Paralaxe Editions presents Naemi and Dania, September 9, 2024

Located in Berlin-Wedding, silent green Kulturquartier is an event venue and independent project housed in the historic premises of a former crematorium. Form und Konzept is a direct neighbor and responsible for much of their visual communication. For the posters advertising concerts in September 2024, the design studio of Beata Niedhart and Oliver Spieker worked with PicNic.

The inclined serif with its characteristic wobbly contours was designed by Mariel Nils and jointly released by NoFoundry and Velvetyne in 2022 under the CUTE license. PicNic comes with a built-in bouncing baseline which can be intensified by activating the ligatures. In some of the posters, Form und Konzept further cranked up the bounciness by manually shifting the baseline for selected glyphs.

The organic letterforms are interlaced with such from the more conventional Myriad and Pragmatica. The latter – a variant of Helvetica with shorter descenders – is part of silent green’s house style.

Salenta De Badisdenne, Topu Lyo, and Andrew Pekler, September 11, 2024

Bex Burch & Laurel Pardue, Teresa Allgaier, September 13, 2024

Brìghde Chaimbeul, Dylan Kerr, September 24, 2024

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The Kitchen Is A Place is a solo exhibition by artist Ann Yan (闫安), held at SxS Gallery, Shanghai. The exhibition was curated by Zhang Yehong (张业鸿). Graphic design by Xiaoyuan Gao, using Elliott’s Blue Eyeshadow and Yink for headlines; the secondary type is a combination of Metallophile Sp8, Resource Han Rounded and the ornaments found in Looking Flowers Deco. Latin alphabet elements in the body copy are set in NotCourierSans.

From SxS Gallery (auto-translated from the Chinese):

For artist Ann Yan, growing up near the Freud Museum in North West London inspired her interest in psychoanalysis and the human mind, especially the subconscious mind, which is deeply embedded in the universal human experience. As a second-generation immigrant, Ann Yan has consciously looked back and tapped into her own cultural collective memory. Citing images from numerous 80s cookbooks, she focuses on recipes that are full of East Asian flavor and flips this nostalgia into a personal and surreal narrative style.

If Dali's grotesque imagery in Carla’s Dinner Party is to be seen as opening a new path for the tradition of table still life painting, Ann Yan has undoubtedly inherited this aesthetic, combining imagery and depictions of food with her own reflections on post-colonialism and cultural relativism through the combined mediums of oil paintings, sculpture, and collage.

Official poster

Exhibition title and introduction displayed on the wall

Exhibition leaflet (back, A4)

Exhibition leaflet (A4)

Close-up: exhibition leaflet (A4)

Folded: exhibition leafLet (A4)

Typographic base

Poster made for Zvučanja (“Sound”), a music festival that promotes demo bands in the underground music scene. This poster was made for fourth edition which took place at OKC Abrašević, a cultural center in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was screenprinted in two colors (red and black) on yellow paper. The festival name is set in Anthony, the rest of information is set in Zico Sans and Futura. The manicule (☛) in Zico Sans was modified to serve as a sign of the horns (?).

From Studio Yukiko:

Moshtari Hilal’s latest group show at Haus Coburg, co-curated with AVAH (Afghan Visual Arts & History) and Aneta Palenga (Haus Coburg | Städtische Galerie Delmhorst) KINDHEIT(EN), invited seven artists from the Afghan diaspora who grew up in different countries to dive into the fragmentary memories of their childhood exploring colours, textures and the profound influence the past has on their memories and visual languages and creative expressions. Despite individual biographies and different artistic expressions, they are united by a common pool of memory images, objects and narratives.

Having followed Hilal’s practice for a while, we were honoured to create the visual identity for the exhibition, uniting the delicate textile weaves used in many of the pieces as a jumping board to think of the flow of time and the bonds that come with that. Unbreakable threads that unveil a profound connection between personal and collective narratives, set to a backdrop of shapes and colours of memory's river.

The title design uses Ready Active, with a number of altered letters as well as organic protuberances, setting out in various directions, depending on the format. The same typeface also acts as drop-caps for Bolivia, the sans-serif used for all the other elements. The translation of the title is set in Noto Nastaliq Urdu.

Posters and digital posts for the Danskvällar (“Dance Nights”) club concept at Trädgården, Stockholm.

Collages and drawings of mountain landscapes are combined with Harber from bb-bureau.

