A real cover story

Since study year 2017/2018 Matthijs Aanen has made the cover art for all the physical editions of the Vonk. He took over from Robert Fennis and has made the most covers for the Vonk to date. As the period of Matthijs’ covers also exactly encompasses my time at Scintilla and reading the Vonk, together with Matthijs I looked at the covers he made so we can give you a closer look at the cover art and some insights in how they were made. This also includes some concept covers that have never been published!

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As can be seen in the digital archive and the image carousel, the covers have been very different over the years with the main consistency that “De Vonk” is written at the top. The other consistency may be that the covers can be summarized to fit the themes “Electrical Engineering” and/or “Scintilla”. Also, every edition has its nod to some reference related to the board, the association or the study. For example, on the cover of Volume 36 Edition 1 we can see the radio telescopes in Westerbork. These are hopefully well known by the students from the excursion in their first year. Overlayed are some clock signals from Modelsim we all know and love from module 5. Edition 3 of that year shows a beautiful lightning strike that may be familiar to people who come into the Scintilla room a lot because it is a remake of the cover of the very first edition of the Vonk that is displayed on the wall in front of the door. For not so subtle nods Volume 37 edition 2 has queen Juliana prominently displayed. The idea was to show her as a featured person in “TIME” magazine. While a more relevant picture for the UT was tried first, one of her driving on Calslaan, the final design better fit the “TIME” aesthetic.

For the last couple of years mainly the board was featured on the covers since it has become somewhat a tradition to feature the board at least once on a Vonk that will be published during their board year. Instead of just having a board picture on the front, Matthijs decided to feature every board in a different environment fitting their board. During the pandemic sadly no physical Vonk was published but a cover was still made featuring the 91st board.

All covers were finalized in Photoshop and most of them are achieved by using Photoshop magic. One great example of the Photoshop magic is the cover of Volume 41. For this cover the generative AI tools of Photoshop were used to generate the shadow of the helicopter and to fill in lots of the background. For some other covers the base picture was more difficult to achieve. One of the more unusual covers can be found on Volume 36 Edition 2 which had a main article about brainwaves. What at first seems as some EEG signals in the background actually represents a landmark at the University. To achieve this effect a program in MATLAB was created to convert any kind of picture to an EEG like recording. The first trials were made on a picture of Obama and “Het Torentje”. If you squint your eyes can you guess what the landmark is on the published cover?

When Matthijs was asked how it was to design all these covers, he indicated that it had always been a lot of fun. Especially the covers where he already had a design in mind and could fit it to the theme. So, maybe a bit counter-intuitive, but the covers that were harder to make were more fun to design. One idea he still had in mind was a cover with a picture taken with an analog camera for a more retro feel. After our meeting he could not get the idea of this cover out of his head and made a concept that we can publish in this article.

Sadly, this will probably be the last cover that Matthijs made for us. On behalf of the Vonk I want to thank you for all the pretty pictures and I hope you can find a new outlet for all your creativity!