The belief in witches is a topic that is inevitably associated with superstition - but very few think of a connection with the butterfly and its word origin. According to medieval superstitions, witches turned into butterflies at night to spoil or steal cream or milk. Schmetten, Schmette (Slav. Smetana) is the old east/central German word of Slavic origin for sour cream or butter.

This book deals with folk beliefs and symbolism based on passages from Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Institoris, Walpurgisnacht by Moritz Busch, Tiefe Schatten (“Deep Shadows”) by Theodor Storm, and other texts.

The booklet was made during a course at the Hochschule Düsseldorf (University of Applied Sciences) with Prof. Holger Jacobs, and produced as a single edition in 2019.

The selected typefaces reflect the topic of the book and the atmosphere through the illustrations. Apoc (Matthieu Salvaggio) is used for texts. Desert (Leah Maldonado) is used for numbers and illustration captions. Headlines and section pages are set in Kaliste by Antoine Brun.

This 56-pages booklet called Salmos (psalms in Spanish) presents a selection of eight relevant psalms from the Bible. Designed by Diego Moratalla in 2018 as a semantic experiment, it is staple-bound and measures 116×197 mm, suitable for use as a prayer book.

The purpose of the booklet is to contrast the solemnity and arrogance of the religious ceremonies and prayers and the massification of meaningless content and images on the Internet and TV nowadays, through anime frames and bizarre typography. Each reader generates new meanings of the psalms influenced by those images, so distant from the Christian dogma.

Typolo is a fanzine of typologies, which invites illustrators and artists to experiment around a formal subject and a format constraint. For the first number, I invited 15 people to make an illustration of a full body character.

I used a custom font for the cover and Savate for the rest!

With about 450,000 visitors Emscherkunst is one of the biggest events of arts and culture in the Ruhr region. For the third time already the triennial exhibition features contemporary art in city and nature and transforms the course of the renaturated Emscher river into a gallery. Visitors can discover works by Ai Weiwei, Tobias Zielony, Benjamin Bergmann or Atelier Le Balto along the 50 kilometers long art route from Holzwickede to Herne via Dortmund — preferably by bike.

Using the slogan Entdecke die Kunst (Discover the Art) Emscherkunst invites to rediscover the now mostly recultivated river Emscher through art. Combined with Morse code the slogan is the leitmotiv through all media. Hiding the word “Kunst“ (art) in the code the slogan is translated into a visual language. The simple graphic elements — rectangles and circles — overlay typography and are filled with cutouts of subjacent images of Emscherkunst exhibits. You can discover art by translating the Morse code, decipher the overlayed typography and putting together the images.

Curator of the Emscherkunst: Florian Matzner
Co-Curators of the Emscherkunst: Katja Aßmann, Simone Timmerhaus
Marketing of the Emscherkunst: Leonie Böhmer
Art Direction and Layout / Corporate Design: KoeperHerfurth (Fabian Köper, Jonas Herfurth, Michelle Flunger, Elena Meyer)
Corporate Design basic idea: Alexander Bönninger and Prof. Ralf de Jong, Folkwang University of the Arts
Photographic documantation of Emscherkunst 2016: Roman Mensing, Thorsten Arendt, Haiko Hebig
Website programming: crossconcept
Photographic documentation of the Corporate Design: Roland Baege for KoeperHerfurth

A fictional redesign of Food Not Bombs created as a student project by Jena Myung at Art Center College of Design under the instruction of Clive Piercy. Found via Eye On Design.

Design of a 64 pages hiking guide accompanied by a map for Bad Kleinkircheim’s “nock/art” project 2015. The project brings together the experience of hiking paired with contemporary art in the Nockberge region in Carinthia, Austria.

FF Milo Serif was used for headlines and body copy throughout the brochure. FF Milo gave image captions and additional describing text its own voice.

Art direction, design and layout for the collection of the Ministry of Culture of Colombia, on the tangible and intangible heritage in the country.

La Cascade – National Division Of Circus Arts – is a place of creation, training and research, broadcasting and meeting with the public around the circus arts.

Design: Clémence Passot and Dorothée Caradec
Type: Zigzag and GT Walsheim

Project Projects:

Visual statement for Civic City Cahier 3: Distributed Agency, Design’s Potentiality by Tom Holert, published by Bedford Press, and edited by Jesko Fezer and Matthias Görlich.

