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Catelijne van Middelkoop (born 1975, Alphen aan den Rijn) is a third generation Dutch designer and educator.

“Ornate, complex, and anomalous are characteristics that could render graphic design unapproachable, but in the dextrous hands (and mind) of Catelijne van Middelkoop these are adjectives that only begin to compliment the visual language that she has developed over the years as one of the founding partners of Strange Attractors Design, a Rotterdam and New York based-firm that she co-founded with partner Ryan Pescatore Frisk in 2001.”   “In their work they seem to switch effortlessly between theory and pure play, hand drawing and digital wizardry, historical research and explorations of the ever-changing vernacular of the postmodern metropolis…The outcome of these relentless investigations is diverse, and often surprisingly functional.”

From 2006 till 2012 van Middelkoop was on the national board of directors of The Association of Dutch Designers (http://bno.nl/english) (BNO), the professional association for designers and design agencies in the Netherlands. She was head of the department of Man and Communication at Design Academy Eindhoven.

Education Van Middelkoop received her bachelor degree in Graphic & Typographic Design from the [|Royal Academy of Art (KABK)] in The Hague in 2000. She received a [|NAF-Fulbright scholarship] to study at [|Cranbrook Academy of Art] and graduated with a master degree (MFA) from the 2D design department in 2002. During her studies Van Middelkoop first started teaching design. “[T]eaching became a way to rediscover the roots of graphic design, exploring ancient sources such as ‘The Universal Penman’ by George Bickham and John Baskerville’s gravestone designs. Her new-found joy in writing and drawing letterforms led to the exuberant design of Cranbrook’s ‘Graduate Studies Catalogue’ as well as a picturesque graduation project: hand-drawn, machine-produced gravestones for Cinderella and other fairytale heroines.” Prior to design, van Middelkoop studied Art History and Archeology at the University of Amsterdam (1994-1996). Van Middelkoop is a PhD candidate at the Bauhaus Universität in Weimar, Germany.

Recognition The work designed by Strange Attractors has been shown in venues all around the world and has won various design awards. In 2004 Van Middelkoop and Pescatore Frisk were included in ADC Young Guns 4. In 2006 ID Magazine listed Strange Attractors in their ‘ID Forty: Undersung Heroes’, stating that they “[s]hould be more famous because: Its work is chipping away at the chilly doctrine of modernism.” and “[i]sn’t more famous because: The partners are still young, and old attitudes die hard.” In 2007 Strange Attractors was one of the nominees for the [|Rotterdam Design Prize]. The jury committee was impressed by the practice’s consistent position and the quality of its production: “Whether making typographic works, posters, catalogues, digital animations or a spatial installation, Strange Attractors set themselves against the uniformity and anonymity of modernist design and have a highly personal expression.” In 2010 they received the overall ‘Jury Prize’ from the European Design Awards for the design and brand implementation of Letterlab, a children’s exhibition on typography commissioned by [|MOTI], the former ‘Graphic Design Museum’ in Breda. In 2012 Van Middelkoop and Pescatore Frisk were appointed Curators of the renown Graduation Show of Design Academy Eindhoven. Their work, BIG TYPE SAYS MORE, is part of the permanent collection of Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Design history is very relevant to the practice of Strange Attractors. “[W]e need to be intimately aware of what has come before us, and why. You need to be aware of history in order to be able to move ahead. This doesn’t mean that you should copy or ‘borrow’ straight from history. To become a classic nineteenth-century engraver is not our goal. However, to rethink and understand the original intentions and meaning of the act itself is. Only in that respect can one value and recognize the quality of work we make today.”