WRITING AS DESIGNING
When I started working on these publications, I thought I needed to let the writer in me speak. But something else happened: as soon as words appeared on the screen, I began designing them. Typeface, white space, position on the page… I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t just looking at the meaning of the words, but also at how they looked. And that’s not strange. I’m a visual person. Form is a way of thinking.
Still, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to approach it differently now. Because I noticed the content stayed out of reach as long as I kept moving the form around. The text became a moving target. Only when I forced myself to let go of the design did I get a better grip on what I actually wanted to say. That was a difficult, but necessary step.
What helped was thinking back to my internship at Penguin Putnam Inc. in New York. There, I worked on manuscripts by different authors, raw texts without any layout. What struck me then was how powerful a text can be simply through the way it is structured. The structure, the division into chapters, the hierarchy of information: all of that without a single typographic intervention. It was the first time I realized that hierarchy in text does not have to be visual. You can also create order through meaning. That is the insight I now bring into my own writing process.
So I’ve started working differently: writing first, design will come later. The texts now follow a content-based structure: a layout that clarifies what is essential, what explains, and what reflects. This requires making decisions, cutting, rewriting. And that is exactly the point: not everything needs to be visible at once.
Another decision I’ve made is to write in Dutch. It is my native language, the language I think in, the language of doubt and nuance. Writing in Dutch means not keeping my distance. It feels more direct, more natural. Still, I want my writing to be accessible to an international audience. That’s why I will translate them into English. Not word for word, but true to the meaning. Each translation will become a new interpretation, a second version of the original.
The entire process [writing, structuring, translating] feels like learning to see again. Not through my usual path from form to meaning, but the other way around. And still, it remains a visual process in the end. Because even though I am letting go of design for now, I know I will return to it one day. But then as a second step.
[
First the content.
Then the form.
]
