Talk:
Trial and Error
with Hansje van Halem
Hansje van Halem has run her studio in Amsterdam since 2003. In between deadlines for book designs, she fills time gaps with type drawings and empty book space with patterns. With a “practice makes perfect” mind-set, she taught herself not to be afraid of failure. Her time gaps soon took the upper hand and became her core business. While working on commissions from patterns for endpapers, architectural typography, and all scales in between, she creates a lot of overproduction. The talk will display a richness of design attempts that did not make the cut or ones that are waiting for the right opportunity. The benefits of 10+ years design experiments, failures and unused starting points have led to sweet revenge by up-cycling and up-scaling.
About Hansje van Halem
Graphic designer Hansje van Halem (1978) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (NL) and gathered international recognition with her distinctive typography and geometric, almost psychedelic illustrations built on complex patterns. Van Halem digitally scratches, draws or weaves letters and designs postages stamps, posters and books. Recently she made patterns, animations and spatial objects, including a border fence at the Dutch airport Schiphol.