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Identity
· 2026
Nieuwe Hal
Client
Nieuwe Hal, a concert hall reopening in a former tram depot, Rotterdam
Year
2026
Discipline
Identity
Scope
Name and lettering, identity system, signage, season posters
With
Bureau Spoor (architecture), Lotte Brandt (programming)
A 900-seat hall in an old tram depot needed a name people could read from a moving tram. We made it from the paint already on the floor.
Fig. 1 The end wall of the depot, stencilled 14 metres wide.
Brief
Nieuwe Hal is a 900-seat concert hall in Rotterdam-Zuid, built inside a tram depot that stood empty for eleven years. The programme team wanted one identity that works as a sign on the corner of the building, as a leaflet in a tram shelter and as an app icon. No mascot, no logo in a box, and it had to look finished before the first photograph of the interior existed.
Approach
The depot’s eleven tracks are numbered in white paint on the concrete floor, and the numbers are still there. I traced them into a stencil-cut grotesk and set the name at the width of one track. The programme borrows the layout of a timetable: a time, a track, a title. The wordmark never sits in a box. It is cropped by whichever edge is nearest, the way the old numbers are cropped by the rails.
Result
The identity went public in September 2026 with the first season announcement. The 41 posters of the opening season are printed in black on newsprint grey at 70 × 100 cm, and the stencil on the end wall of the depot is 14 metres wide. The hall opens in March 2027.
900 seats
11 tracks
41 posters
Fig. 2 Opening-season poster, 70 × 100 cm, black on newsprint grey.
Fig. 3 Track 7, painted on the depot floor: the source of the stencil.