'Welcome to Impact City The Hague' is a publication by the Municipality of The Hague that gives information about the start-up ecosystem and the Impact Economy in The Hague. Our studio was asked to come up with the concept and design to visualise the current stage of the impact economy in The Hague. This 'bookazine' was the first publication of this programme.
This project won a HOW International Design Award in the category Editorial Design.
Bookazine, B5, 104 pages, full colour print with fluor pink, Soporset offset paper, third edition
Process
The studio was given an almost 'carte blanche' for this project. Together with the client and the copywriter, we selected organisations and entrepreneurs who we thought would have an interesting story to tell. The next step for me was to assemble a creative team of illustrators and photographers to assist in the visualisation. I was responsible for the concept and design as well as the art-direction of the bookazine - a great opportunity.
I wanted to create a design with a clear but playful symbiosis. The biggest challenge for this publication was fitting both languages (Dutch and English) alongside each other and deciding how to visualise each article. We looked for photographers and illustrators who would make a team of mainly young and local talents that could really add something extra special to the publication. The project was a great learning curve: working with all these different people, getting the best result for each article, keeping to the budget and creating a publication that everyone could be proud of.
After reading the initial texts and interviews, I felt something was missing, a more fictional story to approach the topic from a different angle. This resulted in us asking a young screenwriter to write a short fantasy story about "Impact City". The story, entitled "Urbon", became a real page-turner: on the bottom left of each page you can read one line of the story. On the very first page, I placed the lyrics of the song We Built This City by Starship, a reference to start-ups as well as to The Hague as “Beatstad” (beat city). For the cover we chose to emphasise The Hague's international status, by showing the name of the city in various languages (exonyms).
I'm really proud of this project and grateful I had the opportunity to work on it together with a great team. The book has been a great success: it won a HOW International Design Award for Editorial Design and has now seen its third edition.
I wanted to create a design with a clear but playful symbiosis. The biggest challenge for this publication was fitting both languages (Dutch and English) alongside each other and deciding how to visualise each article. We looked for photographers and illustrators who would make a team of mainly young and local talents that could really add something extra special to the publication. The project was a great learning curve: working with all these different people, getting the best result for each article, keeping to the budget and creating a publication that everyone could be proud of.
After reading the initial texts and interviews, I felt something was missing, a more fictional story to approach the topic from a different angle. This resulted in us asking a young screenwriter to write a short fantasy story about "Impact City". The story, entitled "Urbon", became a real page-turner: on the bottom left of each page you can read one line of the story. On the very first page, I placed the lyrics of the song We Built This City by Starship, a reference to start-ups as well as to The Hague as “Beatstad” (beat city). For the cover we chose to emphasise The Hague's international status, by showing the name of the city in various languages (exonyms).
I'm really proud of this project and grateful I had the opportunity to work on it together with a great team. The book has been a great success: it won a HOW International Design Award for Editorial Design and has now seen its third edition.
This project was done as part of my work at Studio Duel. Thanks to Gijs Hoeijmakers and Julie Tarrade for helping out with the photography.
The book is doing a good job on various social media!
