1 jan 2003

Mieke Gerritzen

Multi Media Designer

Founder of NL.Design, an Amsterdam-based design company, which produces designs for all media and collaborates with many different designers, writers and artists.

NL.Design publishes books and organizes events including 'The International Browserday' in New York, Berlin and Amsterdam.

Ms Gerritzen has taught multimedia design at the Sandberg Institute and the Rietveld Academy. She has received numerous awards including the Gold Medal for Book Design at Leipzig, a Rotterdam Design Prize and Best Dutch Book Design prizes 1994 and 1996.

Mieke Gerritzen's website designs, though radical and individual, avoid giving the user too many options. She works within the Web's bandwidth restrictions, but does not hesitate to use the latest computer technology when she thinks it clarifies content and helps navigation.

She likes to work in as many different media as she can get: print, television, cd-roms, and of course the web, where everything comes together. For this electronic medium Mieke Gerritzen has made her most eye-catching designs, mainly because they're so different compared to what we know from browsing through the web's pages. Gerritzen is one of the very few graphic designers who has been successful in translating an ultimately print-based aesthetic to on-screen media. And she did so first of all by remaining true to the foundation of her discipline: the graphic language of line and colour.

Coming from a background in graphic design for print, she is steeped in the Dutch design tradition of clarity with a highly personal edge. There is a strong link to the bright primary colours and bold lines used by Pieta Wart and Paul Schuitema and she doesn't belie her roots at the Amsterdam Rietveld Academy, where she studied with Rob Stirred of Wild Platen, the dean of Dutch politically inspired graphic design. After graduating from the 'Former Audio Visual' department of the Rietveld Academy, she designed books, catalogues and posters, mainly for cultural clients, and made her first web designs for the newly founded Digital City in Amsterdam in 1994.

www.xs4all.nl/