Humor på Torshov (“comedy at Torshov”) is a local comedy festival in Oslo, Norway. Their identity and digital flyers are designed by Kristine Lie Øverland using Store Norske Leif, by Skriftkompani.

007-Grotesk was created to support the oldest surviving music venue in the Czech Republic. The popular Klub 007 Strahov a.k.a. Sedmička (“Seven”) has become home for music genres such as punk, hip-hop, hardcore, ska, reggae, and rockabilly. Klub 007 Strahov, which is celebrating its 55th anniversary this year, draws in both connoisseurs and oddballs with distinctive taste.

In the first place, the typeface was meant for typesetting monthly programs. It’s tall and condensed and can be also used as a headline typeface. It includes a lot of glyphs that elevate the typesetting. Some of them are discretionary ligatures of international vehicle registration codes, abbreviations of names of days, a set of genre and activists pictograms, or an extended set of arrows.

The typeface is a part of new identity created by Karel Haloun, Petr Kudláček and Jan Arndt. It can be seen in the logo that works with fragments of period programs by means of a simple grid.

Want to support the club? Consider licensing the typeface: proceeds from the font sales will go towards ensuring the printing of monthly programs and posters.

Poster, flyer and social media visuals for the exhibition Selbstbild–nis by students of “Klasse für Experimentelle Malerei und Zeichnung” from the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, held at Kunstverein Gera e.V. Designed by Béla Machemer and set in Exposure, published by 205TF, and HAL Four Grotesk by HAL Typefaces.

Exhibition poster in format 1185×1750 mm

Ränder dieser Bilder (“These images’ edges”) at Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken is Natalie Brück’s first institutional solo exhibition. Inspired by music albums, she produced the audiovisual album Ränder dieser Bilder, consisting of moving images, the sound of her voice, booming sounds, hard and soft beats and melodic passages between moments of silence, hesitation and doubt.

The album themes are order and chaos: simplifications of complex relationships and the nuances of language and images – online and offline.

Several fonts make an appearance for the tracklist to her album which is used as a key visual for posters, invitations and other media. Every song title gets its own typographical voice, sometimes kitschy, sometimes tough, and is intertwined with the others. “Love” is in Candlescript from Vast. “Movement” is set in an older version of Dykhotomos Italic by Jules Durand; Roslindale is used for “Parts” by David Jonathan Ross and distributed via his Font of the Month Club – as is his Bild which is used for “Treffen”. “Stimme” uses Arnold Böcklin; “Words” is set in Zapfino; “Brechen” in an unreleased typeface by myself.

The invitation and the mail signature additionally include Bradley DJR by David Jonathan Ross and WT Skrappa by Jacob Wise.

This exhibition is also the first to use the new identity of Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken featuring of ABC Diatype from Dinamo. The arched type of the logo is a reference to the architecture of the inner courtyard.

Kristin Rosch was involved with texts and layout for the invitations.

Exhibition poster in Format 3560x2520mm

Exhibiton Invitation, DIN A5, unfolding to A3

Exhibiton invitation, DIN A5, unfolding to A3

Exhibiton invitation, DIN A5, unfolding to A3

Exhibiton poster for social media

Email signature

The Nuits sonores, or “Sonic Nights”, are a yearly festival held in Lyon, France. It revolves around electronic music and neighboring genres as much as around visual and performance art. In previous posts, we have featured the typography for the editions of 2011–2013 and of 2023. Every year, the task of developing the visual identity for Nuits sonores is assigned to a different designer or studio.

For the upcoming 2024 edition, the festival curators picked Super Terrain, a collective formed in 2014 by Quentin Bodin, Luc de Fouquet and Lucas Meyer, working from Nantes and Marseille. What caught the attention of the commissioners was the way Super Terrain oscillates between graphic design and art: “We’ve seen them tuning pastels during a residency at Fotokino, making digitized bodies dance for the University Theater of Nantes (a stage for young creators), or hoisting typographic flags.”

The members of Super Terrain – who initially met at the EESAB art school they attended in Rennes – are certainly not afraid of intense colors, expressive typography, and strong statements. In their poster for Nuits Sonores they combine these ingredients: on an organic, fluorescent backdrop ranging from purple to orange and blue they place two extremely big letters, NS, for Nuits sonores. These display a metallic effect and thus mark a sharp contrast to the lava-like patterns.

