Season’s Listing, Ghent 1998–99

Here is the first arts season’s newspaper we did for the Arts Department of the City of Gent (aka Ghent). Our micro-agency Dorp & Dal had just started producing publications for FontShop Benelux (Belgium-Netherlands-Luxemburg), who were in greater Ghent, and I was investigating the Dutch type scene for my book Dutch Type, getting to know the Dutch type scene well.
My font choice was informed by these other projects. I was very impressed with the individuality and masterstrokes of Fred Smeijers’ FF Quadraat family, which became a staple in our late-1990s typographic designs. For the paper’s masthead I wanted something slightly flashier, and I chose Impacta from Marc Lubbers, which was part of Linotype’s Take Type series — a small pile of CD-roms I had acquired because the fonts were new, original and affordable. Some of Impacta’s details are quite close to Quadraat. Maybe it’s fellow Dutchness, maybe it’s direct inspiration. The combination worked well for me.

A technical note for young designers: this A3-size paper was printed in two shades of blue – both Pantone inks – on a two-colour press. We designed a lot of two-colour stuf at the time because the price-per-hour was so much lower for those small presses. It was kind of adventurous because the result couldn’t be foreseen with exactness. We often travelled to the printing company in the countryside to check at the press while printing.