Tamagotchi’s, football cards and keyrings: Childhood collections come alive in From Form’s Amsterdam Museum Night campaign

The film and design studio From Form has built up a legendary reputation for its bold campaigns filled with analogue charm for Amsterdam’s Museum Night. When the city’s museum doors opened after dark for one night only in 2024, founders Ashley Govers and Jurjen Versteeg took us into a multiverse, with museum doors acting as portals to another dimension. Before this new take on time and space, in 2023, there was the duo’s iconic spiral bound flipbook the pages of which tooks us through thousands of intricate close-ups of art, interiors and facades from museum collections.

Museum Night this year, however, makes for quite a special occasion; 2025 is the event’s 25th anniversary. So, for a spin on this year’s campaign identity, From Form wanted to take things back to their roots. “Over the years, countless youngsters have explored museums, new venues have appeared (and disappeared), and many campaigns have come and gone”, Ashley tells us. “Yet through all those changes, one main character has always remained at the heart of it all: the museum itself.” One question that they kept coming back to the pair during their visual research for the campaign was: “what is a museum, really?”, shares Jurjen. “In its most basic sense, a museum is a collection of objects, art, or ideas from the past, present, or future.”

Whilst the night has brought together many of weird and wonderful collections from museums all over the city for the past 25 years: “from contemporary photography to galleries of old masters, to collections of microbes you never knew existed”, says Jurjen, the pair figured that “Museum Night is, in itself, a collection of collections,” he continues. To make the milestone extra special, the studio wanted to present this year’s Museum Night as “a collectors edition”, where visitors could become collectors themselves.

The pair made a conceptual start in 1999, the year the event started, taking visual inspiration from collecting cultures and ephemera distinct to the era: Tamagochis, keyrings, football cards, sticker sheets and pin badges to name a few. Safe to say, if you grew up in the early 2000s, this year’s campaign visuals are sure to take you on a trip down memory lane. Ashley and Jurjen also aimed to expand on the idea of what ‘collecting’ is – releasing it from the confines of museum cases and into the small or sprawling personal collections of things we might keep in our pocket. “In the campaign, we wanted to play with that low-key urge to collect,” shares Ashley. “You don’t need to be an expert or a connoisseur. Collecting can also be personal: experiences and memories gathered during Museum Night.”

In true From Form fashion, many of the campaigns visual elements were made from the duo’s finds at flea markets or on Marktplaats (the Dutch Ebay), where Ashley and Jurjen looked out for – not just original collectables – “but also for the ways they were once stored and organised”, Jurjen says, “you know those plastic sleeves, little cardboard boxes of toys, old folders. There were also many stickers scanned – from barcodes to sheets.”

Across the campaign’s digital applications these collectable formats are animated with a playful and magical take: stickers morph into new shapes, holographic cards switch pictures and pixelated Van Gogh sunflowers appear on Tamagotchi faces. The OOH print campaign that’s all over the streets of Amsterdam, (if you’re lucky enough to see it in person in the run up to the event this Saturday) features posters that are just like “an advertisement for all the collectables shown in the moving Campaign”, says Jurjen.

Whilst this year’s visuals are seeped in early 2000s nostalgia, the goal wasn’t just to tap into the era’s distinct visual codes for collecting. The creativity behind the campaign, like all of From Form’s former work for the event, carries with it the playfulness and sense of discovery that Museum night is all about: “helping a younger audience step over the threshold of the museum and showing them that museums aren’t pretentious, difficult, or hard to understand”, Ashley ends.