Elise Bosmans is a graphic designer from Antwerp with a broad practice — from editorial and print to interactive installations and generative type systems. Typography is her common thread: as form, as system and as a way of pushing at the edges of how things are read, moved and experienced. She studied Visual Arts at Sint-Lucas Antwerp, completing a bachelor's in Graphic Design and a master's in Digital Context.
A letter on your screen is always the same. What if it wasn't? My master's project DIGI.ROT explores type as a living system, one that grows, decays and remembers. Letters emerge slowly, drawn by hundreds of lines that trace their forms like mold spreading across a surface. They are never printed, never fixed. They come into being, and then they dissolve. Every touch accelerates that process. The system accumulates each interaction and carries it forward: the more it is used, the further the letterforms break down. What begins as legible gradually becomes something else: still a letter, but barely. A residue of itself.
The work exists somewhere between typography and time-based art. It asks what a letter becomes when it is no longer designed to last, when its identity is not a fixed form, but a history of use.
My idea grew out of the research I did for my thesis. In it, I looked at how we evolved from old print, in which letters wore down through time and use, to a completely perfect letter on screen. In my thesis, that short evolution leads to a clear end result: the perfect letter. My thesis also examines the reaction against this perfection, which is why it connects so well to my master's project.
During my master's project, I approached typography in multiple ways before arriving at the final project. I like to share these explorations on my portfolio because they are all important for understanding my way of thinking and why I made the choices I did. I've bundled them in a processfolio, which you can view here.
For this masterclass, we built an installation that combines images and sounds from the countryside where we grew up with images and sounds from Antwerp. Object recognition triggers certain sounds, so what appears in front of the camera plays the piece. Through these triggers, the contrast between the city and the countryside becomes something you can play with.
During my bachelor's project I designed a typeface that is both legible and illegible. The starting point is ocular migraine: a condition in which vision temporarily becomes blurred in all kinds of ways before a migraine attack sets in. The typeface is presented on a website that measures the distance between the eyes and uses it to determine whether the type is legible or not. If you look straight at the screen, it is illegible, and if you look slightly away and then back at the website, it becomes more legible. This lets other people experience how difficult it can sometimes be for patients with a blurry spot in their vision during an ocular migraine attack.
Book: a flip book about the typeface, explaining how and why it works and showing the evolution from legible to illegible. Posters: since the typeface became a display font, four posters show the typography at a larger scale. Letter analysis: a book analysing how each letter moves from legible to illegible, using a diagram on which the letter is plotted.
Live project: fracture.vdvm.be
Geometry is a 1,200-page book designed collectively by the third-year graphic design students (BA3) at Sint-Lucas Antwerp in 2024–2025. My chapters cover the Voronoi system, Cyclopedia, the book Grid Systems, and Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt).
For the accompanying exhibition, I designed an interactive installation in which a Voronoi diagram responds to music and ambient sound. Visitors influence how the diagram grows and evolves.
A publication that documents the research and process behind my typeface and website. Unfolded, the book is the size of my screen, which emphasises the translation from digital to print and brings the two together. The book itself is designed from my typeface: it is both very orderly and very chaotic, because I use the code inside the book and place the images over it. It is a translation of my typeface into a publication in which the process becomes visible.
A magazine with essays, interviews, film and music reviews, and a manifesto. The content was translated into a magazine with architectural plans as its starting point.
A logo experiment in which two logos are combined into a new image, translated into a screen-printed t-shirt.
A typeface designed from the shape of a squircle. It started with sketches and was then developed in Glyphs.
