Armand Mevis and Linda van Deursen, from 1987.

Mevis & Van Deursen is named after its two founders, the Dutch graphic designers Armand Mevis and Linda van Deursen. The studio’s identity has always been the pair of surnames joined by an ampersand, with no coined name, initials or symbol standing in front of the people who did the work. The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (KABK), in its teacher profile of Linda van Deursen, says she founded the studio with Armand Mevis in Amsterdam in 1987. Dutch Wikipedia also describes Mevis & Van Deursen as an Amsterdam graphic design duo.

From the start, the studio’s identity was tied to the kind of work it took on. The KABK profile says the pair has worked for cultural clients since 1987, and lists identities for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, documenta 14 and the Venice Biennale. It adds that they have edited and designed books for artists, photographers, architects and designers. Dutch Wikipedia likewise says the duo worked mainly for the cultural sector.

That double role, as designers and as editors, is part of how the studio presented itself. Rather than showing a single house style, the pair’s published record is a list of clients, institutions and books, and the studio’s name appears on the work as a credit, in the manner of a byline. Dutch Wikipedia names books designed for the artists Gabriel Orozco and Rineke Dijkstra, and lists the fashion designers Viktor & Rolf and the Dutch art magazine Metropolis M among the studio’s other clients.

The studio also documented its own output. Dutch Wikipedia lists Recollected Work: Mevis & Van Deursen, published by Artimo in 2005, as a book on the duo, alongside a special feature on the pair in the Japanese design magazine Idea, issue 308, under the title Recycled Works 1990–2005. Both titles turn the studio’s own archive into a publication, which is a fitting form for designers whose clients were so often publishers, artists and museums.

Museums in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, dated.

A documented museum commission came in Rotterdam. Dutch Wikipedia says Mevis & Van Deursen designed the visual identity of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen from 2003 to 2006. The dates matter for the studio’s story: they show the pair working on the identity of a large art museum years before the Amsterdam commission that later drew public attention to their name.

That Amsterdam commission was the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Logo Design Love, the logo blog written by the designer David Airey, published a post on the new Stedelijk logo in May 2012. It listed the designer as Mevis & Van Deursen, the client as the Stedelijk Museum, the place as the Netherlands, the sector as arts and culture and the form as a wordmark, and said the logo was designed by Linda van Deursen of the studio. The post noted that the museum was closed at the time for the final phase of its building renovation and expansion project, and was due to reopen on 23 September 2012. It credited the building work to the architects Benthem Crouwel and linked to a short Dutch-language video about the new logo.

The wordmark set off a public argument about legibility. Readers who commented on the Logo Design Love post on 1 May 2012 were split: one praised the balance of the vertical and horizontal spacing, another said the idea of building a typographic form out of words was sound but objected to the spacing and to how the letters read once the baseline was removed. Dutch Wikipedia says the duo received a great deal of criticism for the new Stedelijk logo in 2012. The same blog post later noted that the author Michael Evamy had written about the identity and its background for Creative Review.

The Stedelijk work is tied closely to a building and a date. The logo was introduced while the museum was shut, so it served as an early sign of the reopening, before visitors could see the renovated galleries. MadeGood’s own Stedelijk Museum guide covers the museum’s side of that story, from its catalogue tradition to the S introduced in 2012.

A partnership name, two practices.

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.

Teaching in Arnhem, Amsterdam, The Hague and New Haven.

Alongside the studio, both founders built long teaching careers, and those schools are part of how the studio’s name travelled. Dutch Wikipedia says Armand Mevis teaches at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, the postgraduate typography workshop. It says Linda van Deursen was head teacher of graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam until 2015, and has taught since 2017 on the master’s programme Non Linear Narrative at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. The KABK profile confirms that she teaches on that master’s programme, describes her as the former head of the Rietveld Academie’s graphic design department, and says she has been a senior critic at the Yale School of Art in New Haven since 2003.

The partnership itself has changed. Dutch Wikipedia says the duo has worked separately since 2023, with each continuing as an independent designer. The studio name now belongs to a body of work made between 1987 and that separation, documented in the books and identities listed above. In that sense the name works much as it did from the beginning: as a credit attached to a project, rather than as a brand designed to run on its own.

What the documented projects share is a client base in culture, a habit of editing as well as designing, and a willingness to let a typographic decision, such as the arrangement of letters in the Stedelijk wordmark, carry the whole identity. The 2012 debate shows how visible such a decision can be when the client is a public museum.

For a design guide, Mevis & Van Deursen shows how a studio can let its founders’ names stand as the whole identity and let its client list, books and teaching do the rest. Compare Karel Martens, another Dutch designer in this collection, and the Stedelijk Museum. For this guide we use black, red and grey with a neutral grotesque sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mevis & Van Deursen’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.