“Hello I am Liza Enebeis and this is what I love to do.” This sentence is what greets visitors to loveliza.nl, the personal website of Studio Dumbar/Dept creative director, Liza Enebeis. The text that follows this statement is a list of four things: Studio Dumbar, Demo Design in Motion Festival, Typeradio and Books Loveliza.

Together, this group gives an idea of Enebeis’ professional and personal work, but also conveys something about her particular philosophy which has, over several years, given much back to the design industry.

While it’s through her work at the legendary Dutch studio that many will know her name, the fact that Enebeis can list a motion graphics festival, a radio show/podcast about typography, and a popular Instagram account on design books among her ‘love to dos’, says much about her commitment to design and her own role within it. She is naturally curious and likes to share things both new (Demo) and old (@booksloveliza) in a way that is generous and inclusive.

Enebeis has been creative director at Studio Dumbar/Dept since 2010. The studio, which now bears both the name of the designer who founded it in 1977 and the digital agency that acquired it in 2016, has gone from strength to strength under her tenure. And her work as one of four partners within this close-knit, multidisciplinary team – who now produce some of the most exciting motion design in the world – has taken her all over. 

Enebeis knows the UK well, for example. Last month, she was at the All Flows festival in Milton Keynes; two weeks ago, it was D&AD judging in London; and she will soon head to Birmingham for the city’s design festival in mid-June. Yet what many people watching her talks, or sharing jury duty with her, might not realise is that this well-known, Dutch-made designer was actually born in the UK. “I’m Greek at heart, British by birth and Dutch by design,” she says.

Enebeis grew up in Greece, where her family is from, studied design in France at Parsons Paris, before a friend suggested she visit The Netherlands (“that’s really where design is happening,” she was told). So, after graduating Parsons, Enebeis applied for internships at various Dutch studios, securing one at Studio Dumbar in 1994, when its base was in The Hague prior to its move to Rotterdam.

It was during her first day at Studio Dumbar, one of the most progressive and thought-provoking design studios of the time, that she was handed one of its latest design projects to look over – the lauded graphic standards manual for the Dutch postal and communications company PTT.

“Of course, you don’t know anyone, and they try to get you settled in,” she says. “I remember sitting in the corner somewhere in the reception and they said, hey, look at this, the PTT manual. This was like the manual of the time. Everybody was incredibly proud of this.”

Enebeis recalls that she didn’t like what she saw at all. “I thought it was all over the place,” she says. She’d had different expectations of the studio’s work, based largely on what work had been included in Rick Poynor’s Typography Now books, she explains. “There were posters from Studio Dumbar which I thought, wow, this is incredible … and I’d be coming here to do posters.”

What reassured her was the “culture” of the studio, she says, which she later also realised was quite different to the others she would experience. “Just the whole studio atmosphere and how all the designers interacted with each other … I felt very comfortable there, I felt part of it.”

While at Studio Dumbar, Enebeis applied for a masters at the Royal College of Art in London (“I was not finished exploring design”) and afterwards decided to stay in the city, eventually joining Pentagram in 1996, where she worked as a member of David Hillman’s team for seven years. “His attitude was no messing around. He always used to say to me, focus on the work. Just focus.” 

Hillman taught her a lot, she says, and in working with a legend of editorial design, Enebeis got to understand how newspapers were put together – “in the sense of telling stories,” she adds – before returned to The Netherlands in 2004. She worked initially at Barlock studio and then rejoined Studio Dumbar, as a senior designer, in 2008. Two years later she was made its creative director, the third CD at the company following founder Gert Dumbar and Michel de Boer.

Enebeis sees each role in the studio as a vital part of a whole: from the designers to the coders and strategists, from the leads to the juniors. “The work we do now is the work of a collective,” she explains. “Like you make a pancake: you have eggs, flour and milk – it needs three ingredients to make a good pancake, so it could be the business director, a junior designer and project manager.

“All three are equally important. If you take the junior designer out of this, you will make nothing. You know what I mean? In order to function, it’s not about the hierarchy, but being good in your role and respecting each other’s roles.”

