A pair of colorful calendars appeared around Gund Hall during the 2024–2025 academic year to announce the full schedule of public programs at the Graduate School of Design (GSD). Designed by Martens and Martens studio in the Netherlands, the posters reflect the typographical experiments undertaken over the past six decades by Karel Martens, the studio’s founder.
Martens created the visual identity for the GSD’s public programs as he prepares for a retrospective at the Stedeljik Museum Amsterdam, drawing from a design career spanning from the days of punchcutters to the Creative Cloud. Throughout, Martens has maintained a meticulous focus on the interactions of color, typography, and printing techniques, balanced by an infectiously playful attitude toward the conventions of design.
Known today primarily as a graphic designer, with much of his influential work collected in the now-classic volume Drukwerk, Martens began his career when design was an inherently interdisciplinary pursuit. Architecture in particular has served as a source of inspiration as well as the subject of legendary projects he produced and oversaw, including the journal OASE. Trained as a fine artist, Martens also creates textiles, design objects, and kinetic sculptures, a selection of which will be part of the Stedeljik exhibition.
For decades, pedagogy has been integral to Martens’s design work, which is often produced collaboratively and through trial-and-error. This ethos is at the heart of the school he founded, Werkplaats Typografie, and also extends to the dynamic of the studio itself. Today, Martens and Martens includes Diederik Martens, Klaartje Martens, and Susu Lee, all of whom contributed to the visual identity for the GSD’s public programs.
For nearly twenty years, the GSD has commissioned outside designers to create posters and other materials to announce public programs. Chad Kloepfer, art director at the GSD, and Willis Kingery, graphic design consultant for the school, spoke with the Martens and Martens team about their collaboration with the GSD and how the work environment in the studio often flips the roles of instructor and student in a playful yet intensive search for new forms and modes of expression.
Willis Kingery: We wanted to start with an impossible and kind of silly question. How many posters have you designed, Karel?
Karel Martens: [laughs] Too many! More than a hundred. My first was for a movie theater.
WK: Do you still find challenges to be met in designing posters? Has anything in your approach to making a poster changed from your early career to now? Are you surprised by the endurance of the format?
KM: There’s been a departure from some past media. You used to make sketches with your pencil, then it went out to an official printer, and you had to make films and do all that kind of thing. So now it’s much more direct, and much easier in a way. That doesn’t always mean that the results are better, but it’s completely different from when I started my career in the time of letterpress. In that time, you had to work with material, to work with a printer and what they had in their collection. I used to deal with small printers and whatever typefaces they had in their drawers.
WK: And have there been any changes in the thought process that goes into the designing of a poster?
KM: I always try to imagine what kind of public I’m addressing, and who and what kind of public the poster should be for. A public for me is one of the players in the game. You have a designer and a printer, but also the public, and of course the commissioner. There has to be a kind of harmony between these. Working with the GSD, I had a feeling we understood each other very well. The challenge in this case, of course, is the distance. You don’t smell the ink.
WK: One of your earliest teaching assignments to your students in Arnhem in the late 1970s was to design a typographic layout for one month of a calendar page, which was then printed by letterpress in Futura. Curiously, upon receiving the commission from the GSD in 2024 and 2025, you gave yourself your own assignment, creating a calendar system using Futura as the primary typeface. Can you tell us what motivated this?
KM: I’ve always been fascinated by numbers and time. Time for me is a mysterious thing. A calendar is a magical thing, and a daily calendar really makes you see that time is going. [The two GSD posters represent] two parts from a whole year. You see the panorama of the whole year, all the numbers, all the days, and from those there are a few you pick out. Exciting days. I can imagine that for students you can be confronted with the highlights of the year.
WK: The release of your two posters line up elegantly with an auspicious anniversary: Paul Renner began working on the typeface that would become Futura in the summer of 1924, and this was later picked up for commercial development by the Bauer type foundry in the winter of 1925 and eventually released in 1927 as Futura. So, on its unofficial 100th anniversary, can you tell us about your selection of Futura for the GSD posters? Futura feels like a typeface you’ve fallen in and out of love and trust with over the course of your career, but it seems to have enduring relevance for you in architectural contexts.
