. We were tasked with publishing an exhibition in the form of a book. 

The Book documented a move of Dutch designers that brought a wealth of knowledge of graphic deisign to Ireland from the 50’s thanks to Tim O’Neill of Sun Advertising, who was among the first to realise the potential in hiring foreign designers. 1951, Tim who got had to advertising job for Aer Lingus feeling this way and seeing the success that the Dutch airline KLM were having with their promo material met with Guus Melai who was with the publicity department at KLM and recruited him to work on the Aer Lingus account.

The rest is history.