During Halloween 2016, The Hague based indie band Vuigtuig released their second album, full of macabre and morbid humour and haunting fictional horror sound tracks. The album artwork uses the recently released Krana Fat for its band logo, and the album title is rendered in Nihilist (released just in time for finishing the artwork). Information is set in a mix of Sentinel, Venus Condensed and Errata.

Last year my youngest son was in a circus class. I am normally happy to volunteer for anything as long as it is not graphic design. This time, to my surprise, I heard myself casually offering to design the poster of the annual final performance, named Droomwandelaar (“dreamwalker”).

The lack of a clear briefing, storyline or professional photos was easily made up for by infectious enthusiasm and besides: designing the poster offered a chance to finally play around with some fonts that had been sitting on my computer for ages, patiently waiting to be put to use.

The fonts of The Pyte Foundry's one-release-a-week year (2016) generally had a compact character set, but often enough the fonts included an extra surprise. In the all-caps Dosage, for example, the uppercase characters are of a bolder weight than the ones found in the lowercase. It also includes a funky manicule, but the stylish pointing hand on this poster can be found in Alcove, Mortar, Galore, Plakat, and Prhyme. The frames behind “Ticket Sales” are from QFWFQ. A ready-made boxed font like Granblue is harder to fit on a curve than I thought; the pre-existent logo is set in Rosewood Fill.

Ausdauer, German for “perseverance”, is the name of a musical theater founded in 2011 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The group consists of experienced composers, musicians, actors and playwrights who firmly believe that music and acting should fuse on equal terms, and not one art serve the other. Accordingly, they exclusively develop new dramas with original, contemporary compositions, even when they deal with historic matter or reference their precursors.

Matthijs Sluiter’s Studio Het Mes from The Hague is responsible for the visual appearance of Ausdauer Muziektheater, that is, the house style and the promotional material for each year’s production. While the design of the posters varies a lot according to the piece, cohesion in the visual language is largely achieved by means of the chosen typefaces.

Since 2018, Kai Bernau’s Neutral (Typotheque) is systematically used for all reading texts, always with its alternate monocular a. The headline level displays an intriguing play with Mars, a small typeface family designed by Alaric Garnier, inspired by Venus. Interestingly, the first two members were the extreme widths, the Condensed and the Extended, released by Production Type in 2018. Studio Het Mes jumped on Mars straight away and used it for the poster for Roan / De Eeuw van Ariane. The moderate “Standard” cut of medium weight followed in 2021.

Website: overview of all performances

Poster for Die Mauer. Photo by Jeff Zimberlin.

Website: About page

Website: main menu

Website: newsletter sign-up

Postcards for De Eeuw van Ariane and Die Mauer

Flyer for Roan (a precursor of the groups’s play De Eeuw van Ariane). Photo by Jeff Zimberlin.

Poster for De Eeuw van Ariane. Photo by Jeff Zimberlin.

Poster for De Prinses van Atjeh, 2022, featuring the Condensed and Extended weights of Mars, the latter with the alternate R

Dag in de Branding organizes four one-day programmes a year, where concerts are put on at various locations in The Hague. The festival reflects current developments in classical and improvised music, in music theatre, in jazz and pop music, as well as in opera and electronic music.

The organisation wished to communicate in a very clear and simple language. At the same time the audience is interested in concise information and background stories. We proposed to communicate in a ‘dynamic’ way: ideally very compact and clear (logo, banners on location, posters, the website's homepage), but always with elaborate information close at hand: backgrounds on every concert can be found on the website, and the programme was redesigned as a magazine with interviews and other interesting stories.

To distinguish between the different types of information, we gave different typefaces different roles: Mallory (Frere-Jones Type) is the main typeface – bold, enthusiastic, precise and warm. On posters, Mallory is paired with Typotheque’s November for edition-specific information in different sizes and widths. The different widths come in very handy, as we decided to communicate the composer's names in big sizes, and at the same time breaking down any name on a poster was a definite no-go. Running text in both print and website is set in Nocturno. Like Mallory, it’s warm, and slightly wide.

Poster for edition 53, October 2019.

Poster for edition 52, playing at various locations along The Hague’s beach, summer 2019.

