Between the Period and the Dash

Samuel Salminen (1996, FI) is an Amsterdam based graphic and information designer and researcher.

In his practice he investigates the relationship between language, power, and spatial representation — using typography and design as tools to expose and intervene in systems of control, erasure and territorial inscription. His work spans editorial design, type design and web development, and is often situated at the intersection of the political and the typographic.

Education

MA Information Design — Design Academy Eindhoven

BA Graphic Design — Royal Academy of Art The Hague

Visual Communication — Beckmans College of Design

Between the Period and the Dash

2026 — editorial

My master’s thesis ‘Between the Period and the Dash’ proposes a grammatical framework for reading state power, arguing that the nation-state governs through a documentary grammar that attempts to write complete sentences about its subjects, rendering lived existence into administrable form. I identify a structural gap (the dash) between the state’s drive for absolute closure (the period) and the embodied subject who inherently exceeds any administrative concept. The thesis traces how subjects inhabit this gap through acts of forgery, erasure and endurance, arguing that the state’s structural inability to subsume the particular is itself the opening through which agency is reclaimed from below.

— Best Thesis Award, Design Academy Eindhoven 2026

Thesis and design by:
Samuel Salminen

Supervisors:
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Anna Engelhardt, Vera Sacchetti, Silvio Lorusso and Lukáš Likavčan

Department Head:
Marco Ferrari

Printing & Binding:
no kiss

Paper:
EOS 90g/m²
Gmund Matt Moss 200g/m²

Typefaces:
Timezone & Four Grotesk by HAL Typefaces

Eindhoven / Amsterdam, 2026