The Gathering is the eighth studio album by thrash metal band Testament, released on June 8, 1999. The cover artwork was done by English artist Dave McKean who also did the cover art for the two prior Testament studio albums Demonic and Low. The fonts in use are Margo Chase’s Portcullis and Jonathan Barnbrook’s Patriot Heavy, both released in 1997.

[More info on Discogs]

Hosted at Somerset House in London, co-curated by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard and Claire Catterall, The Horror Show! was a journey to the underbelly of Britain’s cultural psyche. The exhibition presented an alternative perspective on the last five decades of modern British history in three acts – Monster, Ghost and Witch. Recast as a story of cultural shapeshifting, each section interpreted a specific era through the lens of a classic horror archetype with thematically linked contemporaneous, new works and a survey of the counter-culture of the time. We were tasked with designing all 2-D aspects of the show. The graphics inside the exhibition, the marketing, publicity and the catalogue. Each one needed to fit seamlessly with the other and explain the complexity of the exhibition in a sympathetic form.

To accompany the exhibition, The Horror Show! catalogue is constructed with a unique, irregular concertina fold. When closed, this features a “Frankenstein’s monster” face, grotesquely confronting the viewer. Whilst once open and fully extended, it is revealed that the face is made up of photographs of artworks and cultural figures from in the show. This collaged cut-up is a metaphor for British society, consisting of the mainstream and counter-culture, the two constantly pressing and grinding against each other. The back of the catalogue features the main collage used in the publicity for the show, with the addition of a very important key, so that you understand who everybody is in the image.

Once you have opened the catalogue, you are confronted with three sections which, as in the show, are designed completely differently from each other with contrasting typography and paper stocks for each. The Introduction section is dark black and takes its styling from the combined spaces in the show. Monster puts on the stinking clothes of Punk DIY. Ghost is grey and washed out, never fully materialising on the page. Witch is bold, proud, modern and old – daring you to disagree.

The catalogue design needed to refer to the decades in the exhibition – the 70s, 80s, 90s and onwards but also be something very contemporary. This meant a selection of fonts which referred to the era of the ‘feeling’ of each section but were used in a contemporary way. They are thrown up against each other in ugly juxtapositions, symbolising how counter-culture needs to push into the mainstream to change us all and move creativity and society forward. The layouts also referred to this historical context. The Monster section is based on the 70s and 80s and is an updated version of the DIY punk fanzine. Ghost is ethereal, with typography almost not there. Witch is bold, alchemic, and strongly gothic but looks towards the future as much as the past.

The title on the spine brings together Ouroboros, Infidel, Trickster, Nylon & Draylon, Bastard, Virus VujaDe, Terminal Grotesque, Tourette Extreme, and Bradley DJR (for the exclamation mark). The O’s are custom drawn pictograms.

Back cover: “A twisted tale of modern Britain” combines Ouroboros, Serpiente Display, Trickster, and Nylon & Draylon.

Text inside the mouth is set in Combat. The fonts used for the “MONSTER” letters include Ouroboros, Bastard, Trickster, Fleshy Font, and Newspeak

Spread with text set in T1 Korium and Combat. “Freak Scene” combines Gandur Alte with Trickster. Year dates are from Zloy.

The “Ghost” letters are taken from Lapicide and Marian Black. The italic for the text on the ear is from Faust.

More Marian Black and Lapicide, with Melancholia Italic used for captions

Captions feature Faust Italic, upright Melancholia, numerals from Gosna, and Tourette Normal.

The text on the left half of the eye is set in Ni Resolution Blackletter. The “WITCH” letters are from Infidel, Nylon & Draylon, Ni Resolution Blackletter, Virus VujaDe, and Prototype.

Titles feature overlapping letters from Ni Resolution Blackletter and Nylon & Draylon. The byline is in Terminal Grotesque, the text in Larish Alte.

More text in Larish Alte, with initials and page numbers from Ni Resolution Blackletter

Anıl Aykan and Sara Ozvaldic at Barnbrook provided the design for this “fascinating, clear, and detailed historical analysis of the eclectic and beautiful visual and material culture of paganism.” They used Kaftan Serif (with condensed proportions) for the title, paired on the cover with Albertus Nova for the subtitle and Apoc (with alternates) for the author’s name. The interior features a range of additional typefaces, see the image captions.

