Cover and assets for the single “I don’t recognize you anymore” by dubstep music producer Rohaan, released on Oval Records. The visuals are created by Kristian Startari, using the fonts Large (stretched) by Alexandre Créquer and Pinyon Script by Nicole Fally.

ASTAM is a Galician brand focused on high-end textiles, from the first touch to the last stitch:

At ASTAM, we believe in quality, timeless design, and garments that tell a story along with the person who wears them. In a world where the fleeting prevails, we believe on the durable. We dress a curious and inspired woman.

Their logo and website are set in Ufficio Sans.

Espacio La Nube is an ephemeral architecture studio based in Madrid, founded in 2016 by Hugo Cifre and Miguel Ángel Maure. Design studio An Audience of One uses Waldenburg Medium for the branding. From the case study:

Nube, an architecture firm that builds experiences with air. Inspired by the nature of a cloud, Nube expands its brand with a new system rooted in lightness, emotion and transformation, echoing the essence of ephemeral architecture.

in one breath was the title of the graduation show of Kim Stolz at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. For the invitation, Felix Sanvoss designed a printed card on transparent paper, using OO Lyga designed by Samira Schneuwly and released on Outline Online.

Le colosse qui a obscurci le ciel (“The Colossus That Darkened the Sky”) is an encyclopaedia about volcanoes that examines how mass media portrays disaster and horror. Created by Elina Kerivel for her Bachelor 2 project at ENSAV La Cambre in 2023, the book uses photography to compare documentary images of volcanic events with how they're shown in the media.

Volcanoes are both fascinating and destructive, but Le colosse qui a obscurci le ciel questions why we’re so drawn to their darker side. Through a collection of images and texts, Kerivel explores the gap between scientific documentation and the sensationalised coverage we typically see in news media.

The typefaces she used are Uncut Sans and (the Latin part of) GenA Koburi Mincho.

License: All Rights Reserved.

Letterhead by José de Ros

Josep de Ros was an industrialist from Figueres, Spain, born in the manor house of Les Olives into an aristocratic family. Around 1917, he started a business in the fertilizer sector and opened the Camponal liquor distillery a few years later. He had a warehouse on Vilallonga Avenue in Figueres, near the railway station, close to the border with France. He died in 1935.

In the shown letterheads by Josep/José de Ros from around 1930, the difference between typography and lettering is difficult to appreciate (thanks to the staff of Fonts In Use for the clarifications).

License: All Rights Reserved.

Detail of the letterhead: “José de Ros / Abonos, cereales y despojos / Figueras”. All three styles are lettering.

The name is in an English script close to Stempel’s Künstler-Schreibschrift, known in Spanish as Inglesa Artista semi-negra, with an ornamented J and a characteristic loop around the stem of the R. Josep de Ros i Moner (father) and Josep de Ros i Reig (son) were descendents of Ros de Olano. In Stempel’s 1918 specimen book for the Spanish market, the name of Ros de Olano is set in Inglesa Artista (it’s misspelled as “Olona”; another page in the same book has the correct spelling).

“Figueras” is drawn in a serif with inline. The structure is very close to the Bravour typeface designed by Martin Jacoby-Boy for Stempel in 1912), but with sharper serifs, and a wider letter U with a small spur. I have made a comparison with the solid Bravour negra and the decorated Bravour adornado (Verzierte Bravour).

License: All Rights Reserved.

Comparison of the lettered inline caps to the Bravour typeface

From the obituary for the father in La Veu de l’Empordá, 27 December 1919 (translated):

[…] Josep de Ros was from a noble family, from the stately house of Ros located in the town of Les Olives, although the one they owned in this city could also be considered a manor. Among the ancestors of the house are the famous General Ros de Olano, who was a minister of the Crown and commanded an army corps in the African War during the years 1859 and 1860. The last Prior of the Monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll also came from the Ros family.

License: All Rights Reserved.

Detail of the letterhead featuring Merveille, Kleukens, and Venus, all by Bauer/Neufville

The Camponal letterhead is typographic: it’s set in the typefaces Merveille, Kleukens-Kursiv and Venus-Grotesk, all by the Bauer type foundry (Merveille originated in the United States under the name Laclede), and distributed in Spain by the Neufville branch in Barcelona. Bauer’s typefaces were the most commonly used ones in Catalonia before the Franco dictatorship (1939). This letterhead helped to locate the forgotten Camponal distillery.

License: All Rights Reserved.

Label featuring Venus schmal dreiviertelfett, Fette Grotesk-Kursiv, and Clio a.k.a. Kleopatra

The Camponal identity uses other typefaces by Bauer and Neufville, like Antigua Mercedes (the Spanish name of Tages-Antiqua), Bernhard-Antiqua, Fette Grotesk-Kursiv, Carnaby (Marocco), Grotesca Estrecha (Neue enge Zeitungs-Grotesk), Florentiner Mediaeval, and Majestic.

