Over the years, six athletics clubs in The Hague have merged to create what is now Haag Atletiek. So it was that in 2013 the present club could celebrate its first century. That called for a jubilee book – and that means taking care.The lucky dip of archive material, the editors’ unbridled enthusiasm, a design agency with little experience of making books – these can be so many ingredients for a heap of busyness wrapped up in poor magazine design.
Not here, however. Even if the green-and-yellow club spirit does burst out at us from the pages – and why not indeed? – Honderduit Haag has still turned out to be a tightly structured book, and very accessible too. Each chapter opens with a picture page on the left with an illustration in duplex. There is a photo chapter in which spot UV varnish makes the photos jump out at you. The statistical department is stored in the last chapter, the women’s times in red and the men’s in blue spot colour. ‘They’ve had a typographer in to do this.’ There are even spreads with nothing but text. The logos and badges of the merger partners adorn the spine.
The paper is very slightly on the stiff side. One panel member excused this by saying that the shrinking range of papers available sometimes gets in the way of finding perfection.