Hack The Future, Then Fund It

ekip is a European platform working to drive innovation within the Cultural and Creative Industries. Beeld En Geluid, the Netherland Institute for Sound and Vision, is one of the main partners of ekip and coordinated this project.

As part of this work, ekip ran two Future Forward Hackathons — one on public innovation infrastructures, one on sustainable funding models — inviting participants to reimagine policy topics through speculative scenarios rather than digital prototypes.

The brief was to compile both sessions into a single zine that could work as a playful, accessible policy tool as much as a creative record of the co-design process — something for policymakers and funders to pick up as a conversation starter, not a conventional report.

Approach and solution

The visual identity deliberately draws inspiration from zine culture: a varied typography system mixing scanned handwriting, gaming-world fonts, and replicated online-platform text, paired with collage-style image treatment — torn edges, tape, posterized photography, layered heritage imagery — to reflect the diversity of voices behind the content. A single accent colour, matched to ekip’s own branding, was picked up throughout in highlights and side notes.

The zine is full of (more or less) hidde details: emojis, an “innovation policy jargon bingo” spread, and a glossary of inventive expansions of the acronym CCI on the closing page.

Each printed zine was delivered in a matching pink envelope stamped “Dear Project Funding…”: a small unboxing moment that extended the concept beyond the zine itself.

The full document can be downloaded at this link.