“(…) After reading and re-reading the text, we were drawn to one quote by Mr Keedy: ‘… Stop pretending you’re an artist, because you’re not.’ Holert’s text critiques contemporary design that subscribes to an overvalued idea of its own autonomy. While we are proponents of graphic design as an editorial and curatorial practice, we find the 'designer as author' or 'designer as artist' approach quite questionable. 

As such, we would like to take advantage of the authorial context of this Civic City Cahiers invitation to propose, paradoxically, a distributed intervention within the book structure itself.” 

Project Projects have a very unconventional, eclectic taste in type and choose their type very carefully for projects. This quality makes their output extremely typographically sophisticated and enriching to read/experience.

KinderKulturMonat is a Berlin-based initiative that organizes a monthlong cultural program for children. The project is a spin-off of the Dutch Oktobermaand Kindermaand. Studio Laucke Siebein created a corporate design featuring watercolor illustration and a “vernacular handmade typeface” by Miguel Hernández. As Mija is a little too fickle to work well in longer blocks of text, the more prosaic AG Book comes to the rescue. Mija is also used as a webfont on kinderkulturmonat.de.

“Colorful! Sexy! Funny!” Guided by these keywords, Blotto Design has developed a new visual identity for the Komische Oper, the cheeky Berlin opera house. The typographic main actor is Brandon Grotesque (2010), a fresh and unpretentious geometric sans by Hannes von Döhren. Blotto put it on stage together with Genath. What looks like a peculiar display cut of a Fleischmann at first is actually “a free interpretation of a baroque type based on a 1720 specimen likely showing Johann Wilhelm Haas first design for the Genath Foundry in Basle, Switzerland”, designed by François Rappo and published in 2011 with Optimo.

All photos: Blotto Design

The various stationery items, flyers and brochures are united by the use of three bright colors, a curtain-like zig-zag border – and the two corporate typefaces, of course.

Ian Warner of Blotto Design shares some insight in the criteria determining the typeface selection:

We decided on using Brandon Grotesque at a very early point in the development. It was a fit from the start, because the new identity was supposed to be rather an evolution than a revolution: Brandon’s underlying geometry shares a lot with Futura, which is the typeface that was used before. Furthermore, Brandon is inspired by magazine designs of the 1920s and 1930s, a defining period both for the Metropol-Theater (as the Komische Oper was known back then), and the self-image of the house. The font family is also very well equipped, spanning 12 styles and supporting Turkish as well as Central and Eastern European languages. Latter is crucial in the communication of the opera house.

The logo, a red dodecagon with white type on it, marks the building on Behrenstraße/‌Glinkastraße. With an extra dot in its counter, the round O of Brandon Grotesque looks like a target or a geographical marker. Another off-center dot breaks up the symmetry.

Two spreads from the programme for the current season exemplify the richness of the typographic application: There are numbers arranged in a triangle, big centered type, titles in all-caps on an angle, and words on an arc. Blotto demonstrates how variegated a page can look like, even when only one typeface and one color is used.

Ian Warner continues:

Genath came in later. We wanted to work with fresh, new fonts. In the end, Genath won us over with its strange hybridity in the details: The display cut is full of character and has the thin serifs and high contrast of a Didone, while the other styles combine the sweeping forms of a Transitional Serif with very fashionable and almost chunky serifs. At the same time the Regular is a true workhorse, easy to read and to use. That was a perfect match with the unconventional appearance of the Komische Oper: cocktail dress paired with hiking boots – everything’s possible.

As Genath’s contrast is a little too delicate to render well on screen, it is replaced with the less swank Droid Sans as Brandon’s sidekick for the website.

Three weights of Brandon Grotesque are used as webfonts, mainly for headlines and rubrics. As the designers didn’t want to dispense with the element of letters arranged on an arc, and as CSS browser support is still not good enough to do that with live text, these kinds of headings are rendered as images. It only shows when zooming in, though: Fonts stay crisp, pixel images become blurry.

Brandon Grotesque popped up here before, in an article about the Comedy Central rebrand, which leaves me wondering if there is something inherently comical about its curves. Anyway, Brandon and Genath are excellent typefaces, both highly serviceable and, especially the latter, hardly used. Give it up for Blotto Design, their sagacious font choices, and an overall successful new identity for the Komische Oper!