I was approached to design a logo and business cards for an e-commerce brand. Luxury4Lease is a shop which offers luxury goods from the latest season for rent to members. The first offering will be luxury handbags, and they will eventually expand to jewellery and watches. The identity needed to be broad enough to cover both the male and female segments, and convey class and luxury. I decided to go for a modern and minimalistic design to hint at the brand's Scandinavian roots. The monogram consists of the characters 'L4L', and is repeated as a letterpressed pattern on the back of the business cards.

Other materials such as the stationery and website will come at a later date.

These are some of the smaller projects that I work on from time to time.

---

Jacqueline Bongers ballet school needed a logo and a house style, but had to focus their limited budget on promotional materials like flyers. I painted a ballerina in watercolours to represent lightness and technique. The ballerina will be the "symbol" of her school, to be used on promotional materials in the future, such as shoe bags and cotton totes, and will always accompany the logo when used to promote the school. To balance the airiness of the watercolour, I used a solid and simple typeface to convey the abundant text in the logo; a ballet school not only for classical ballet but also for modern dance. The watercolour ballerina combined with the heavy-set logo reinforces the fundamental elements of ballet; which is lightness and grace, combined with a foundation of strength and stability.

---

For Twinkle Cakes, I had initially baked a large, flat cookie and used bright yellow clay representing decorative icing to form the wordmark. It was a fun idea, and the client loved it, but it eventually became clear that it was too difficult to incorporate into promotional materials. By playing around with the checkered cloth on the background, I eventually created a diamond pattern encased in the original circular cookie shape, which can also be associated with the word "twinkle". This more graphical version of the logo, including the diamond pattern, made it much easier to use throughout the print designs.

---

A copywriter and journalist I worked with in Amsterdam, who is also a good friend of mine, had a baby in January 2013. She asked me to design her birth announcement card, which I gladly did. She and the baby's father had fallen in love with a postcard by Bruno Bourel and bought it in Budapest. They asked me to use this postcard as inspiration for the design because they liked the image of a mother and her child, and the father greeting them in the corner. At the same time, they wanted to announce their change of address, as they would be moving two weeks after the birth. I decided to keep the stark black and white, but to use playful illustrations to counter the serious colour usage.

I designed the identity and online portfolio for .astute, a photographer, videographer and media specialist. He sent me an image of birds which he really liked,  which I turned into a sharper and more graphic recognisable image. It isn't a logo, per se, but it is repeated in the .astute stationery.

We chose to use bright red to attract attention, and a clean layout so as not to overpower the images and videos that would be displayed and dynamically loaded on the front page as the user scrolls down.

Eat Your Seasons is a personal project of mine. I'm not a vegetarian myself, but I am pretty environmentally-conscious. So this is my way of helping out! Every month of this birthday calendar is illustrated by a seasonal vegetable, together with witty (I hope!) dialogue and a fun fact.

The calendar costs € 15 each. Email me to place an order!

27 September 2012 update!
Fresh from her third Golden Calf award, Willeke van Ammelrooy is interviewed on Studio Max Live and talks about the next edition of De Bijbel Tapes. Screenshots at the end of the post.

---

I had the challenging responsibility of creating the logo, visual identity and all its applications for De Bijbel Tapes, the biggest audiofilm production in Dutch history, and the first of its kind. It brings the Bible, word for word, to life, through the voice-acting of some of The Netherlands' most reknowned actors.

To create the logo, I concentrated on the word "revealing". The concept of this project is to bring the Bible to life through real people and real emotions. When people read the Bible, they generally read it with a sort of holy prejudice in mind. Everyone seems to sound holy, wise and good. But in reality, these are stories of real people. They shout, they cry and they struggle in situations. In this way, De Bijbel Tapes is "revealing" the Bible in a new way to the audience.

The director wanted to present the books not as mere stories, but an actual account of historical events. In this way, we came up with the "documentary" style of presentation. We used real-life photos sourced from news events around the world and a serious, no-nonsense, style for the logo and accompanying material.

Visit the website for more photos and information.

Project managed by MERX
Client: Chevigny

For the third year in a row, I created the event materials for the NS Try Out Festival, including the full programme, indoor and outdoor signage, advertisements, wall stickers and flyers.

Our advertisements were placed in various regional and national newspapers.

I also designed the festival CD and vouchers commissioned by some of the festival partners and performers.

Thread & Tale is a new boutique for women. They source their casual and simple yet stylish clothes from little shops in Bangkok and bring them to a wider market.

I was given a free hand to interpret the name 'Thread & Tale' as I wished when creating a logo for the brand.