A few typefaces could have been sourced from different type foundries based in Madrid and Valencia, like Clio (Ludwig Wagner, 1903) distributed by Neufville/Bauer as Kleopatra and by Gans as Aurora; or Aurora Grotesk (Wagner & Schmidt, 1908) sold by Gans as Grotesca Ideal and by Fundición Tipográfica Nacional as Grotesca Estrecha.

Typography and lettering also coexist in other elements, such as in the Camponal liquour labels and packaging.

Learn more about Josep de Ros and the Camponal distillery.

License: All Rights Reserved.

Camponal label featuring lettering (white letters), Kleukens-Antiqua, and Majestic

License: All Rights Reserved.

Label featuring Kleukens-Antiqua, Venus, and an unidentified typeface (similar to Stempel’s Holzhausen-Antiqua, but with a different M)

License: All Rights Reserved.

Bottle label ft. lettering, an unidentified grotesk for “Licor de Hierbas ‘Camponal’” (similar to Grotesca Favorita by Gans), and Bauer’s Kleopatra

License: All Rights Reserved.

Packaging ft. lettering (the reversed letters at the top), Marocco a.k.a. Carnaby for “Cura estómago e intestinos”, Majestic for “G. Garriga”, and other unidentified typefaces

License: All Rights Reserved.

Camponal ad ft. Bernhard-Antiqua, Universitäts-Antiqua a.k.a Druckhaus-Antiqua, Neue enge Zeitungs-Grotesk, Tages-Antiqua a.k.a. Antigua Mercedes, and others

License: All Rights Reserved.

Point-of-sale display ft. Columbus, a version of Edel-Grotesk (probably Groteska Moderna by Fundición Tipográfica Nacional), and Schmale halbfette Etienne

License: All Rights Reserved.

Camponal ad ft. Bernhard-Antiqua, Tages-Antiqua a.k.a. Antigua Mercedes, Universitäts-Antiqua, Florentiner Mediaeval, Kleukens-Antiqua, and an unidentified grotesk

License: All Rights Reserved.

Address label ft. Etienne Sombreada (Gans’s version of Umstochene Etienne by Schelter & Giesecke), Venus, and Antigua Veneciana (Gans’s version of ATF’s Cheltenham)

License: All Rights Reserved.

I came across this showing in a poor reproduction in an exhibition in a very small local museum.

William Walton’s Façade is the musical part of Façade – An Entertainment, which comprises a reading of the Façade poems of Edith Sitwell accompanied by the music. It exists and has been performed in many different versions since its public premier in 1923.

This version, without poetry, was recorded by Chicago Pro Musica and apparently earned a Grammy award for Best New Classical Artist (from Wikipedia).

The fonts chosen for the album art are approximately period appropriate (at least for the original performances, not for this 1984 Reference Recordings version): Bifur for “Façade” and “Chicago Pro Musica”; and Futura for the rest of the text .

[More info on Discogs]

Tanssilattia vuorella (“The dance floor on the mountain”) is a collection of poems by Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski (1937–1983), and the first part of his Thiarnia suite. Translated to the Swedish by Mia Berner and the author, it was published by Bonniers in Stockholm in 1977, under the title Dansgolvet på berget.

All words on the exclusively typographic cover are set in two sizes of tightly spaced Baskerville Old Face.

Studio Edgar Jayet went into business by the end of 2022. It is dedicated to a trans-disciplinary approach to interior design, scenography, object design, publishing and research. The studio operates between Paris and Venice. The visual identity on display in this post was conceived of and designed by Sophie Hanoun of Yorgo&Co, based in Paris. The printed matter was produced at Ateliers A in Châtillon, just south outside Paris.

The design uses Eames Century Modern by Erik van Blokland for the name of the founder – in a light weight with ample letterspacing – as well as for the product titles and descriptions. Everything else, in print as much as on the website, is set from Enduro, predominantly in the Semi Light weight of normal width.

The Enduro Collection was designed by Emmanuel Besse and released by Production Type in late 2020. Enduro is a take on the genre of the industrial grotesk and comes in three families, Normal, Narrow, and Condensed. While the range in widths is restrained by choice, the range in weights is very much the opposite: seven weights per family plus their italics add up to over 40 styles and a comprehensive typographic system satisfying all needs.

From Verso Books:

Sex and art, we're told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodification of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy. Our reaction to this should not be moral or political outrage, nor legal regulation or denial, but rather-as Sophia Giovannitti argues here-acceptance, through which we can find a more autonomous way to live.

In this searching and provocative work, drawing on cultural and political theory, the contemporary art world, and the author's own experience as a sex worker and artist trying to make a living, Giovannitti argues that if we delve into our anxieties around art and sex, we can instead find new ways to live and spaces, however small, of freedom. When there is nothing left to protect, she argues, everything is possible.