The typeface they chose is very much in line with such an “industrial” take: it’s Kreuz, designed by Emmanuel Besse and released with Production Type. Kreuz is predominantly used in its Extended width. What stands out in this sans serif is the systematic way in which inner curves are smooth and round while outer curves are broken into edges, leaving a rough overall expression.

The curators are very fond of exactly this aspect, as it goes so well with a new event location they are able to use for the first time in 2024, the Grandes Locos, a former repair workshop of the French railway SNCF.

The program booklet pairs headlines in Kreuz Extended with text in the standard width.

El Origen de la Noche / The Origin of Night is an immersive sound installation by 4Direcciones Audiovisual (directed by Diana Rico and Richard Decaillet) working in collaboration with a group of traditional authorities from indigenous communities of the north-west Amazon, as well as anthropologists, musicians and linguists.

To design the identity of the exhibition, Mia Paltrow-Murray, graphic designer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, used the typefaces Exposure by Federico Parra-Barrios and distributed by 205TF, Serial B Blur by Mario Julián Gutierrez (Dum Dum Studio) and Neureal by Laura Csocsán (ECAL Typefaces).

Les Urbaines spotlights “the moment when singular artistic practices take form, prefiguring the aesthetic currents of tomorrow”. Entirely free, the festival presents over fifty projects (visual works, live shows, performances, dj sets, and workshops), an invitation to live a shared space and time dedicated to emerging sensibilities and imaginaries.

The 2023 editions’ visual identity is designed by Kim Coussée & Eliott Villars using Selecta by Maxitype.

Louise Dehaye created a clean and structured visual identity for the 2023/2024 saison of L’Inconnue, a curious and interested music scene. She based the identity on a pair of fonts: Ginka (from lift-type) and Review Mono (from ECAL Typefaces). From Dehaye (translated):

After 35 years under the name Rock & Chanson, Talence’s contemporary music scene is changing its identity to become L’Inconnue. Also, three posters have been specially designed for the season launch party on September 22, and screen-printed by l’Insoleuse.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Back in the spring of 2016 Kaisa and I had a brilliant idea.

Well, actually we had two brilliant ideas. They were 1. To ride our bikes across North America, from East to West, and 2. To raise money for the trip by making and selling a punk zine about bike travel.

”But why a punk zine of all things? There can’t be much money in that”, you might exclaim. And you would be absolutely right. But doing things that are rational has rarely been a guiding principle for the two of us. So yes, a punk zine it was to be.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

At this point I had also grown somewhat tired of the meticulous perfectionism that came with desktop publishing. There was a small part of the otherwise so very pedantic me that viewed such an ability to fully control the visual environment as both sterile and impersonal. And while I know this isn’t a very original observation to make I still longed for the more tactile ways of designing.

This project offered me the ideal opportunity to make use of all the old type catalogues and printed ephemera I had amassed during decades of unorganized and mostly stochastic collecting and turn them into something new. In the process I also ended up spending a hundred euros on an old Xerox machine our school was going to ditch anyway, and to the dismay of my brother placing it in his garage.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

I began by whipping out my old Letraset catalogue and starting to blow up the typefaces I thought I could use in the project. Turns out this included almost all of the typefaces presented. As for the Letraset catalogue, this was the very book that incidentally ignited my love for typography when I first came across it in 1986. I simply couldn’t believe that so many wonderful letterforms existed in this world. An insight I still cling onto some three decades later.

In making the zine I set up a couple of rules for myself: 1. All type (with the exception of the body copy) would be set by hand, meaning it would be cut and pasted, and 2. The tools used would be analogue (with the exception of a concession I made enabling me to use digital cameras when needed), 3. No rulers or other measuring devices would be allowed, everything had to be eyeballed, 4. Fonts would be used to one’s heart’s content and combined without too much thought or prejudice, and finally 5. Everything would be in black and white, because, well, punk is black and white!

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

With these simple guidelines I sat down and began designing, allowing the process and the mistakes I made along the way guide me towards some form of an end result. The fun part was that for once I had no clear picture in my mind of what was to happen. Working in this way was intuitive and liberating, but even more importantly helped me realize how much of the transparency we associate with computer-generated design is illusory. The tool always controls its user whether they are aware of it or not. And if that’s not a punk rock insight then I don’t know what would be!

