Peter Behrens School of Arts//Hochschule Düsseldorf

At the Peter Behrens School of Arts at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, more than 2,000 students study in the fields of design and architecture. In their daily work, students explore current design and architecture issues in society and look for new solutions in the digital and global world. This is reflected in projects and cooperations for which our students have already received numerous prizes and awards. At Miss Read 2026, we would like to present our diverse student work in the fields of book design, typography, photography, art printing and more to a broad professional audience. We look forward to an inspiring exchange with visitors and exhibitors at this year's fair.

Noa Röttger, Zwischen Traum und Typo, HSD PBSA, 2026, © Noa Röttger

How can art be transferred into type? What exciting new forms and visual imagery can emerge in the process? This work explores the translation of Surrealism as an artistic movement into typeface design. It plays with the legibility of text and letterforms, challenging the conventions of classical typography. The result is a surreal typeface with multiple stylistic sets, which can be used to visually dissolve the type image, blur the boundaries of legibility, and create compelling new surface compositions.

[+]

Eileen Gräfenstein, Soft Measure, HSD PBSA, 2026, © Eileen Gräfenstein

Martha Elizabeth Colwell was an early 20th-century type designer, illustrator and artist in Chicago. Her work spans across poetry, illustration, painting and hand lettering in both commercial and artistic contexts. Her work revisits Venetian Renaissance letterforms within a broader typographic revival. Due to limited material preserved from marginalized designers of this period, revisiting her work calls for new approaches. The typeface Iseult and the publication Soft Measure draw on Colwell’s personal works. Through careful rearrangement, her forms find new correspondence with contemporary visual language.

[+]

Von Thieren is an editorial project that revisits ancient and medieval assumptions about animals and places them in a contemporary context. In the past, all human knowledge was compiled in manuscripts and bestiaries; today, it is concentrated in AI models. This shift is illustrated through a direct comparison: animal descriptions from the Buch der Natur (1349) are fed to an AI, whose task it is to visualise them. The result is a collection of AI-generated animal images alongside original texts and historical illustrations of each creature.

[+]