On the book cover, Sophia Giovannitti’s name is set in the Thin weight of Atlas Grotesk, with Romie (designed by Margot Lévêque) used for title and subtitle.

The Kay is a boutique Pilates studio right outside of Antwerp, Belgium.

On their website, Off-The-Grid mentions:

We created a brand that’s minimal yet different. Built around the idea of movement and alignment. The logo can be split up to add important pieces of text in between or it can be used on one line.

For the brand assets, Off-The-Grid usually worked with the logo as the main focus. They made the logo large and bold so there’s immediate brand recognition.

The typeface used for the logo is Relais with a modified A and Y. It is paired with Sofia for texts.

3000000Hz is an artist’s book informed by Olympia Scarry’s solo-exhibition White Noise at Fondazione ICA Milano in 2022, depicting, frame-by-frame, a series of ultrasound scans of white onyx recorded at the Policlinico of Milan.

Words by artist Olympia Scarry:

A record of an archeo echo. 3 million Hertz per second, 5 minutes, and 7 billion years in 2023.
 Ultrasonic frequencies of sound waves, pulsating off the surface of a solid rock of translucent white onyx, submerged in water, sunken again below the sea, recomposing the potential and spatial distances by returning to a deep time, as the membrane of a body. Sound becomes visible as the abstracted, yet anthropomorphic frames translate the traces into a soundtrack of stratigraphic depths. A fluorescent yellow light pierces a fissure, oscillating a horizontal plane as the measure of tempo. The echo’s record of the sublime geological landscape rotating on its own axis, is suspended in time, collapsing the memory of the material, but only for a nanosecond. Sound travels faster underwater.

3000000Hz was conceived by the artist, designed by Dan Solbach and produced by Apalazzo Gallery and Fondazione ICA Milano. The text is set in Persona (Abyme, 2022).

Robbie is a short story written by Isaac Asimov, and first published in 1940 under the title Strange Playfellow. Lucas Mosesson used the text as the starting point for creating a book with an experimental layout, set entirely in CoFo Sans Mono. The project was made as a student project at Lycée Camille Claude, a design school in Blois, France. Lucas comments:

The project ROBBIE: An Interactive Novel reimagines the structure of a conventional edition by opting for an interactive approach that renews the reading experience. It highlights the human dimension through design and interaction processes that involve the human hand. Scratching, cutting, tearing, pasting, unfolding… the interactions are numerous and serve to illustrate the story through gestures, actions, and movements rather than images. This reedition invites the reader to become an actor and shape the narrative through their manipulations. The project establishes connections with current issues related to technology and robotics through a science fiction narrative that encourages reflection. All of this is contained within an ephemeral book whose degradation is necessary to fully enjoy the experience.

The typeface selection is related to the main themes of this work: Isaac Asimov’s short story Robbie revolves around robots and technology! For me, CoFo Sans directly recalls the early digital fonts derived from more traditional typewriter typefaces. This allows for a blending of the human and digital dimensions, with a font that simultaneously exists in the past, nostalgia, present, and future!

Furthermore, it is particularly effective when applying rules and grids to achieve stricter compositions. At times, one might even have the impression of seeing lines of code or script. CoFo Sans is also useful when it comes to make patterns or typographic effects with repetitive characters.

This catalog was published on the occasion of the exhibition Drawings: Studies for Works 2000–2015 by Seth Price, shown at Petzel Gallery, New York, from May 14 to July 17, 2015. Price is a contempory artist who uses a lot of different media, including sculpture, video, text (see Fuck Seth Price), and clothing. This exhibition focused on his drawings and his work on paper.

We can find works made in different media types, like pen and ink-jet on paper, pen and graphite on paper, giclée print on paper, enamel paint on shrink-wrapped wooden palette, etc.

The cover features his drawing Compatibility Mode (2012) and the title set rotated to the left and right in the Ultralight weight of Neue Helvetica. This typeface is also used inside the book, although there’s very little text apart from the titles in Neue Helvetica and the titles of the drawings in Berthold Bodoni.

The catalog was edited by Bettina Funcke and published by Petzel Gallery together with Koenig Books. The design is by Eric Wrenn. A pdf is available from the artist’s website.

CD cover

Horse Rotorvator is an album by English band Coil, featuring John Balance and Peter Christopherson. This is the band’s second studio album.

From Wikipedia:

The album title was inspired by a dream of Balance’s in which the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse slit the throats of their horses and assembled their jawbones into a device large enough to “plough up the waiting world.”

Initially released in the UK in 1986 by Force & Form, this post shows the 1988 re-release.

The cover was designed by Peter Christopherson himself. In the center, a fisheye photo by John Balance is framed by a circular contour. The title and the band name are shown in the four corners – COIL / HORSE / ROTOR / VATOR – in capital letters from Palatino.