KM: Futura still contains a kind of thesis about the future in my opinion. As a designer you can go crazy looking at all the typefaces. I see typefaces as a kind of representation of the human voice. And a human voice can be reflected on a poster depending on what someone would like to tell. A poster for a professor of mathematics might use another typeface, and it would be different again if it were for a book or magazine.
Diederik Martens: You’re aiming for a tone of voice?
KM: It’s also connected to the creation of hierarchy, which acts as a guide. A caption should be different than a footnote, through size or position. In that way I always learned a lot from the catalogues that Wim Crouwel made for the Stedelijk Museum. There’s only one typeface, one size, one leading. Only the position on the page is important. In this way you create your own rules. I remember reading Jan Tschichold for the first time—his book on book design. After two pages, I closed it. I thought I can never act that clever. I later saw there was a distinction between his falsch und richtig (“good” and “not good”). Sometimes “not good” is better than “good.” When you make rules for something it is already dead.
Chad Kloepfer: Given that the poster you’ve designed for the GSD neatly outlines the days of a semester at a design school, could you each tell us what a day on the Silodam at Martens Martens looks like?
KM: I’m a workaholic.
DM: [laughs] You, no! So, you wake up in the morning and you go to the gym.
KM: Yes, I do some exercises, have some breakfast, and then I go to the studio around half past nine, which is in the same building, so I don’t have to walk far.
Susu Lee: Me and Diederik come to the studio at 10. I come three days a week. We always check what we’re going to do for the day. I make a schedule in my head, otherwise I get lost because there are a lot of things to do here. Then me and Karel work together behind one computer. It’s always nice to be here. And Diederik is working on typefaces, making fonts, animations.
DM: If they start working here in the studio I can always go next door to Karel’s house, because it’s quiet, and I can make phone calls, handle the administration and Karel’s calendar, make a typeface or animation. Then we have lunch together around 1 o’clock, baking eggs or something like that. Susu likes to bring a Korean lunch.
SL: Working here with Karel—I don’t know if this is the right word for it—but it always feels like a playground. There’s so much to see, and Karel’s ideas are crazy. He keeps thinking of new stuff and is always willing to try out something new every time. From trying everything out, we of course make some mistakes, but then it somehow becomes the work.
DM: It’s always a lot of trial and error. It might sound repetitive, but it somehow never repeats. Sometimes you might think one work is a copy of another, but we’re always looking backwards in order to go forward. We don’t believe there’s one best way. We’re always taking one step forward, two steps backward, and so on. Every design process here is like that, reinventing almost the same thing.
WK: Do you ever take a break from designing every day?
KM: For me it’s an ongoing process: the client has a question and I have to find an answer. I have to find the ingredients that I can use for it, and I’m always analyzing that. Then you get an idea, and try it. If it’s good you keep it. If it isn’t, you put it in the trash can and you start again.
DM: It’s like you’re a detective. A detective has to be a workaholic, they can’t hide behind their desk and wait to start working. They’re always gathering information.
WK: Do you remember the moment that you developed a sense of vocation as a designer?
KM: It was from the moment when I began studying at art school. That was the nicest part. You develop things yourself, in collaboration with other people or not. I was around 20, and at that time art school was five years, and in my case the curriculum of the school was really broad. It was more of a general art education. The term “graphic design” didn’t exist yet for us at that time. So you took classes from all the teachers, developing ideas in whatever medium you wanted. In my opinion design education today is too focused on design, design, design. It should result from a way of thinking. I don’t see a difference in the kind of thinking that is needed to make a dress or a poster or a stamp or whatever. You’re facing a problem. Graphic design may be the ingredients for the technical realization of the problem, in combination with materials, but I try to see everything as new—as a possibility for new work. It’s surprising how so much is all the same. But now we are preparing for the Stedelijk exhibition, and I discovered that I too did a lot of things too many times.
CK: We know that not just the practice of design, but also the teaching of design is very important to you. In 1998 you founded the post-graduate school Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, Netherlands, with the purpose of learning through working on practical design assignments and commissions. Do you still think this is the best model for a design education?
