Eva van der Hoek, NL

graphic designer

About

A growing part of the graphic design discours has dematerialized and has shifted into an attitude that engages with its outside world. Thereby graphic design came to hold a certain status, enabling a contribution to more political responsibility and innovativeness. Within my research I investigate the importance of this shift, but most of all, the way it is done. When we engage towards political change through design, we hold a certain responsibility that we should be aware of.

The research starts with art education, where young designers are trained to become critical thinkers. But why do we engage with political issues as graphic designers and in what way? Does the academy provide us with enough tools to be ethical and innovative in a project? Or does the curriculum need to be refined? The graphic design discourse is constantly evolving, but the focus to discuss it publicly has been increasingly lost. By creating opportunities for discussion, we can use these examples to contribute to future efforts.

With the goal to be broadly distributed through the academy. It tries to reach graphic design students, starters, teachers and professionals to actively think along about our role and working methods. To make the newspaper accessible, the newspaper is distributed for free.

Devided into six chapters, three interviews and multiple highlighted projects.
The interviews were hold with teachers, students and artists. 

We had the honor of designing graduation catalogue [2023] for HKU Media. In our design, we focused on our time during studies at HKU, which included a break due to Covid. This inspired the inclusion of a ‘break’ in the design, visually separating images
from text. The theme of resilience symbolizes our return from this setback.