Spreads from the program for edition 43, spring 2017. The program for this edition focussed on two giants in contemporary music: Edgard Varèse and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen.

A free newspaper with a map and address list as a means of stimulating both tourists and residents of The Hague to visit more local makers and shops outside the main streets. It was a logical choice to limit the type palette to fonts made by designers who work(ed) or studied in The Hague. A decision that left us with way too much typefaces that easily work together – the work of established type designers and their students share some logic or vision, more than we expected. We settled for recent typefaces form the last 5 years or so, that could cope with large pages and short texts. On a detail level, choosing ‘local' type shows in the text with plenty of Dutch ij-ligatures, (plus one j-acute just for fun).

“Valentine — of loss and longing”. Risoprinted poster for a show with music, film and spoken word.

The theme — longing and loss — and the venue, a museum for harbour history, served as a good excuse for a poster that makes a nod to nostalgia. Odesta’s expressive lowercase (with a good ij-ligature!) and small caps are paired with two types that are not nostalgic at all, but work well in this case: Neutral (with alternate ‘a’ and ‘t’) and Panorama. 

Business incubator and creative hub BINK36 is housed in the buildings of a former repair and service department of PTT, once the national postal and telecommunications company of the Netherlands. Despite the enormous size of the building, the entrance to the site was often missed by motorists because the driveway is hidden from view by a viaduct. We found part of the solution in this huge house number: the last two characters of the logo set in Bureau Grot.

Signage for a multifunctional music centre in The Hague, Netherlands. The signage consists of large vinyl floor numbers on the wall, and MDF panels of variable length with directions printed in bright red and white. The font used throughout the wayfinding is Polaris Condensed.

At both entrances of the complex, the signage is the first thing a visitor sees. Bright red sign plates, stuck on a large floor number, will tell the visitor what to find on this floor and on the floors above it. Signs are placed at all points where stairs meet a hallway. The list of possible directions grows shorter at each point. Visitors who lost their way can easily retrieve it by descending the stairs until the signage shows the desired direction.

Visual identity for music theatre group Ausdauer. L’Histoire du Diable is a remake of Strawinsky’s l’Histoire du Soldat (1918). The play is situated in a smoky bar in Paris, right after WWI. A group of soldiers play an alienating mix of Strawinsky, Jazz, marching music, as the innkeeper tells her story. She was there when things went wrong in WWI. Moreso, she was decisive, maybe she was the devil in person. Or so she claims.

Describing events instead of actually showing the action onstage was the starting point for the posters, flyer and a small facebook campaign. A dadaïst lettering for the title is paired with vernacular, centered typography. The big words under the title say: “Funny. Macabre. The show you visited after all”. In referral to silent movies, a set of dialogue cards were made for Facebook. The cards show grotesk facts and numbers from the Big War, cameos from the play and newspaper quotes.

Facebook campaign. A set of intertitles with quotes, numbers and pictures related to the play are mixed with selfies from the theatre group.

Poster (above) and flyer (below). Failure and mistakes play a major part in the text. In print, half of the message is printed upside down. A failure with advantages: The poster is complete, whether theatres stick a date sheet on the poster or not, and the flyer is readble in any position.

Illustration for a linguistic research among Europeans in seven countries. Investigator Gaston Dorren is surprised to find out that native speakers in Sweden, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Italy and Spain have very similar irritations when it comes to incorrect use of their mother tongue.

The lettering was made with help of PDU Stencil. From the Colophon Foundry website:

In 1876 David acquired the patent for a system that he had invented for sign-writers. With a universal stencil, all UPPERCASE, lowercase, numbers, punctuation, accents etc could be sourced from the grid of the stencil.

PDU was digitized by Dries Wiewauters as a typeface (fill and outline, later a stencil version was added). The remake of the original PDU stencil plate was used for this illustration.

Poëzie aan de waterkant (poetry at the river banks) was an annual festival for poetry, spoken word and singer-songwriters held in the Westbroekpark in The Hague, Netherlands. From 2011–2013, the posters combined typography set in Founders Grotesk, integrated in the botanical illustrations. For the final edition, text on the back was set in a combination of Founders Grotesk and the recently released Founders Grotesk Text.