German designer and researcher Franziska Sofia Meeder brings together over a dozen contributors in a 180-page publication examining how identity is constructed at the intersection of culture, gender and the technologies of our time.
The question at the centre of A Collection of Modern Self is one that design is particularly well-placed to address: how does the way things are made and presented shape who we think we are? Franziska Sofia Meeder’s publication, released in July 2025, approaches that question through the lens of the early modern period while keeping its implications firmly in the present.
“Design should not only be understood as an aesthetic practice,” she says, “but also explore, reflect on and respond to complex, social, cultural and technological contexts.”
The book brings together an unusually wide set of contributors: designers, writers, thinkers and creative practices including Short Notice, Zamme Projects, the Ritsch Sisters, Uta Brandes and a dozen others, each approaching the intersection of cultural identity, gender and social change from their own position. That multiplicity is itself the method. A single voice on identity would contradict the project’s premise; a collection of perspectives, held within a single designed object, performs what it argues.
The object itself is carefully made. Printed with thread stitching by Europrint Berlin, the 180-page publication is set in portrait format on Munken Lynx Rough paper with a Schaber Brillianta Calandré cover scored five times. Those production decisions are not incidental details but the physical manifestation of a design practice that Meeder grounds in research and creative reflection in equal measure. The scored cover in particular, five deliberate marks rather than one, has a quality of accumulation that suits a book about how identity layers itself over time.
Meeder studied Communication Design and then Design and Information at the Faculty of Design in Würzburg, and her practice as a freelance designer sits consistently at the meeting point of graphic work and discourses around feminism, gender and equality. A Collection of Modern Self takes that research-led approach into collaborative, multi-authored territory, using the publication as a space where interdisciplinary perspectives can coexist and inform each other.
Franziska Sofia Meeder is a designer and researcher based in Germany, working across graphic design, typography and concept development with a practice rooted in the close integration of research and creative work.
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A Collection of Modern Self, July 2025. 20 × 26cm, 180 pages. Digital printing, thread stitching, scored cover. Paper: Munken Lynx Rough. Cover: Schaber Brillianta Calandré. Printed by Europrint Berlin. Concept and design: Franziska Sofia Meeder.