KM: What was nice about the Werkplaats was that from the beginning my studio was in the school as a permanent location. We were always thinking when we created the Werkplaats Typografie that we should do real things. When you can create ideal situations for yourself, then it’s not so difficult, and also not so exciting in my opinion. In this way I was able to work less and also do a lot. For example, I always made the architectural journal OASE with a student. In fact, the student did it and I was guarding them. The students were always motivated to make the best possible work, in contact with the architects, who were also designers. The students would hear the architects’ comments, make their own strategies, and go to the printer with their own ideas.
CK: What do you think Susu? What’s your sense from working in the studio?
KM: Don’t tell all the secrets!
SL: I studied at the [Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam], and I would say it has a similar educational program to the Werkplaats. We had a lot of applied assignments, such as designing a poster for the Rietveld or other institutions in Amsterdam. I don’t know if it’s the right answer, but whenever I’m in Karel’s studio I feel like Karel is teaching me. I was actually thinking a few weeks ago what it would have been like to be at the Werkplaats while Karel was at the Werkplaats. But now I’m at the studio and can just talk to Karel about commissioned work and assignments and how to develop them. I really appreciate it. I also appreciate how Karel directs. He doesn’t say, “this poster should be like this,” or “this poster should read in this way.” He always puts it in a really poetic way. For example, with the GSD poster Karel told me that the front and back layers of the typography have to fight each other. The front and back layers need to be in a fight. At first, I was like, what does that mean? Then I looked back at his work in Drukwerk and started to understand, oh, this is what Karel means.
CK: You had mentioned something about time as a component of your thinking and work, and looking back at your books we see everything from overlapping numbers and dingbats to graphic patterns and typeface design where there is a real kinetic quality to the work. We have even seen this translated into videos and sculptures. What is the relation of time and movement to your work, and is it a conscious component as you are engaged on a project?
KM. It’s all based on choreography I believe. I remember already as a child I was interested in how a watch worked. I remember my father had a type writing machine; I could not read in this time, and as he was typing I was wondering what is a typeface, and what are letters? And that with 26 characters from an alphabet you can make so many kinds of meanings? That for me is still a kind of mystery. Same with colors. With basically a few colors you can make all the colors of the world. You can take this for granted—and this is also okay—but for me it’s still a mystery that you can make from yellow and blue—green! Three! Two makes three.
DM: Has time something to do with it?
KM: Yes, even in printing. With the monoprints you are printing, and then you cannot touch them. And the next day you can touch them again. I never have a fixed plan, only a beginning. I start printing something, and then it is asking me for something more. And sometimes they go to the trashcan, and sometimes they receive more and more. I still have the feeling that I’m the student. That I’m the one who has to learn.
DM: And we feel like the ones who are the teachers!
SL: Sometimes I have the feeling that Karel is really like a child. In a good way! Always wondering, finding new things—in his crazy collections, his crazy shelves.
WK: Karel, you’ve mentioned that the 2mm grid structure for OASE was inspired by watching a documentary about the architect Dom Hans van der Laan. Similarly, you’ve cited the work of Auguste Perret as a point of inspiration for the vertical strips in your beach installation in Le Havre. Have you experienced any other moments of interdisciplinary connection after a lifetime of working with architects? And conversely, have any of your collaborators in architecture translated lessons learned from you and your work into their own projects?
KM: Life is a process. I was never even intending to study design. The word “design” didn’t exist at that time. I was intending to study mathematics, but everything then depended on the teachers. On the last day of the semester the teachers would give a kind of speech, and I had this teacher that was always explaining the failures of mathematics. He was playing with his ideas about what mathematics should be, and I thought this is the forefront of the future. But then, I’m dyslexic, so I could not finish my high school and therefore advance on to university. So, I had to do something else. My sister was in the art school and she always said, “you have to come to the art school.” From the moment of joining the art school I felt happy. There were all kinds of things that you could do.
DM: But you never recognized that an architect was inspired by you?
KM: No.
DM: Did you ever think about being an architect?
KM: Why? To save money? No. There are so many things to do. But I have a feeling that education is too focused on disciplines. As a young person you could learn just as much from a person who is teaching aviation or, I don’t know, anything! As a young person you need a full color of opportunity. Not only graphic design, not only architecture.
