Breen
Infographic posters for collectors.
Breen is my own webshop selling prints. I research subjects with a deep visual history, catalogue their symbols, logos and marks, redraw them where the originals fall short, and organize them into posters that show the complete picture in one frame. I designed the identity, built the site and run the shop myself.
a name with family in it
Breen began as a platform my uncle and I needed to sell the ideas we came up with together. We're both called Van de Ree, so I put REE in the middle of the name. In Dutch, Breen sounds like the English word brain, the place where ideas originate. For the logo I borrowed the angle of the N's downslope and cut the B with it, so the wordmark opens and closes on the same diagonal. That single move accentuates the REE and keeps the mark timeless.choosing a world to enter
Every poster starts with the same questions. Does the subject have a universe of logos, symbols or marks? Do people search for it, or does it just interest me? I check demand in Ahrefs before I commit. Can I scope it down to something complete, and can I finish it within a few weeks? Are there sources I can trust? Only when the answers line up do I start cataloguing, comparing and redrawing. The research decides the poster; the design stays out of its way.
Most of my subjects have appeared on posters before, but never complete. That gap is what Breen fills. A logo captures the essence of something people hold dear, and the full collection lets them compare the entire history in one frame. What sells the poster, I think, is that it's a collection of memories.
proof the effort shows
After I sent the KNVB a poster, the Dutch football association asked me to design two posters of regional clubs for them. The Santos Magazine 100-year KNVB anniversary special later showed one of my posters in full color, with a detail enlarged, and orders came in from readers who saw it. Design blog Brand New covered my Batman print too. None of this came from advertising. People recognize research when they see it.
no dependencies
Breen is the reason I know HTML and CSS. I wanted to build something that was entirely mine, and I still work from that mindset: the site is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no frameworks, nothing I don't control. The design follows the same logic as the posters. Black on white, Swiss and quiet, so the prints do the talking. An automated fulfillment process prints each order on museum-grade paper and ships it, which keeps the shop running while I design.
honest numbers
Around fifteen people visit Breen each day, and the past three months brought in about €100 a month. Most of that traffic arrives through backlinks from design sites like Brand New and The Awesomer, and almost all of it lands on a single product page. That page outsells everything else, which tells me exactly what to do next: earn backlinks for the other pages too. I'm building Backlink Scout to do just that.