I design editorial systems for difficult cultural work

What I do and why

I'm Jason Yergeau, based in Haarlem. For twenty years I've worked between the people who make complicated things and the people who have to understand them. I build the structures that carry cultural material to an audience, and I write the words that go with it.

The work tends to arrive in a familiar shape. A museum has a collection database and a public face that shows almost none of it. A festival has a programme and no way to say which of its sets have anything to do with each other. A publisher has an archive its readers cannot move through. I design the system that gets the material out, build it myself, and then help write what goes into it.

This site is one of those systems. The essays are written by hand. A second layer runs alongside them, surfacing references and linking one piece to another while you read, without interrupting the reading. Designing that kind of structure, and having the technical depth to build it properly, is the whole of what I offer.

What comes out of a project might be an interactive programme, an annotated archive, a publishing platform, or a run of short films made from the same material. I work best in the room where the curators, the writers and the engineers are all trying to describe the same thing, because I have done each of those jobs.

For the full list of what I take on, see what I offer.