Het beest in ons, Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam

Het beest in ons (“The beast in us”) is the title of a special exhibition that was on display from June 2022 through January 2023 at the Museum for Natural History of Rotterdam, which, according to their website, is “a dead serious museum”. For this project, 25 writers across the Netherlands were invited to reflect on the challenges of contemporary human society from the perspective of a chosen animal. While a fox ponders food security, a jaguar comments on framing, and an albatross speaks about homosexual parenting, to give just three examples.

The written texts were taken to the streets of Rotterdam by means of a small truck. Passers-by were invited to read the texts aloud inside the truck in order to record their voices for the museum’s audio guide. Eventually, the exhibition brought together the Dutch authors, the museum exhibits, and the voices of the citizens of Rotterdam. To top it all off an accompanying book was published. The recordings, meanwhile, can be listened to on the museum’s website.

Responsible for the visual design of the whole project was Rotterdam-based Studio Spass, founded by Jaron Korvinus and Daan Mens. The concept is based on three very clear design principles: the silhouettes of animals, bright plain colors, and one typeface, Media Sans by Production Type. Apart from a few cases the silhouettes of the animals are filled with text, and this text consists of the buzzwords of our current societal discourses – a very clever way to graphically combine the two sides of this project.

Media Sans is a good choice to realize this concept: with its extreme x-height and respectively extremely short ascenders and descenders, it allows for very tight line spacing, even with lowercase typesetting. This also makes the nice animation of the type inside the animals ever more convincing, as can be seen on the exhibition’s micro site. Featured in the pictures to this post is almost exclusively Media Sans Bold, but the project made use as well of Media Sans Text, a text-optimized version that’s not officially released yet.