To begin with, I visited and researched similar boutiques that the two owners regularly shop at and which they are inspired by. I also guessed (correctly) that their tastes were subconsciously inspired by other brands with similar-sounding names, such as The Duke & The Duchess and Pull & Bear. From these findings, I interpreted the mood and character of the brand to be classy, yet approachable, honest and modern.

The end result is a logo design that starts with the thin characteristics of thread, adding more to it as the tale gets told. As the typeface used in the logo is thin, it wouldn't be possible to scale down and still be legible if the whole brand name was used. Therefore, I devised a new way of presenting the brand as T & T, with the full name written in a solid typeface, holding the 'thread' and the 'tale' together, like the spine of a book.

To balance the clean and sharp look, I used natural, softer looking textures and hand drawn borders to inject a bit of fun and warmth into the identity system.

As the brand is looking to cater to most of their customers via Facebook, I wanted to create a system that matches and works with the current Facebook Page design which uses a square profile photo and square thumbnails around the site.

The Wisdom Factor is a concept developed in the US, and aims to educate people in positions of leadership of the importance of "wisdom". This involves the relationship between the self and the world. It says that each person should be sensitive towards what is happening around them, be it with other people or with nature and the world.

This concept reminded me very much of what the Native Americans and ancient tribes believe. Researching their culture and symbols made me realise how brilliantly they have developed the connection between graphics and their meanings.

The symbol that stood out the most to represent the world around them is, naturally, the circle. By adding different marks and shapes around the circle form, they could extend its meaning to other things related to the world.

However, as the book is a professional and educational book of essays aimed at modern readers and leaders of organisations, I wanted to keep the tribal symbolism very subtle. To this end, I used modern typefaces, Nexa Bold and Nexa Light, together with a thick line for the circle and removed all other marks.

Being the second book from Chevigny to follow in a specific style, I used the same size and format as their previous publication, De 5 kindconclusies, which I also designed.

I hadn't worked with watercolour for a while and was interested to see how my style had evolved. A few years ago, I saw a photo of a girl called Sandrine whose long, graceful neck instantly caught my attention. This piece is called Sandrine in honour of that photo.

MERX is a communications and marketing agency which specialises in online marketing and event management to empower the brand experience.

The virtual world and the real world are probably the most opposite elements you can find. Yet, I wanted to incorporate both of these worlds into one logo.

Inspired by origami's simplicity and its handmade, three-dimensional and precise quality, I created this design. Using origami as inspiration, I try to bring a sense of being hands-on and three-dimensional together with the sharp, straight and precise lines of the digital world.

Vrij means 'free' in Dutch and also contains the last name of freelance project manager Marijke van Rij. She wanted her brand's identity to come across as relaxed and friendly just like her own personality. I took inspiration from beach photos and shapes of air freely moving to create an easygoing and flexible logo and visual identity.

This book is about self-discovery, and explains how conclusions made as a child can affect the person you are today. It is dotted with anecdotes that had to be differentiated from the main text, but not disrupt the flow.

I also designed the website and materials for the exhibition stand at the Libelle Zomerweek 2011 in Amsterdam.

Project managed by: MERX
Client: Chevigny

SCAN Explorer is an online search database for multinational agencies and marketing service companies. The concept is simple - companies who want to market their products and services worldwide need the right agency to do the work. SCAN Explorer makes it easy for them by only accepting multinational agencies who have worked in 3 or more markets globally.

Knowing the wide global audience of the website, I, in my role at MERX, designed this with a focus on creating a clean, professional, inviting and easy-to-use service.

Visit website

MATAHATI is a collective of 5 fine artists from Malaysia and is one of the rare collectives who have been around for more than 2 decades. Galeri Petronas celebrated these artists by holding an exhibition of all their work, and commissioned an accompanying catalogue filled with their personal and public work, and essays by notable curators and art writers. The result is a massive 300-page coffee table book worthy of any art collector.

Gaea is a new healthcare product in the Malaysian market specifically for women. It helps with feminine hygiene and reproductive organ health, among other physical benefits.

When they approached me, they already had an existing logo and packaging, which I advised them to redesign. The next step was the website, whose user interaction and interface I designed. The design was sent back to developers in Malaysia to build and to integrate an online payment system.

Museumnacht (Museum Night) is an evening when all participating museums and venues are open at night to the public in an effort to make art more accessible. Montie's performance consists of attaching a small microphone to his scissors and making rhythms by cutting volunteers' hair to an accompanying keyboard. At the same time, someone reads poems to create an ethereal and surreal mood.