Belgian Institute
of Graphic Design

My Cursive diary, 48 heures avec les graphistes is a podcast made by Nana Esi and is part of the After Cursive podcast series, reflecting further on Cursive, a graphic design and visual cultures that took place at Kaaistudio’s on the 11 and 12^th of April 2025. The podcast can be found here, on Mixcloud.

David Le Simple is a lecturer, researcher, editor and author working across written and spoken media. On Radio Campus, he hosted programmes such as *Bonjour Mardi* and *Babelutte*, where polyphony and witty repartee were the order of the day. A member of the Crickx Research Group behind the book Publi-Fluor, a facilitator for the journals of the Bye Bye Binary collective and a partner of Surfaces Utiles éditions, he moves in graphic design circles 24/7 without practising graphic design himself. It is this self-taught and detached perspective that is at work in the podcast for the Cursive festival.

Alice is a 28-year-old author and teacher, she lives in Paris, alone, surrounded by books. Will ____ is a 56-year-old English famous niche typographer, artist and editor living in Brussels. Most certainly surrounded by books too. We are now in 2025 and the initial scene takes place in Amsterdam, in 2019.

These are the first words of “I love Will, a story mostly about words’ a podcast made by Chloé Delchini and that is part of the After Cursive podcast series, reflecting further on Cursive, a graphic design and visual cultures that took place at Kaaistudio’s on the 11 and 12^th of April 2025. he podcast can be found here, on Mixcloud.

 

Chloé Delchini is a graphic designer who writes. Using storytelling as a tool at the root of all forms of communication & developing ways of making things public & putting joy and play at the center of her work. Le Lapin, is her first novel (Scribes, Gallimard, 2024).

 

Hot Type is a podcast made by Maya Strobbe with Emese Veszely and is part of the After Cursive podcast series, reflecting further on Cursive, a graphic design and visual cultures that took place at Kaaistudio’s on the 11 and 12^th of April 2025. he podcast can be found here, on Mixcloud.

In Hot Type, Maya and Emese jap about outfits, slide aesthetics, stage presence, and nerd level of the first evening of Cursive. Through their chitchat, their podcasts pushes further the reflection on what are the codes of graphic design, where do you learn them, what is expected of a graphic design lecture or conference, in-coded within graphic design culture, and educational background of graphic designers.

 

Maya Strobbe is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of drawing, graphic design, and conceptual publishing. Her practice explores the administrative processes of daily life through a distinct visual language informed by the aesthetics of bureaucracy, rules, and games. A key aspect of Strobbe’s practice is RAMSDAM BOOKS, a publishing platform for artists’ books. She lives and works in Brussels.

 

 

Something Flummox is a podcast made by Nana Esi and is part of the After Cursive podcast series, reflecting further on Cursive, a graphic design and visual cultures that took place at Kaaistudio’s on the 11 and 12^th of April 2025. The podcast can be found here, on Mixcloud.

Nana Esi is an independent designer, art director and teacher. Her design practice is both imaginative and research based. Within her practice she investigates how materiality is translated between visual language and semiotics. Her assimilation process aims to engineer and edit solutions in any medium, while allowing both confusion and clarity. She has established herself as a seasoned polymath in collaborating, designing, and co-creating identities with a large variety of designers, clients and cultural institutions. She co-founded Atelier Brenda in 2012, a multidisciplinary design studio and collaborative practice with Sophie Keij. In 2013, together with Ziggy Devriendt, she developed the visual foundations and design for radio-turned-label, Stroom.

 

For Cursive, she explores graphic design through the format of an editorial audio magazine. Bringing together multiple voices, her contribution reflects on the joy, precariousness and potential of the medium today.

After Cursive podcast series combines four podcasts reflecting further of Cursive, a graphic design and visual cultures that took place at Kaaistudio’s on the 11 and 12^th of Apri 2025 finishing off with an afterparty at Club V.I.P curated by Isengard. This first edition brought together international as local speakers from different generations as well as backgrounds and focused on the importance of community-making within the extensive field of graphic design.

 

Cursive was organised by B-i-n-g-o, represented by Pia Jacques and Leroy Meyer, D-E-A-L studio formed by Victor Coupaud and Morgane Le Ferec, and Mateo Broillet independent type designer and teacher.

The podcasts were launched at KIOSK radio the 29.05.2026, and can be found on Mixcloud and KIOSK radio. The four podcasts were made by Nana Esi, David Le Simple, Maya Strobbe and Chloé Delchini and can be found on the website of cursive.

 

On the first evening, Valentijn Goethals presented us 019, a transdisciplinary platform that develops in-between spaces for experimentation, collaboration and encounter between architecture, graphic design and visual arts. He was followed by Roxanne Maillet who explores lesbian semiotics and the linguistic strategies used to counter oppression from the margins. Her work takes the form of collective readings, publications, and typographic experiments on different media. To round off the evening, Anja Groten introduced us to Hackers & Designers, a non-profit initiative that organizes activities at the intersection of technology, design, and art with an experimental approach to organizational tools and technical infrastructure.

 

The second evening started off with Michaël Bussaer & Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey looking back at the Bold Italic conferences organised from 2005 – 2014 by Michael and to which Stuart was invited at the first and last edition of Bold Italic. They were followed by Rietlanden Women’s Office, namely Elisabeth Rafstedt and Johanna Ehde. Elisabeth and Johanna engage with both contemporary and historical methods of collaborative graphic design and they make together the publication series MsHeresies which is about the ornamental in feminist collaboration. Katharina Serulus concluded the evening with presenting us the fantastic work of Charlotte Morel that designed the famous Amnesia posters in Ibiza in the 1980’s. Katharina studied art history and design cultures at the KU Leuven and the VU Amsterdam. Her research interests include national discourses, gender, transnational networks, club culture, and non-disciplinary practices in the fields of design, architecture, and visual culture.

 

The graphic design of the podcast and of Cursive was made by Ran Devos and Lise Leën
Webdesign is by Antoine Gelgon

Cursive and After-Cursive was made possible thanks to Vlaamse Overheid and Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles

A publication about our research and past presentations on the Design Museum’s graphic histories in Ghent is available!

 

We settled for eight weeks in the DING vitrine of the museum, sharing and inhabiting the space with the Post Identity Project*. It is a period too short to dive deep into the museum’s graphic history, but enough time to open a selection of archive boxes and discover some snippets of its past.

 

This led to four temporary exhibitions and research trajectories: the evolution of Design Museum Gent’s graphic identity, the graphic designer and educator Hélène Van Coppenolle, Frida Burssens wonderful poster series and, finally, the exhibition ‘In koeien van letters: 50 years of graphic design in Flanders’.

 

24 pages, 19 x 25,5 cm

 

Price free contribution
Shipping €4 (Belgium) €8 (EU)

 

To order a copy, please send us a mail to

[email protected]

 

Designed by PIP* (then, Ran De Vos and Bruno Jacoby)
Made possible thanks to Design Museum Gent