Noordhoff
Hundreds of titles, one cover system, designed for every screen.
Noordhoff publishes for every level of Dutch education, primary school to university, across dozens of brands. On the shelf those titles read like strangers, and the shelf is no longer the only place they live: a cover has to hold up as an app tile and a platform thumbnail too. We built the thing every cover starts in, and handed it over. Noordhoff runs it themselves now.
The idea
A shelf that read as a coalition, and a tool that starts every cover.
Noordhoff's titles span four education segments, and some brands run across all of them. Getal & Ruimte goes from primary maths to university calculus, Nieuw Nederlands from children's spelling to academic writing. But over the years each brand was designed on its own: different typefaces, different colours, nothing connecting a primary school workbook to the secondary school version of the same method. The shelf looked like a coalition, not a publisher.
Noordhoff asked for covers. We gave them the cover system. Not a document to read and interpret, but something you operate: pick the segment, the brand, the level, the book type, and seventy percent of the cover is already standing. What is left is the part the team wants to spend its time on.
What we made
Seventy percent decided by the system. Thirty percent that stays theirs.
A cover system only holds if it knows every cover it will ever have to make. So before drawing one, we mapped every variable that could land on a cover: the methods, the levels, the book types, the editions, the digital products. We worked from a detailed briefing by Noordhoff's own design team and made sixty-plus explorations to see how the parts behave together. The groundwork was not decoration. It was the project.
Some of that groundwork ran on AI. It helped us keep the whole matrix in view, push through visual explorations faster than we could draw them, and weigh one iconography direction against another. It also drafted the first briefings for the illustrators and the photographers, so the people making the images started from something specific.
One layer works across all four segments. One typeface for everything. Subject icons, maths, language, physics, history, that follow a student from primary to vocational. A strip that fills itself in with each book's level, year, subject and edition. That layer decides seventy percent of every cover before anyone opens it.
The other thirty percent is per book, and it stays with the team. Layout, photography, colour, illustration: their call. A physics title can lean on a photograph, a primary language method on illustration. They choose inside the fixed part, so the creative work stays theirs while readability, hierarchy and what stands out are already handled.
What we did
Designed for the screen first, running without us.
None of this was drawn for print and then squeezed onto a screen. Educational publishing is moving to apps, learning platforms and online tests, so every part of a cover had to work at thumbnail size before it worked in a student's hands. That was the starting point, not a later fix. The team produces the next title without briefing a studio: no back and forth with us for every book. The first books are in classrooms. The next method is already going through the same system.