Fine-art training, then a life in print.

Karel Martens is a Dutch graphic designer whose practice has always been a mix of commissions, teaching and self-initiated printing. English Wikipedia says he graduated in 1961 from the Arnhem Academy of Art and Industrial Arts, where he studied fine art rather than graphic design, because graphic design did not yet exist there as its own course. It’s Nice That, in a feature by Jynann Ong published on 2 September 2020, gives the same year and school, and says that in those early years he drew type by hand at sizes as small as eight or nine points.

Martens has described the breadth of that training himself. In an interview published by the Harvard Graduate School of Design on 17 April 2025, he said art school then lasted five years, that the curriculum was a general art education, and that the term “graphic design” did not exist for his class. He said he does not see a difference in the kind of thinking needed to make a dress, a poster or a stamp, and that design should result from a way of thinking rather than from looking at other design.

His first poster, by his own account in the same interview, was for a cinema: the GSD article shows a hand-composed paste-up for a Filmhuis Nijmegen poster dated 1975. He told the interviewers he had designed more than a hundred posters, and that in the letterpress years he worked with small printers and whatever typefaces they had in their drawers.

Teaching became part of the practice early. Wikipedia says he began teaching at ArtEZ in Arnhem in 1977. The GSD article reproduces an assignment from that period in which each student in a class designed one month of a calendar page for 1979, printed by letterpress; Martens’s own page was set in lowercase Futura.

The government and the post office were steady clients. Wikipedia lists coins, postage stamps and telephone cards designed for the Dutch state, and It’s Nice That mentions stamps, coins, films, books and corporate identities. The GSD article describes the standard telephone cards he designed for PTT Telecom through the 1990s, in which overprinted numerals in colour grow denser as the value of the card rises. Wikipedia also says he designed books in many formats for the publisher SUN.

Monoprints, archive cards and a school built around real work.

Alongside the commissions, Martens prints for himself. Wikipedia describes his monoprints as made with found metal objects, such as parts of discarded machines, inked and pressed onto found paper. It says he prints one colour a day, lets it dry and adds the next colour the following day, so a single print can take days or weeks. It’s Nice That points to his cloud images, built from the tight repetition of finely drawn rosettes, as another strand of the same interest in pattern and repetition.

One long-running series reuses another designer’s cards. Wikipedia says that when the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam digitised its catalogue, the old archive cards designed under Willem Sandberg were set to be discarded, and Martens took them as a ground for his prints. Each print is unique, and the finished cards are used as diplomas for graduates of the Werkplaats Typografie. It’s Nice That describes the same project in 2020.

The Werkplaats Typografie is the school he co-founded. Wikipedia and It’s Nice That both say Martens set it up in 1998 in Arnhem with his former student Wigger Bierma, as a two-year master’s programme now part of the ArtEZ University of the Arts. Wikipedia says the programme works with outside clients and expects students to run self-initiated projects too. Martens told the GSD in 2025 that from the start his own studio was inside the school as a permanent location, and that the founders wanted students to “do real things”.

OASE, the architecture journal, shows how that worked. It’s Nice That says Martens took on its design in 1990. He told the GSD that he always made OASE with a student: the student did the work and dealt with the architects and the printer, and he kept watch. Text published for the Stedelijk retrospective in 2025 says that he began designing OASE with students from the Werkplaats, that no two issues are the same, and that today he designs it with his daughter Aagje Martens.

His books are also part of the record. It’s Nice That says his monograph, first published in 1996, has been updated several times, and that the version released around the start of 2020 by Roma Publications, titled Re-Printed Matter, uses an open Japanese binding with double-sheeted spreads and plays with borders, which Martens called the place “where two worlds meet”. Wikipedia names Jaap van Triest as his collaborator on the 1996 edition, Printed Matter.

A designer’s name as a studio name.

Across the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Switzerland, a large share of graphic design practices carry the names of the people who run them. A studio called after its founders signals that the work is authored: the client is hiring a way of thinking as much as a production service, and the name on the door stays the same whether the job is a poster, a typeface or a thick exhibition catalogue.

That authorship rarely stops at client work. Many of these practices teach, at art academies and design schools, or run workshops and summer programmes, and the classroom becomes a place where their methods are tested and passed on. Teaching also shapes how a studio talks about itself: as a set of questions and procedures rather than a house style.

Books and exhibitions are the other recurring surface. For a studio working mostly for museums, publishers and cultural institutions, a printed book is both the commission and the portfolio, and a shelf of catalogues says more about the practice than a logo could. Exhibitions of design work, talks and published interviews then carry that identity beyond the people who commissioned it.

A family studio, dated work and a 2025 retrospective.

Since 2019 the practice has carried a studio name. Text from the Stedelijk Museum, published by Meer on 18 August 2025, says Martens began working with his children Klaartje and Diederik in 2019 under the name Martens & Martens, and that the scope of the work widened to textiles and collaborations. The GSD interview of April 2025 lists Diederik Martens, Klaartje Martens and Susu Lee as the studio team, places the studio on the Silodam in Amsterdam, and has Diederik describe his own share of the work as typefaces, fonts and animations as well as administration.

The Stedelijk text names textile work with Suite702, which makes towels based on Martens’s colour system for beach cabins in Le Havre, and says his designs have been used in textiles for Liberty London, Maharam, Hermès and others. It adds that the table he designed for the Werkplaats Typografie in 1998 is part of the museum’s collection.

A dated commission shows the studio method. The GSD article says Martens & Martens designed a pair of calendar posters announcing the public programmes of the Harvard Graduate School of Design for the 2024–2025 academic year. Martens chose to build a calendar system in Futura, echoing his own 1979 teaching assignment, and in the spring 2025 poster the magenta of four-colour offset printing was replaced with a fluorescent pink. Susu Lee told the interviewers that Martens had asked for the front and back layers of type to “fight each other”.

The work went on show in Amsterdam in 2025. Meer lists Unbound at the Stedelijk Museum from 11 July to 26 October 2025, covering 65 years of work, from lettering on buildings to books, typography, postage stamps, telephone cards and wallpaper. The GSD article, written while the show was in preparation, says textiles, design objects and kinetic sculptures would also be included.

In conversation Martens keeps returning to the same method. He told It’s Nice That in 2020 that limitation is important and that mistakes, including those made on a computer, can produce useful surprises; his film Not For Resale grew out of badly cropped scans of the reference images pinned on his wall for a lecture. He told the GSD in 2025 that when you make rules for something “it is already dead”.

For a design guide, Karel Martens shows a practice in which the name on the work moved from one designer to a family studio while the means stayed the same: overprinted colour, numbers, found material and a school run on real commissions. Compare Sulki & Min, a Seoul duo studio in this collection, and Mevis & Van Deursen, another Dutch graphic design studio. For this guide we use fluorescent pink, print yellow and overprint blue with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Karel Martens’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.