Karel Martens: Time, Typography, and the Art of Doing It Again

There’s a particular kind of joy in getting lost inside Karel Martens’ work. It’s orderly but never rigid, experimental but never loud for the sake of it. A master of rhythm, structure, and subtle rebellion, Martens has been making graphic design personal—and quietly radical—for over sixty years.

Now, the Stedelijk Museum is giving us a rare look into the mind of the designer who’s never stopped making, unmaking, and remaking. The upcoming retrospective is set to highlight not just Martens’ prolific design output—posters, books, calendars, coins, stamps—but also his fine art, kinetic sculptures, and his playful obsession with time. It’s a long-overdue celebration of one of the most influential Dutch designers working today.

What makes Martens so singular is that he’s never treated design like a fixed language. “Sometimes ‘not good’ is better than ‘good,’” he once said, recalling the moment he gave up on the idea that rules were sacred. For him, every brief is a new beginning, a new set of problems to solve. That curiosity has shaped everything from his early letterpress posters to his most recent calendar designs for Harvard GSD.

Design for Martens is a dialogue—with materials, with collaborators, with time itself. “A public for me is one of the players in the game,” he said in a recent interview. “You have a designer and a printer, but also the public, and of course the commissioner. There has to be a kind of harmony between these.” And if you’ve ever held a Martens-designed object, you’ve probably felt that harmony—carefully constructed, but never precious.

He’s been called a workaholic. He laughs it off. But there’s a real sense that Martens is always designing—if not on the page, then in conversation, in his teaching, in his way of moving through the world. His studio, Martens & Martens, which now includes his children Diederik and Klaartje Martens and designer Susu Lee, operates more like a creative playground than a traditional workspace. “Working here with Karel… it always feels like a playground,” says Lee. “Karel’s ideas are crazy. He keeps thinking of new stuff.”

That spirit of trial, error, and reinvention is deeply embedded in everything Martens does. The exhibition at the Stedelijk won’t just be a walk through his career—it’s a window into a process. A lifetime of making, undoing, and making again.

Martens once said, “Design should result from a way of thinking.” That ethos—patient, deliberate, human—might be exactly what graphic design needs now. Not more flash, but more feeling. Not louder, but smarter. And maybe most of all, a reminder that rules are there to be questioned.

We’re ready for the reminder.