Vestingstad Maastricht is a local museum and foundation with an enormous amount of knowledge about Maastricht's history and the historic defensive structures and buildings scattered around the city today. Vestingstad Maastricht is completely run by volunteers.

In the Minor Graphic design we were asked to provide Vestingstad Maastricht with a new and refreshing identity, reflecting their position as thé place to go if you want know anything about Maastricht's history.

When visiting Maastricht Vestingstad and talking to the volunteers, I was blown away by the amount of stories and anecdotes they can produce about every single period in the history of Maastricht. When discussing a certain time period, the volunteers were able to tell me all kinds of different stories regarding that time, with contagious enthusiasm and interest.

This is what I tried to capture when I was creating the identity. I took a typographic approach to achieve this. Soon I arrived at brackets. Brackets in Dutch are often called "haakjes". These brackets are a symbol for "haakjes uit het verleden" - "contexts in history". They serve as a visual methaphor for the different time periods or contexts in the history of Maastricht, inside of which the volunteers of Maastricht Vestingstad tell many different stories stories. The content - the stories - is always encapsulated in brackets - the time period or context.

To balance out the modern look of the black and white typographic elements, I used high-quality historic paintings and illustrations. The unique colors of these images add some welcome contrast to Maastricht Vestingstad's website, instagram posts, posters and other promotional products.

Something Vestingstad Maastricht's identity lacked was consistency. One of the most important goals in this project was making sure that this organisation got a visual identity that can consistently be used in everything they make and do.

To bring the idea of the brackets encapsulating content to life, I created a couple of short animations. These can for example be posted on social media or on their website. One example of these little animations is shown above.