CK: That sounds similar to a Bauhaus form of education. Not a single discipline, but a bigger, circular idea. I had a question about the tools designers use. The tools we use have changed dramatically over the course of your career. I feel like when a new tool is invented, it’s easy to become a victim of it. How have you stayed above that?
DM: Yes, victim of tools.
KM: [smiling] That term “victim” is very strong. I had said my career started with letterpress. I remember I had to teach my students the way monotype was working approximately. It was a very big thing, so I split it up in parts, and I started telling them about how it works, how fantastic it was as a system for translating compositions onto this hole-punched paper. Then there was a lecture at the time at the school from the designer Gerard Unger, a Dutch type designer. And he starts his lecture, “Of course, all of you know how Monotype works…” Nobody. I was also in the audience and I was looking around thinking, what have I done wrong? For me that was a learning process in teaching. You have to deal with curiosity, and you have to make students curious. That tool was not much longer in use. Tools are always changing. After that we went to the IBM Composer, for example. In a way not a serious instrument, without special control over spacing, but you still had to deal with it because you’d have clients without large budgets. And then came cameras and phototypesetting, that came with its own rules which you then had to deal with.
DM: I think you never became a victim of tools because you’re always thinking, “What can I do in a certain kind of situation?” You can use a special tool or not, but you’re never thinking in tools. You’re thinking through your search for solutions. You find the tool for it through the searching.
KM: And I’m always thinking, can we do more with this tool than what it’s made for?
DM: It’s like when you first started using the computer. You didn’t know what to do with it. But then you started to do things with it that no one had done before, because everyone else was thinking, “computers are for this or that,” but you found things outside of the intended uses.
WK: To address another kind of circularity, many designers speak through a consistent vocabulary or approach. In a way you’ve been uniquely committed to a consistent set of visual interests and formal expressions throughout your career, and you continue to possess an almost monastic devotion to developing your craft and personal explorations. Do you ever make things—small experiments in the studio—that you discard because they don’t feel like they fit into your larger body of work?
DM: No!
KM: It’s happening very often at the moment because I have to dive into my own past: 60 years of work. Save everything. I’m seeing things I made 60 years ago and I’m now thinking—more than at the moment when I did it—”Wow, not so bad!”
CK: Since preparations for your retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum are so much about the past, if we’re looking forward, is there anything you wish you could still do? Is there anything that you haven’t had the opportunity to do yet?
KM: This is the beginning of my worries, especially at my age. It’s for sure that I don’t have so many more years in life. I’d like to use them for my work. But the strange thing is—apart from that my wife has sadly passed away—there’s a kind of strange world that you get in, where you’re then working on your own portrait. To be honest, I was so surprised that they were asking me for such a show, that it actually motivated me to go ahead, to show myself in the best way.
DM: But what do you still want to do in the future?
SL: This I know. Because I also asked it to Karel one time. Karel always wants to do something. I asked him what do you want to do besides graphic design? Besides making books and publications? And he said he wants to make BIG sculptures. So I said, we can do it after we’re done with the Stedelijk! But he said, no, it will be too much work.
DM: The exhibition consumes a lot of energy and time and concentration and space, but we still think when the preparations for the exhibition end, we’ll have time to do lots of other kinds of stuff. But it always goes on and on, and then something else comes up, and you think you can start something new, but you can’t plan for anything. It’s like we’re on a train that will never stop, and you have to live with it in a way. But we want to do a LOT. When? We’re always willing, but where is the time?
KM: You cannot do everything. I’m interested in 3D printing, but I may not get the chance to do it. I have a small studio now. The machines are too big. I have at most the space to make something at the scale of A3. That’s the maximum. But from the other side, limitation can point your energies into small things. I sometimes wish to make a big thing, in concrete for example. You can now 3D print in concrete. What’s happening in your school with this kind of thing?
DM: He wants to use your school’s concrete printer!
CK: We’ll talk to facilities about that!
KM: Well, this is the nice thing about education, that you see young people taking decisions. I always had the feeling that I was the student and they were the teachers. Students are always inventing things. It’s amazing to see that you’re in a positive environment, so you should work with young people and see how they are making things. That’s really a privilege, I believe.
CK: That’s a really beautiful and perfect way to close this out. Thank you so much.
WK: Karel, on behalf of many designers, I’m very glad that you didn’t study mathematics!