The book was published by Thames & Hudson in 2023. From the description:

Focusing on a curated selection of pagan art and artifacts, this book explains the iconography and mystic power of pagan ritual objects from around the world. Ethan Doyle White identifies three critical elements of paganism from classical antiquity to today: polytheism, affiliation with nature, and witchcraft and divination. Fundamental symbols are identified and examined closely, and central myths and allegories are clarified to provide new insights into the philosophies and beliefs of pagans.

Pagans begins with an introduction that clarifies what we mean by “pagan.” It traces the pre-Christian origins of paganism, the development of the different aspects of pagan belief over centuries, and how materials from the pre-Christian religions of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia are built into the practices of today’s Pagans.

The book is organized into three broad sections—“Ancient Ways,” “Ritual,” and “Community”—each containing three themed chapters.For each chapter, illustrated text is interspersed with double-page presentations of the key figures, stories, and iconography relevant to each theme. Readers will not only come to understand the many symbols that define pagan religions and practices but will also discover the beliefsand philosophies of pagans from around the world, from polytheism to pantheism and from magic and ritual to ideas about the afterlife.

Another typeface used in this book (but not shown in the included images) is Gill Facia.

Title page with frontispiece

Albertus Nova is used with initials from Black Mamba for the section titles.

Chapter openings use all-caps Kaftan Serif with Black Mamba initials for the title, all-caps Albertus Nova and Apoc for text, and Gill Sans Light for the rotated credit lines.

Body copy and marginalia are set in SangBleu Kingdom, with Apoc Italic for captions. The drop-cap E is from Infidel, which “is based on letters from the Lindisfarne Gospels and other similar manuscripts and bibles from the middle ages.” [Barnbrook]

“Decoding” features Albertus Nova with its alternate uncial-like E.

The chapter title for “Ritual” uses Serpiente Display.

Norlan is “an international brand focused on elevating the whisky drinking experience through design, science, and ritual.”

Axia is a sans serif uniwidth typeface composed of concise letterforms. All of the widths of the roman and italic weights harmonize perfectly with one another without changing the line length. Text set in Light or Black results in the same, economical copyfit.

On the website, Axia is paired with Proxima Nova. The logo appears to be based on Bourgeois Condensed.

Claude Reinhardt offers 30 years of experience in planning and construction. Support, representation and monitoring of processes – always in the interests of the client, with a purposeful approach and with a focus on functionality and architectural quality.

I adore anything @aaronsprinkle does, and his new band Blank Books has an awesome EP out. I love it so much I made my own packaging concepts for it and they are allllmost as rad as the album. http://blankbooksband.com/releases — @EephusLeague on Twitter

Bethany Heck is not only a top-notch writer on her Font Review Journal website, she’s also an incredible and passionate designer that carefully experiments with the typefaces that she reviews.

Maelstrom is the large yummy type, which I chose because it's so good for large-scale because of its insane thick-to-thin contrast. You can use it large and it still lets air through because the strokes get so slender. Proto Grotesk is used on the CD itself and the vinyl concept, and I found it's odd angularity and the AWESOME spur on the "a" were really nice compliments to the curves in Maelstrom. It's got the same svelte lines against blocky slabs. I used Untitled Sans on the wrap sticker, because I wanted that to feel like a neutral, utilitarian addition to the "extra" of the rest of the design—an imposition necessary to share all the information necessary for the album instead of a flashy stylistic detail. [1]

Proto Grotesk has already been featured. Maelstrom & Untitled Sans will surely follow!

Sabat Magazine fuses witchcraft and feminism, ancient archetypes and instant art. The Maiden Issue goes out to teen witches of all ages, exploring witchcraft today. Encouraging a coven of thought, it preaches a fearless approach to finding the powers within.

Larish Alte and Albertus are definitely among the most occult typefaces, used to great effect in this radical tome, highlighting pink contrasts with black and white, as textblocks dance on the page. Also make note of the type-only spread that employs Barnbrook's morbid curiosity VujaDe.

Editor and Creative Director: Elisabeth Krohn
Graphic Design and Art Direction: Cleber Rafael de Campos

Spread with VujaDe.

Some of the credits are squeezed very tightly, here. Why didn't they just go with a condensed width?!

