Ghent-based Studio Studio designs a generative poster system for a roadside exhibition space in Breda, building a parametric tool that produces compositions from typographic parameters and prints its own settings on each export, making every poster fully reproducible and the tool itself publicly accessible.
3 sec Gallery is a parking-site exhibition space in Breda where work is encountered at two completely different speeds. Drivers pass in seconds. Pedestrians stop and look. Studio Studio was invited to make a poster series for it and responded by building a tool rather than designing individual posters.
The site conditions defined the core constraint: macro typography for the glance, micro typography for the close read. To give that structure conceptual content, the studio worked with antonyms. A collaboratively written sentence, “We choose light open near paths to build and give today now,” provides the raw material. Each letter is set in macrotype on a poster; its antonym fills the letterform in microtype. The W of “We” is built from “They.” The C of “Choose” is built from “Reject.” The poster communicates something large and immediate to the passing driver, and something more intricate and contradictory to whoever stops long enough to read what the letter is made of.
The grid and Monotesk typeface carried across from Another Graphic, Studio Studio’s community-driven typographic archive, which had been the starting point for the invitation. The parametric engine developed to generate the series has controls for size, contrast, columns, rows, spacing and density, with AI supporting rapid prototyping against a tight deadline. Each poster, on export, prints a slim frame around itself containing the exact parameters used to generate it, making every composition precisely reproducible from its settings alone. The monochrome palette was both practical and conceptual: it met the production timeline and mirrors the binary logic of antonyms.
The tool is publicly accessible at studiostudio.be/3secgraphic, where anyone can generate their own composition within the system. This turns the project from a fixed poster series into an open system, and from a design outcome into an ongoing invitation.
Studio Studio is a Ghent-based graphic and web design practice founded by Mathieu Cieters in 2014, working across print, identity and digital projects. Cieters also maintains Another Graphic, a typographic archive running for over a decade, and Typo Typo, a type foundry in development.
Website: studiostudio.be Instagram: @studiostudio.be Tool: studiostudio.be/3secgraphic
Poster series for 3 sec Gallery, Breda (NL), 2025. Parametric grid engine, Monotesk typeface, monochrome. Parking photography: Edwin Wiekens. All other images: Studio Studio.
