Angles

The work of Belgian graphic design studio Vrints-Kolsteren—whether joyous or subdued, artful or a frame full of art—is a hybrid of the rational and artistic: a process of experimentation in search of ground rules. Partners Naomi Kolsteren and Vincent Vrints describe it as a game. By playing the game, they establish its rules, allowing them to play again and again with a fresh outcome each time. It is precisely the creation of the rules that allows them to play with such freedom.

“Dutch design influenced both of us a lot,” says Kolsteren, who is seated beside Vrints in front of a wall teeming with books, a constant and reliable source of inspiration for both. “The Dutch design in a more structured way; Belgian design has fewer rules. Dutch design starts from a grid or some kind of structure; in Belgium, there’s a rich history of art that has influenced graphic design, so it’s more free and artistic looking. Our work is a combination of the two.”

“We work in a systematic way,” Vrints adds, “but it looks experimental.”

Born in Patan, Nepal and Antwerp, Belgium, respectively, Kolsteren and Vrints were both raised in Antwerp and met while studying illustration and discovering graphic design at St. Lucas School of the Arts. After graduating with honors in 2012, Vrints went on to work for Dutch graphic design office, Studio Dumbar, and Kolsteren to Belgian agency Mirror Mirror. Within three years, however, the two had launched Vrints-Kolsteren to do creative direction, photography and graphic design for brands in more creative and cultural fields. “Working at big studios, you miss the connection with clients,” Vrints says. “When we work with people now, it’s more of a collaboration. The client has ideas, we have ideas, and we mix them up. It’s more of a conversation.”

Today, with iF and Red Dot awards to their names, their work is remarkable for its pairing of color and type to create identity ecosystems that tend to balance the very expressive with the pointedly neutral. The studio’s use of black-and-white and a generic typeface for the identity of Onkruid, for example, has a powerful, purposeful neutrality. A creative events platform (music festivals, art interventions) run by an interdisciplinary team, Onkruid’s purpose is to foreground other creative brands. Its identity needed to privilege that of its partners. Instead of designing a logo, V-K created a system in which Neue Haas Grotesk becomes the protagonist of largely black-and-white billboards, among other items, on which Onkruid’s name frames and displays collaborator names or images. One series of billboards features a partner’s ‘poster’, in color, as if it has been wheat-pasted over a (black-and-white) poster advertising Onkruid, cutting off half its name. An eye-catching twist on graffiti: Onkruid has let itself be backgrounded by the partner it is promoting.

Today, however, “it’s hard for us to not use color,” Kolsteren admits. “And our approach to color is different. Often brands go for one color and try to claim it. But with identities, we usually opt for more than one.” Antwerp Art Weekend’s identity revolves around a different set of unorthodox color combinations each year. They sometimes burst onto the eye: This year, banners, billboards, signage and stationary sizzled with contiguous checkerboards of blue and yellow, fuchsia and orange, teal and rose, as if television broadcast system test screens had bred Cubist offspring. These still patterns thrum with energy while emphasizing subdued, simple, sans serif text with surprising clarity.

The studio’s use of type is similarly eloquent even when plainspoken. For menswear label Arte Antwerp, to focus attention on the fashion, for everything except for the bespoke logo, they used a minimalist, off-the-shelf typeface, Century Gothic Monospace. For the diverse, experimental and DIY Academy of Visual Arts in Mol, where Vrints teaches graphic design, “we wanted the type to speak,” he says, “so we created it for ourselves.” The result, an old sans serif type drawn on a grid, looks as if it should push the bounds of legibility, but actually reads well in a variety of contexts and scales.

For iMal, a technology-oriented arts center, V-K created an identity that looks dynamic even on the printed page. They assigned each department a color code and symbol—a dot, line or icon—that becomes a pixel to be stretched, shrunk or distorted, concentrated or dispersed, a building block that, en masse, generates larger moving images.

“Just making a logo doesn’t work anymore,” says Vrints. “It works better to have a flexible, versatile system instead of one static image. Our best identities are the ones that we keep on evolving, a game that needs to be played again and again.”

More: Vrints-Kolsteren.com

Story: Shonquis Moreno