A lot of people are surprised – they don’t know that we’re from ‘77, and others wonder how it’s possible to reinvent at the studio. I don’t think it’s a reinvention. It’s an evolution

At the recent launch of Gert Dumbar’s Gentleman Maverick of Dutch Design book, Enebeis was asked to talk about the Studio Dumbar/Dept of today, while Dumbar himself reflected on the past incarnation. The current studio team wrote an open letter to Gert and it was read out at the event, the conclusion of which Enebeis read out:

“However different the things we do might be at its core, it is still the same spirit, the spirit that you infused into the studio. The freedom to design, to work together as a collective, the room to discover, and to be yourself, to be self-critical and willing to take risks. We are there as our true selves to come to true answers, sometimes absurd, sometimes dreadfully serious, but above all, authentic.”

For Enebeis the process of reading out the letter, linking the past, the present and future of Studio Dumbar/Dept was a rewarding experience and reiterated the idea of being “authentic” within such an environment, especially one that has existed for nearly 50 years. “A lot of people are surprised – they don’t know that we’re from ‘77, and others wonder how it’s possible to reinvent at the studio. I don’t think it’s a reinvention. It’s an evolution.”

Another key part of the studio’s transformation, particularly over the last decade, has been the involvement of Dept, the technology and marketing services company which acquired Studio Dumbar in 2016.

“We were always looking for a digital partner, because we saw how our profession was evolving,” says Enebeis. And the work the studio is currently putting out speaks for itself – from Instagram to OpenAI, Feyenoord to Utah Jazz, the range of clients is vast and the motion work enables each one to investigate the potential of the screen, sound and movement for its brand.

With the newly forged connections to a parent company, the design studio can flex its muscles with global reach and with four partners now running the studio: Enebeis, operations and business director Wouter Dirks, strategy director Tom Dorresteijn and lead designer Stan Haanappel.

The arrangement was not without its initial concerns, Enebeis recalls. At the time of Dept’s initial interest, Studio Dumbar had around 16 staff (including one motion designer) while Dept had over 250 employees across two locations and the explicit ambition to become a global agency.

It was incredibly inspiring just to have everybody around you talking about different areas that we were not familiar with. Motion slowly became part of our working method

“Is this right? Is this not right? What does it mean to our culture?” Enebeis remembers thinking. “We’re independent, what happens if we join? You know, every possible question you can imagine.” The acquisition had a huge impact at first, she adds, recalling being very aware that suddenly “of course everything is digital … there are all these data scientists and digital experts talking and thinking from a completely different perspective. We were almost like the people doing prints.” 

But what became clear was how significant it was to have access to this world. “It was incredibly inspiring just to have everybody around you talking about different areas that we were not familiar with. I think that, in a way, inspired us…. We started the lab, we started teaching ourselves more motion … and it slowly became part of our working method.”

The studio’s focus on motion and creative coding also helped to inspire the Demo Design in Motion Festival, which is now into its third iteration, having broadened out its January 2025 instalment to take in 16 different cities. The festival started in 2019 as a one-day event where all of the 80 digital screens in Amsterdam Centraal station were taken over by the work of 253 motion graphics artists and designers for 24 hours. The event screened work by a range of practitioners, from studios The Rodina and Bureau Borsche to motion designers such as Zach Lieberman and Jurriaan Hos.

As Enebeis stated at the time, the location was symbolic of the festival’s message and this was “not a closed, expert-only congress or exhibition – Demo is out there in the most public of all spaces; a railway station.” Buoyed by the incredible reaction to Demo 2019, the festival was staged again in 2022, this time across 5,000 sites in The Netherlands, becoming the largest open-air exhibition ever staged.

Again, the public-facing aspect of this initiative is significant and suggests that Enebeis and her Demo co-founders at DOOH agency Global have a determination to get motion design out there, in front of thousands of people, not just have it pored over by other designers, or leave it confined to phone screens.

“It’s important to show the work publicly, too,” she stresses. “Demo started with the idea to inspire other designers on what you can do with screens in a public space,” but became something more about the idea of public space itself and how these environments could be better served by art and design – “how you design that screen and that format and what messages you put across.”

With Typeradio, the internet radio stream/podcast Enebeis launched with Donald Beekman and Underware in 2004 now existing largely as an archive of hundreds of interviews with type designers, Enebeis mentions she currently has another idea for a project in the back of her mind, but that, if she talks about it, then she’ll have to go and do it. For now, there are no further details to divulge. But something tells us she’ll get around to doing it anyway.

studiodumbar.com, loveliza.nl