Eindhoven, 1998, and three names.

Dutch Design Week did not start under that name, or as a week. Dutch Wikipedia says the event began in Eindhoven in 1998 as the Dag van het Ontwerp, the Day of Design, set up to bring entrepreneurs and designers into contact with each other. As it grew, Dutch Wikipedia says, the day became the Week van het Ontwerp, the Design Week, in 2002, and in 2005 the name changed again to the present Dutch Design Week, shortened to DDW.

English Wikipedia dates the initiative to 2002 and describes it as having begun as a non-commercial fair. It says the aim of a non-commercial event remained, but that conflicts of interest and fast growth pushed the event toward a more commercial approach from 2007. The two language versions agree on the 2002 step to a week; the Dutch one adds the 1998 day that came before it and the 2005 rename that gave the event its English name.

The format has settled into a fixed slot in the calendar. English Wikipedia describes a nine-day event held around the last week of October, with exhibitions, studio visits, workshops, seminars and parties spread across the city. Dezeen reported that the 2022 edition ran from 22 to 30 October. Since the 2012 edition, according to both Wikipedia versions, the week has chosen a yearly theme that runs through the whole programme, and since 2009 it has named a group of ambassadors each year to speak for Dutch design.

The event has an organiser behind it. Dezeen, in a report by Marcus Fairs dated 8 June 2020, quoted the Dutch Design Foundation as the body running DDW and named Martijn Paulen as the foundation’s director. Paulen told the magazine that the foundation and its partners had spent 19 years building a design community together.

Strijp-S, a graduation show and a city as venue.

Dutch Design Week has no single exhibition hall. English Wikipedia names the Klokgebouw at Strijp-S, the Design Academy Eindhoven and the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology among its main venues. Dutch Wikipedia adds the Veem and Microlab at Strijp-S, Sectie-C, the Designhuis, the Temporary Art Centre, the Witte Dame and the former Campina site, together with many smaller places in the city centre.

Moving between those places is part of the visit. Dutch Wikipedia says the week runs Design Rides, free transport to and from its venues. English Wikipedia says the pop venue Effenaar and the classical concert hall Muziekgebouw Frits Philips organise a music programme, DDW Music, around the festival, with live performances and exhibitions about experimental instruments and sound art.

One fixture recurs every year. Dutch Wikipedia lists the Graduation Show of the Design Academy Eindhoven among the parts of the programme that return annually, and Dezeen described the academy’s graduation show in its 8 June 2020 report as one of the satellite events the week usually includes, alongside several large exhibitions, talks and parties across the city.

The 2020 edition tested how much of the event could exist without its streets. Dezeen reported on 8 June 2020 that organisers had judged a large physical event unrealistic because of the coronavirus, and that the week would go ahead from 17 to 25 October with most activity online and a limited number of pre-booked visits to designers’ studios in Eindhoven. English Wikipedia says that in the end all physical events were cancelled after a rise in cases in the city, and the digital festival became the centrepiece of the 2020 edition.

English Wikipedia also says the week hosts companies including Philips, Philips Design and DAF, alongside the design academy and the university.

Dates, signage and catalogues.

Design and art events carry their identity in places a consumer brand rarely reaches. A recurring exhibition or festival often puts a year, an edition number or a season into its name, so the wordmark has to work as a stable root that accepts a changing suffix. The same name then has to hold together across a catalogue, a poster series, a website and a printed guide that is replaced every edition.

Host-city signage is a second surface. Banners on lamp posts, flags on venues and wayfinding panels in streets, stations and pavilions have to be read at walking pace and at a distance, often in more than one language. Typography chosen for these jobs tends toward clear letterforms, generous spacing and strong contrast against the street.

Catalogues and posters are the third surface, and the most collected. They outlast the event itself, and many organisers commission a different designer or studio for each edition, so continuity comes from the name, a grid or a colour habit rather than from a fixed logo. For a design guide, the useful question is which elements stay fixed from edition to edition and which are allowed to change.

A tulip, a grid and a 1963 poster.

One constant in the Dutch Design Week identity is a flower. Dezeen reported on 1 November 2022 that the tulip is the week’s longstanding logo, as well as the national flower of the Netherlands. The Amsterdam studio Thonik says on its website that the tulip logo was then almost 20 years old, and describes it as a constellation of rectangles and quarter circles.

In 2022, for the week’s twentieth anniversary, Thonik built a new identity around that geometry. Dezeen said the studio took its cue from a poster designed by Wim Crouwel for an exhibition of the Dutch painter Edgar Fernhout, held at Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum in 1963. The poster used Crouwel’s Fernhout lettering, a set of 13 chunky, grid-based letters drawn with quarter circles. Thonik used those characters and worked with the London type foundry The Foundry Types to design the remaining 13 letters and complete the alphabet.

Thonik told Dezeen that the new identity went back to the festival’s original identity, in which DDW had been written in a similarly constructed font, so that the redesign also marked 20 years of the event. Set in the Fernhout face, the letter W in the DDW logo resembles a tulip, which ties the new lettering back to the old flower mark. Thonik said DDW and the full name Dutch Design Week were written in the typeface, along with short words such as map, crew, press and TV, and that grids ran through the online and printed communication, with a wide mix of colours.

Dezeen said the identity appeared on signage and wayfinding across the city during the 2022 week, as well as on tote bags and in animations made to promote the festival. Thonik says the 2022 theme was The Greater Number.

For a design guide, Dutch Design Week shows how a small geometric mark can be rebuilt into a full alphabet without losing the flower people already know. Compare the London Design Festival, another citywide design week, and La Biennale di Venezia. For this guide we use night blue, tulip red, ochre and brick with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dutch Design Week’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.