The sharp and dense aesthetic of Metahaven’s designs make the viewer struggle, but the duo (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk) explicitely wants its output to have a layer that resists easy assimilation. Of all Dutch designers, it seems the closest in outlook to Jan van Toorn, with whom Van der Velden studied at the Jan van Eyck Academy in the 1990s. Van der Velden himself was a lead tutor in the 'Think Tank for Visual Strategies' Design MA at the Sandberg Institute, a key course in the development of recent crictical Dutch graphic design thinking.