Jonathan Barnbrook and Marcus Leis Allion’s Bourgeois circled the globe as part of the international promotional campaign for Ridley Scott’s blockbuster The Martian. The monolinear design was strung across newspapers, billboards, and magazines from the United States to Asia, and onward, to drum up anticipation for the release. Iginition Print and 20th Century Fox hit all the right notes, adding a little humor when needed. (The face masher at bringhimhome.com, for example, pretty goofy/genius.)

Bourgeois Condensed was used for much of the Instagram/Tumblr sized images to promote the film.

The Deluxe Edition of the soundtrack includes a pretty good collection of disco hits.

The epic possibilities of the image masher at bringhimhome.com. Bourgeois was, surprisingly enough, even used for this purpose.

Special Patrol Group:

Weapons of mass destruction: made in Britain. […] Around 40 bus stop ad spaces in London this morning say: #StopDSEI.

Defence Security and Equipment International (DSEI) is an arms fair taking place at ExCel in London this week.

“Public Offerings presents breakthrough works by some of the most important and challenging artists to emerge in the past decade, exploring the conditions, consequences and contexts that surround their first ‘public offerings’.”

This catalogue accompanied the exhibition Public Offerings, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, April – July 2001. The essays and picture captions in the book were set in Elephant Black Italic.

Barnbrook:

The typefaces Expletive and Echelon were designed as a result of work on this project.

Inner sleeve (front) with a pastiche of Frans Hals’ painting Portret van Catharina Hooft en haar min (c. 1620)

Expletive Script was designed by Jonathan Barnbrook and Marcus Leis Allion and released in 2001 by Virus Fonts. It’s a unique blend of threadlike monolinearity, the simplified circular forms of engineers’ stencils, and connected chrome scripts. The only time I’ve ever seen it in use is on Andreas Dorau’s long-awaited seventh album from 2005.

Both weights are used: Expletive Script Light is not only thinner, but also possesses more pronounced extenders than the Regular. The oscillating lines are created by combining the Regular with the Alternate cuts — in latter, some characters drop below the baseline. This nervous typography is a fitting counterpoint to the disturbing photography of Dorau and his wild boar alter ego.

Art direction and logo design: Christian Küpker
Photography: Uwe Krejci

The interlinear ligature of Andreas Dorau’s initials resembles the infinity symbol (∞). It is a custom creation and not included in the font.

Inner sleeve (back)

Detail

Theatrical one-sheet artist Neil Kellerhouse has used Bourgeois by VirusFonts very often in the past several years. His most recent and visible use was for the title wordmark for Netflix TV series House of Cards. Kellerhouse used Condensed Bold and Condensed Book Italic variants for this particular promotional campaign. Certain posters use MADType's Pacioli's lowercase characters for listing of names and credits.

Bourgeios is also used on House Of Cards slot machines that can be seen at casinos across the USA!

The Occupied Times of London is among Design Museum’s nominations for Designs of the Year 2013. Congratulations!

The first issue of the OT came out on the 24th of October [2011], just nine days after the occupation began with a print run of 2000 copies of 12 A4 pages. For the first six weeks the paper was produced weekly out of a tent by a small but dedicated team. The OT quickly settled as an A3, broadsheet-sized newspaper and gradually increased in pages until finally becoming a monthly publication of 24 pages after six months.

bricktz.com

[The newspaper] is designed by Lazaros Kakoulidis and Tzortzis Rallis who used Barnbrook’s VirusFonts typeface, Bastard, for the large intro caps to features and PF DIN Mono, designed by Panos Vassiliou of Athens-based foundry Parachute, as the main body copy face.

creativereview.co.uk

The former, provocative in its charged references to Blackletter; the latter the accepted typeface of many mainstream corporations, businesses and banks. Sitting the two together – in fact, placing single letters set in Bastard ‘within’ the DIN typeface for headlines – chimed cleverly with the ‘occupying’ metaphor. But there was another point to make, says Rallis. “Brands are now using the visual language of protest themselves, with stencils etc, to promote their products – they stole that language – so we are stealing theirs.” […]

[U]sing Bastard came with its reservations, however, from both journalists working on the paper and some of its readers. “But Jon [Barnbrook] volunteered to come in and talk to the journalists about why the typeface was appropriate to the project” […]

creativereview.co.uk

We think it is a rather apt choice of typeface, considering the ideology of the typeface: the reinterpretation of blackletter semiotics and insinuation that multinational corporations are akin to the new fascists.

virusfonts.com