Ootje Oxenaar

Oxenaar has played a key role in Dutch graphic design history. He entered the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 1947 and later worked as a designer for entities including De Nederlandsche Bank, for which he created the familiar series of banknotes. He worked for the Dutch PTT from the late 1960s, first as a deputy director and then as head of the design department until 1994. In that capacity, he fulfilled an important function as a public design commissioner. Kuijpers’s book links Oxenaar’s various roles as an issuer and executor of commissions by looking at the social function of graphic design. The book thus forms a concise history of graphic design’s rapid development into one of the Netherlands' biggest and most important creative industries in the half century after the Second World War.