Palm trees, wingdings, tarot colours and retro collages, both reminiscent of castaways and holidays – the first theme for which Atelier Brenda & Amélie Bakker designed the visual identity brings together various graphic elements and inspirations on as many different mediums. A fax announced the digital transition. "Graphically, we didn't want to lay it on too heavy. Loneliness may often be seen as something negative, but ‘O Solitude’ was an ode, a celebration."

A few months after the big Women's March, the designers decided to go over their own programme poster with spray cans. The logo got two cat ears on the ‘g’. "Feminism belongs to everyone, and so we felt that openness to everyone's individual touch was important." The font also resisted some long-standing rules: glyphs, glitches and tweaks pop up between and through the lettering. "The programme was also about how the big struggle often hides in the little things. Therein lies a lot of political power."

"We wanted to keep it simple: just letters. But it proved difficult to break our habits and we soon started using the letters as illustrations.”

No theme, but a focus on different disciplines and spaces, due in part to the opening of the new exhibition space: "We chose to work with just colour and typography. There was also the Tashweesh festival, which already had its own signature style. So everything became green and the festival metallic."

That summer, the rooftop filled up with longtime and new football fans for a programme of films, football matches, performances, concerts and DJ sets. The designers also eagerly used the shapes and colours of football jerseys, pitches and goals.

Squidgy letters, holographic foil and hand-drawn illustrations provided a playful and abstract approach to a programme questioning normativity.

"The most conceptual design we made. From the sweltering city one ascends the stairs to rooftop heaven. The poster was a line-up list in the form of a 'stairway to heaven'." This wouldn't be the last time the infamous stairs played a determining role in the design.

What can love mean beyond clichéd romance? "While we definitely wanted to avoid it with the previous house styles, we used a lot of clichés as inspiration for this. Hearts and optical art, lots of grids and other optical illusions in unsubtle black and white, because love is also abstract and can even be a frenzied illusion."

In times of fake news and persistent colonial power structures, this programme would bring together forgotten, under-served and intuitive forms of knowledge. Would, because by that spring, almost all ways of coming together were hindered. "We made a booklet in the same format as the old Beursschouwburg programmes that would double as a programme, calendar, journal, and scrapbook. We found the theme to be quite difficult, complex and layered. So we used the orange and silver colours from work shirts and traffic cones. By letting grids, mirror writing and chalk paper play with each other, the booklet started to feel as layered as the programme. What is still hidden, what is already visible?"

Searching and undulating, we tried to make plans with artists we missed for far too long during pandemic times.

A programme about being on the move, enduring, continuing, resting, speeding up, standing still and wandering: "First of all, we wanted to find peace with our design, and express that something may take a long time. Letters that look aged and go from thin to thick – that's how that period of lockdowns felt, when time seemed slow and fast at the same time, but mostly intensified."

A programme about how we can remember, remake, rewrite and appropriate myths today. With Comic Sans, as it turned out.

"Instead of designing a new visual identity from scratch, we tried to break this habit by using elements from previous themes in a new way. A kind of sound mix show in which we let titles, colours, tags, grids, logos from previous styles come together in different combinations. It is also a sustainable way to reuse what has already been made into something new. A strategy for teasing out, re-moulding and reinventing our habitual design methods."

A programme on quiet refusal, self-defense and riot.