Lost&Found - invite

Lost&Found is a stage for lost and found sound and image. For the design of their radio-evening this folded invitation radio samples of the entire Dutch FM and AM frequency were translated into text. The lost audio parts within the text are written as '[...]'.


- commissioned by Lost&Found, Amsterdam
- printed by Drukkerij Heijt
- type Candida

Hapax Legomena - Arnon Grunberg

A novel written by Arnon Grunberg re-designed as 'Hapax Legomena', a Latin term for when words only appear once in a text.
This graduation project started with the knowledge that you only need 200 words for basic communication in a language. I was curious how much words a novel needs to tell a story. It became a visual research of the use of language by only letting every word appear once. Double words are replaced with white space. Slowly the text eats itself away. The book ends with a frequency index.

All the work was done by endlessly 'find' and 'replace' words. After the book was finished, Dion Nicolaas heard about the project and did some programming.


Even after years, I sometimes get an e-mail from an Arnon Grunberg collector, who would like to buy the book. It's sold out. I did find it at an online bookseller for 180 euros. That's 1200% of the original price!

- self initiated
- graduation project Gerrit Rietveld Academie
- also see http://www.hapax.nicolaas.net/

VPRO - annual report

In 2003 the VPRO (a Dutch broadcasting company) decided to commission their annual reports to graduation students of Dutch art academies. The Rietveld Academie was first, and I was the lucky one to design it. It was my first real assignment and very educational.

The theme 'Internal Messages' was given by the commissioner and had to cheer up a boring report. The internal company e-mails, slightly odd or funny and the report are designed as two separate books of different sizes and were shoved inside of each other. In between the plain text for the annual report, every now and than a couple of internal messages show up.



- This report won the Dutch prize for 'Most beautiful Annual Report 2002' in 2003.
- commissioned by VPRO
- with thanks to Marieke Stolk.
- type Perpetua
- printed by Robstolk

War in Irak

An incomplete and uncorrected overview of the NOS news reports during the second war in Iraq.

This book is a transcription of five days / 24 hours a day Dutch television journalism. It started as a way to document and translate temporary, spoken information into more permanent information. It ended in amazement of news reports, lied facts and war itself. The book stops where the 24/7 news reports end, that was when the war was no longer a hot topic.


Book was made in a small edition, laser print, 486 pages

Scratched Letter

For my gradution I designed the Scratched Letter. It started while making my first try-outs using a Wacom Tablet. I tested this mouse pen by scratching within the outlines of a piece of text. Then I collected all the different version of a's, b's that I had been drawing and put them on a pile. This typeface now exists as a digital illustrator file. For my graduation I made two publications as type specimens for the Scratched Letter.



Letter Sketch Book
The sketch book of the design process of 'The Scratched Letter'.Letter shapes are scratched in the computer, but by hand. By stacking 1 up to 200 different scratched versions of one letter, the letter gets thicker and more black.In the picture: left are 50 layers of the 'd', right is built up from 100 different scratched layers of the letter.


Flip Book
'The Scratched Letter' in use in a letter flip book. The book zooms in on a specific type characteristic of the Scratched Letter: the difference when it's used small (black) and if used big (the chaos of lines show).