Thijs Verbeek

The brochure ‘Opon Up’, for PON, has been nominated for an European Design Award 2020. This brochure I made in cooperation with Atelier Yuri Veerman shows the first insights gained from a diversity project that PON initiated. They are presented in the form of short interviews with employees supplemented with illustrations. The brochure is printed in 7 pantone colors on 3 types of paper stock in 6 different sizes with 5 different fonts. The brochure is intended both for former and new participants of “OPON UP” as well as a select group of employees at PON. It serves as inspiration and aims to open up further conversation about diversity within PON.

The Dutch national delivery company PostNL asked me to design two sheets of 6 postage stamps. The given theme was ‘public transport in the Netherlands’.
Both sheets of PostNL postage stamps pay homage to the main modes of public transport in our country: trams, rapid transit, city and regional busses, local, intercity and international trains, and ferry lines.
Each sheet represents a journey through the Netherlands and features various distinctive landscapes, seasons and weather conditions, ranging from cityscape to countryside, from suburb to center, and from summer to winter. Together the 12 different routes connect each of the 12 Dutch provinces. By depicting the trains, buses and trams relatively small, they blend in with the background. In addition, I wanted to feature the vehicles in all kinds of weather conditions, bringing them to life; they are dirty, muddied, or covered in snow or graffiti. The backgrounds are monochrome, showed in 4 different colors that relate to nature and the seasons; green, orange-brown, blue, and gray. Where each vehicle is sharply in focus, the blurred background suggests movement. Similar to the view from, for example, a speeding train.

As I was collecting the photographic material of the trains and buses, the problem was that where wanted to show them in sideview, the vast majority of material was photographed either straight ahead or at an angle, seen from the front. I therefore constructed my own original images based on digitized existing material. The stamps are arranged in topographical order, The city of Maastricht in the lower right, Goes in the lower left and Groningen in the upper right corner. On the selvages, parallel to the perforation, I listed the names of the towns serviced by public transit. Northern place names along the top edge, those from the East along the right edge, etc. The resulting string of location names indicates that all far corners, each town and every city in the Netherlands are interconnected.

Last night during the ADC Award ceremony in New York City I won a Gold and Bronze cube.
Gold for the book I designed for Atelier Yuri Veerman “Book Burnings: An Anthology” and Bronze for my little books “Thijs Verbeek A-B-C”. “The ADC Annual Awards, part of The One Club for Creativity, is the oldest continuously running industry award show in the world. Now heading into its incredible 98th year, these Awards celebrate the very best in advertising, digital media, graphic and publication design, packaging and product design, motion, experiential and spatial design, photography, illustration and fashion design all with a focus on artistry and craftsmanship.”