Utrecht graphic designer and screen printer Boris Rijksen creates a custom limited edition print for the Utrecht Public Library’s new year celebrations, gifted to partners and stakeholders in an edition of 200 and made in two versions mirrored to produce four distinct gifts.
When the Utrecht Public Library wanted to mark the new year with a gift for its partners and stakeholders, they turned to Boris Rijksen and asked him to distil the library’s ethos into a screen print. He came back with two words: Understand and Unwind.
The commission resulted in two versions of the print, each mirrored to produce four distinct variations in total, giving the gift a quiet sense of variety within a coherent whole. The limited edition of 200 was distributed across the library’s network, with a process video shown alongside to give recipients a window into how the work was made. That transparency is fitting for an institution built around access to knowledge, and it reflects something Rijksen values in his own practice: the making visible.
“It’s amazing that the library wants to support handmade work and art,” Rijksen says. The commission sits at an intersection that matters to him, between the commercial design world he worked in for over a decade in advertising and the more personal, physical practice of screen printing he turned to as a counterweight to office life. A public institution choosing to gift something handmade rather than printed commercially is a small but meaningful statement about what is worth valuing.
Boris Rijksen is a graphic designer and artist based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with a love for typography and messaging.
Website: borisrijksen.studio/bibliotheek-utrecht Instagram: @borisrijksen
Screen prints for Utrecht Public Library, January 2026. Silkscreen, edition of 200, four versions.
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