The American Book Centre is an English language bookstore with stores in Amsterdam and The Hague. The bookstore in Amsterdam has been (for me at least) an institution for many years. It has a large selection of English books on literature, comics, art, design and much, much more. While it’s situated in a largely touristic area it feels very intimate and low profile. The American Book Centre (ABC) always does lots of events like lectures, book launches, open mic’s, trade-in days, which they communicate though their website, social media and mailings.

ABC commissioned me to let their day to day (in-store) customers know about all of these events. They had a large unused flatscreen monitor that provided the perfect tool to promote events. I decided to devise a platform, called ABC tv, which served as a starting point to tell the instore customers about everything that ABC organises, as well as their history.

Searching through the heaps of footage of past events as well as the (rather infamous) history of ABC i decided that (being aware of the short attention span nowadays) the information had to be presented in a short form that connects with the present speed of our media intake, so i thought .GIF.

The format (or the ‘style’ of .gif) provides a quick, fun, and direct way of getting across the right feeling about anything. To be able to use this ‘GIF style’ and make the ‘esthetic’ somewhat similar for all the events, i had to think about the way a GIF works. Usually these are very short, whacky clips taken from a movie. In this case i was working the other way round, using photos taken at events and turning them into GIF-like clips that last longer than the average GIF.

When researching the footage that ABC delivered, i noticed that the photographers at events usually take a couple of shots for each ‘situation’ (people talking, people drinking, people gesturing) which makes it possible to recreate a ‘film’ from photographs. So then, by using repetition and the correct timing you can actually suggest plots and subplots fairly easily. Not all of the events had enough footage to be able to create these GIF movies, so a selection had to be made. In the end 14 different GIF animations were made, ranging from 15 seconds till about 2 minutes in length.

Playing in between the animations is the animated logo (based on the existing identity) of ABC tv (see below), confirming the brand to the viewers and letting them know what they are looking at.

There are so many people constantly walking by, which requires a constant reboot of a quick experience. This is also why the GIF-movies work well: it’s not a huge investment of time for the viewer, and if one GIF-movie doesn’t go down well, they might still have some energy left to try the next!

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Leri for Life means: Life long Learning. It’s an educational method based on the potential of learning as a (local) community. The Leri for Life program aims to enhance economic opportunities for people in the inland of Suriname, teaching them to discover their own talents and qualities and to develop them.

BOA productions commissioned Studio van Amsterdam to redesign the Leri for Life method manual and develop a new website so the manual could be distributed (and read) more easily in the inlands of Suriname. This manual was developed between 2005 and 2011 in six villages in Suriname, to prepare young children (toddlers) for primary school. Following this pre-school program should encourage children to do better at school and prevent them from dropping out later on.

The old logo was a bit wild and colourful (see it here). First, i had to create a solid identity ‘baseline’ to work with. So first the logo and color scheme had to be redesigned, so that the look would be more consistent and easier to work with.

I chose a simple color scheme and (semi) playful font, not too serious, and too crazy either. With this in hand, i was able to start working on the manual, which would prove to be a much larger effort.

The original Leri for Life manual word file contained about 100 pages of text and (hires) images. It had to be stripped of all unnecessary content and boiled down to the bare essence, the text. Visually, a lot needed to be done, so first I needed a lot more (and better) images to design the manual. The delivery of images from the inlands Suriname proved to take a long time (no surprise i guess), so the process was delayed for some time. In the mean time, the website was developed using the new identity.

I designed a more fresh, condensed publication (49 pages) in Dutch and English (so two different layouts) that’s easy to read and can be downloaded quickly due to the small file size. In the inlands of Suriname there aren’t a lot of superfast desktop computers, but many people do have cellphones. Because the cellphone reception isn’t always optimal here, the small file size of the LFL manual simplified the distribution, enabling people to read the manual online or download it and read it offline.

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Hans Kuiper works as an artist, curator, songwriter and journalist. He has initiated many exhibitions and radio projects (for instance, radio Neverno) since 2005, and as a performative artist/songwriter Kuiper has developed his very own pop genre called ‘Neoschlager’. This he uses as a starting point for exploring the aesthetics of pop culture in an artistic context. His songs (sung in German) are performed strictly in ‘white cube’ settings (preferably at gallery openings or as part of an exhibition), thereby fusing highbrow and lowbrow (pop) art in an exciting and different way.

The Neoschlager project started as a collaboration between artist Tiny Domingos and Hans Kuiper (kuiperdomingos projects). The concept of their collaboration is that, at each new event, Kuiper & Domingos create an art installation in (or around) which Kuiper will perform Neoschlager songs for the audience. To strengthen his performances Kuiper wanted to bundle his song repertoire in a way that would ‘fit’ the genre of Neoschlager. Audio cassettes seemed to be the logical choice.

The design combines the ‘heavy duty’ Neoschlager microphone with a reference to Domingos’ wood and blue tape-art installations. Both sides of the tape have songs on them with names like ‘Da geht ein Mann’, ‘Ich gehe zu meinem Galerist’ and my all time favourite ‘Wir sind alle da, in social Media’. If you’d like to listen to any of the songs, go here.

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