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url: /design-history/marian-bantjes/
title: "Marian Bantjes | Ornamental Typography & Custom Lettering | TGDS"
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lastModified: 2026-05-21T05:13:55.958Z
site: "The Graphic Design School"
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# Marian Bantjes | Ornamental Typography & Custom Lettering | TGDS

Marian Bantjes
Design history · Contemporary ornamental typography
The designer who argued ornament is not a crime.
Marian Bantjes (born 1963) is the Canadian graphic artist, typographer and lettering designer who rebuilt ornament's reputation in a profession that had spent a century rejecting it. Working from Bowen Island, British Columbia, she produces editorial identities, custom lettering and book-length arguments for beauty as a serious design category.
Biography
Marian Bantjes was born in Canada in 1963. She trained not as a graphic designer but as a book typesetter — working in the pre-digital and early-digital typography shops of Vancouver through the 1980s, where she learned the craft from production practice rather than from art school. She has repeatedly credited this route as the single most formative fact of her career: typesetting taught her the grid before she ever thought about breaking it. From 1994 to 2003 she was a partner in Digitopolis, a Vancouver graphic-design studio, working on conventional identity, publication and promotional design. She co-owned the business for nine years before selling her share, moving to Bowen Island off the British Columbian coast, and reconstituting herself as an independent graphic artist rather than a graphic designer — a distinction she has defended in every subsequent interview. Her independent practice from 2003 onward refused the studio model entirely: no staff, no office, direct client work from a home studio. The early Bowen Island work was almost entirely hand-drawn ornamental typography — pen, ink, scanner — aimed at editorial clients (Print, Eye, Wired, The New York Times Op-Ed) who wanted something that no Adobe Illustrator combination could produce. The 2007 Saks Fifth Avenue identity, commissioned by Michael Bierut at Pentagram, was the work that moved her from editorial-designer respect to identity-designer visibility. Her 2010 TED talk — “Intricate Beauty by Design” — and the companion book I Wonder established ornamental typography as a legitimate contemporary category after a century of modernist rejection. She has continued to work from Bowen Island, producing editorial covers, custom lettering commissions, book-length illustrated works, and AGI-level advocacy for beauty as a serious design category. She has taught and lectured widely but has never held a full-time teaching post.
Design philosophy
Bantjes’s position — stated clearly in her 2010 TED talk and throughout I Wonder — is that beauty is a functional property, not a decorative afterthought, and that ornament is a legitimate design tool that modernism wrongly defined out of the profession. “Why do we assume that common sense or common taste is really common?” — Marian Bantjes, I Wonder (2010) Three commitments organise the work. First, hand before software. Bantjes draws most of her lettering on paper before any vectorisation — not for craft-ideology reasons but because she has observed that hand-drawn marks survive scaling and reproduction in ways digital marks do not. Second, specificity over style. Each Bantjes lettering commission is purpose-drawn for its specific publication, client and context. Her practice refuses the “signature style” that contemporary illustration culture rewards — a position she has defended repeatedly against commercial pressure to standardise. Third, beauty as argument. I Wonder is organised around the claim that beauty is a mode of thinking. Curiosity, wonder, ornament and delight are treated as cognitive tools, not emotional reactions. This argument — with Sagmeister’s Beauty Show three years later — is the clearest contemporary rehabilitation of beauty as a design criterion.
Key works
Saks Fifth Avenue identity (2007) — ornamental reconstruction of the Saks wordmark into 64 tiles that recombine for every application. Commissioned by Pentagram’s Michael Bierut. Still the most-cited example of ornamental lettering applied at identity scale in the 2000s. Stefan Sagmeister — Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far (custom lettering, 2005–) — several entries in Sagmeister’s long-running autobiographical project were drawn by Bantjes at Sagmeister’s commission. The recurring collaboration is one of the clearest contemporary examples of designer-to-designer lettering commissioning. Wired magazine Valentine Issue (2008) — cover and feature-opener for the February 2008 issue, built from ornamental Valentine imagery. Demonstrated Bantjes’s ability to carry an entire magazine issue at full editorial scale. I Wonder (2010) — Thames & Hudson / Monacelli Press book-length monograph-cum-manifesto. Every spread is custom- designed; the book is both a catalogue of Bantjes’s ornamental practice and an argument for ornament as a mode of thinking. Pretty Pictures (2013) — Thames & Hudson retrospective covering a decade of commercial and editorial commissions. Organised chronologically and annotated by Bantjes; probably the clearest account of how contemporary lettering commissions actually work.
Influence & legacy
Bantjes is the most visible member of a contemporary lettering generation that includes Jessica Hische, Luke Lucas, Martina Flor, Alex Trochut and Jonathan Barnbrook. That the profession takes custom ornamental lettering seriously as an identity and editorial category today is in significant part because Bantjes’s 2007 Saks work made mainstream identity clients pay for it. Her advocacy for ornament as a thinking tool — in I Wonder, in her TED talk, in her lectures — has reshaped how contemporary graphic-design education treats the modernist rejection of decoration. Many undergraduate typography courses now assign I Wonder alongside Adolf Loos’s Ornament and Crime as the dialectical pair. Her “graphic artist, not graphic designer” self-description is probably the most-cited contemporary case for the viability of solo authorial practice outside the studio-and-client structure. Bantjes has worked without staff, without an agent and without an art school for over two decades. The example has mattered.
Learn at TGDS
Bantjes’s practice connects to several modules of our curriculum. If her approach interests you, the most direct next steps are: Certificate IV in Design (CUA40720) — our Typography module covers custom lettering, ornament, and the ornamental-typography lineage from Art Nouveau to Bantjes. Intensive Foundation Course — 11 modules in typography, layout and image-making. The same craft Bantjes pushed into ornamental hand-lettering territory. Certificate of completion, not the Cert IV. Stefan Sagmeister — Bantjes’s frequent collaborator and the most direct contemporary parallel to her author-designer practice.
Further reading
Marian Bantjes, I Wonder (Thames & Hudson, 2010). Marian Bantjes, Pretty Pictures (Thames & Hudson, 2013). Marian Bantjes, Letters, Ornaments, Patterns (monograph serialisations). Marian Bantjes, “Intricate Beauty by Design” (TED, 2010). Steven Heller, “Marian Bantjes: More is More” (PRINT). bantjes.com — complete portfolio and essays.