The pale tones of the background and the typography, together with the image of a bronze horse, create an unexpected medieval aesthetic. I find the interior of the CD interesting, and by complementing the design with the fish-eye photo of the marble statue, there’s a connection between the ancient subject and the more or less modern style of photography. The Coil logo on the left-hand page with the acknowledgements also takes its place in this medieval aesthetic with a yellowish hue.

The design reinforces the neopagan spirit that the group asserts in its music and in the aesthetics it constructs.

[More info on Discogs]

CD booklet with acknowledgements in Palatino Italic

CD booklet with faux small caps

Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty was published at the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), New York, shown from 5 May to 16 July 2023.

From The Met:

The book, the first complete investigation into Lagerfeld’s (1933–2019) artistry, explores his extraordinary sixty-five year career, from the designs for Chloé and Fendi in the 1960s and 1970s to his celebrated leadership in the 1980s and beyond at Chanel and with his own label. Inspired by the ‘line of beauty’ theorised by eighteenth-century English painter William Hogarth, this publication pursues the straight and serpentine ‘lines’ and their intersections in Lagerfeld’s work as a means of understanding his unique creative process.

Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty was designed by OK-RM and is entirely typeset in Mercure (Abyme, 2021). The typeface is also used for the exhibition graphics and communication materials, designed by the museum's in-house team, as well as for the Met Gala 2023, which celebrated Lagerfeld’s legacy and the opening of the exhibition.

Extracts from Volume 01 of Dataland Publications. Designer Mina Maurice comments:

Dataland is a bilingual publication aiming to shed light on the vast existing building stock within the city of Cairo and therefore showing its potential to be maintained and reused through an attempt at archiving data of the city’s built environment within curated categories of building typologies. Additionally providing a platform for visual and literary contributions by local researchers and visual practitioners.

Maurice is using 

TWK Lausanne (designed by Nizar Kazan and published by WELTKERN®) and ABC Favorit عربي Arabic (designed by Khajag Apelian and Wael Morcos and published by Dinamo). Art direction by Ahmed Morsi.

PPP stands for the Perpetual Peace Project ~2022, which is created and maintained by the Center for Philosophical Technologies and is a part of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. Its third edition is an academic/educational response to the Ukraine War, enabling conversations about the concept of peace in different directions with multiple perspectives. It begins from the understanding that for many today “peace” is a poorly defined word that has many meanings in different contexts – defined negatively as the absence of war.

From 2022 onwards, the project will investigate those political and institutional spaces best equipped to forge new practices of peace, especially in addressing current geopolitical conditions that seem to make peace unlikely, if not impossible.

The developed visual identity has its journalistic approach with a minimalistic color palette of grey tones, accompanied by black and white images from the war area. Effects like color inversion, image distortion, overlays, and contrast in the used typography add dramaturgy to the whole. Additionally, the use of a bit of mechanic but plenty of character Approach combined with its fixed width version Approach Mono brings an aseptic voice to the identity.

The PPP logo symbol contains three monospaced letters – where each of them has a separate stem and bowl from the other. This treatment gives a DIY / stencil feel to the sign but also emphasizes the destruction and fragmentation which is happening due to the war. The abbreviated PPP form is accompanied by the text in the monospaced typewriter style adding a rhythm and journalistic vibe to the developed visual system.

The repetitive aspect of the letterforms in the logo, as well as the usage of monospaced typography, allowed us to put the identity in motion and play with the perpetuity of animations or interactions on the project website.

Credits
Project organizers: Gregg Lambert & Adam Nocek
Branding and website design: Gabriela Baka
Website development: Owls Department

The redacted update of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace combines EB Garamond and Dreaming Outloud Script.

Kunst og krig / Art and War was a symposium organized by Arctic Art Institute and Deichman. It took place at Deichmanske bibliotek in Bjørvika, Oslo, in October 2022.

The aim of the symposium is to discuss the nuances of the current situation with artists who are critical of the Ukraine war and establish a platform for stories, which are rarely communicated in the major mainstream media.

The typography pairs Director and Roboto Flex.

Presentation with Director and Roboto Flex at the Deichman Bjørvika, Oslo, in October 2022

Frédéric Cordier 2010–2022 was published by art&fiction. Designed by Dual Room and typeset in Maxitype’s Selecta.

From the back cover of the book:

Frédéric Cordier is interested in errors, particularly those introduced into a supposedly infallible system. Parallel to his exploration of seriality, he makes prints dealing with the mechanical aspects of the world and the transformation of nature by human activity. With limited means and a spare selection of techniques, he creates abstract or figurative structures, frames of regularity disrupted by imperfections, landscapes coded like a computer language. This first monograph, edited and introduced by Laurence Schmidin, with essays by Ji-Yoon Han and Sylvain Menetrey, illustrates the breadth of the artist’s process.