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

While working on the zine we realized that the project wasn’t as difficult or time-consuming as we had thought, so we decided to up our game: There would be a tape to go along with the zine! The problem was neither of us played any instruments or sang. (You’d be hard pressed to find a more musically challenged person than myself!)

So we wrote a ton of letters to bands that we thought would be cool to work with, and to our great joy almost all of them responded with enthusiasm and a promise to participate. This was turning out to be way easier than we would have anticipated!

The full tape can still be listened to over on the otherwise slightly less well-functioning project site, should you feel the need to hear some phenomenal Finnish punk and hardcore.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Next question to sort out was who on Earth would still produce tapes in 2016? Well, through some obscure connections we got in touch with a lay Christian preacher who had a small tape production facility set up in his basement in the suburbs of East Helsinki. He would mainly record his own sermons, but he also occasionally sold his services to outsiders. And we were definitely as outsiders as it gets!

And while we’re coming up with new stuff, why not include a poster? And some envelopes to keep all the things together! And some stationery, should we want to write someone. Once again our initially somewhat reasonable project began, somewhat unsurprisingly, to snowball.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

But all of a sudden it was all done! We printed up some 300 copies of both the zine and the tape, and I don’t think we’ve ever sold out anything we produced as quickly. Yay! Unfortunately our goal to collect funds for our trip was a a non-starter as the production costs far exceeded what we had hoped for.

So realistically we probably ended up losing more money than we made on this venture. But even this is not certain, as we really didn’t keep track of our finances. Still, the whole project should still be considered a grand success, because we had a ton of fun doing it!

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photo: Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: smirk1.bandcamp.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Front cover (Drunken Sailor Records)

Smirk a.k.a. Nick Vicario is a punk musician from Los Angeles, also known from Public Eye. LP is the title of his first album under this name, mastered at North London Bomb Factory and released in March 2021 – through Feel It Records in the U.S., and through Drunken Sailor Records in the U.K.

Art and layout by Smoking Room, who combined two typefaces by Rudolf Koch: his multiline Prisma, slanted, and the Rotunda-like Wallau, here in its halbfett (bold) weight with “German capitals”, i.e. with the blackletter alternates. The specific font is Wallau Deutsch, a digitization with soft contours made by Dieter Steffmann in 2002. The hook in I was trimmed, so that it looks less like a J. Steffmann also offers a freebie digitization of Prisma.

[More info on Discogs]

Source: www.discogs.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Front cover (Feel It Records)

Source: www.discogs.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Back cover (Feel It Records)

Source: www.discogs.com License: All Rights Reserved.

A-side (Feel It Records)

Source: www.discogs.com License: All Rights Reserved.

B-side (Feel It Records)

Source: drunkensailorrecords.bandcamp.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Limited edition 12″ black vinyl (Drunken Sailor Records)

Source: drunkensailorrecords.bandcamp.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Limited edition 12″ red vinyl (Drunken Sailor Records)

Poster for Mitch Van Dusen’s live soundtrack performance to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Presented by the Pine Hill Community Center, it was the second annual live silent film soundtrack concert to celebrate the Halloween season.

Designer Darryl Norsen composed a collage with stills from the 1920 German silent horror film classic. For the type, he forewent an obvious period choice – like the expressionist Irrlicht or Caligari – and instead contrasted the imagery with Block, a set of three-dimensional caps reminiscient of toy blocks. In this context, and rendered in black and white, this 1970s design with its shifting counters takes on a creepy, claustrophobic vibe. Block is accompanied by various styles from Futura and an unidentified italic for the artist’s name.

Block was designed by John Gorham as a custom set of initials for a special educational series in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1970, and soon after released by Face Photosetting. I’m aware of one (uncredited) digitization, made available by Richard W. Mueller as Knockout Initials in 1993. Since that freebie is distinguished by a simplified A, and this poster has the glyph as drawn by Gorham, I assume that Norsen sourced the letterforms from a showing of the original, possibly the one in New Alphabets A to Z. If that’s true, he must have added the period himself – Block’s character set covered the basic capital alphabet only.

The legacy of Federico García Lorca is incomplete, was stolen from us.

Fragmentos© is a fanzine conceptualized, designed and self-published by creative studio errorerror.studio® that brings together five incomplete poems of Lorca for an incomplete reading. They want to express the feeling that remains when you cannot fully enjoy an artist, especially when his life has been taken from us too soon. Through the intervention of the photography of Lorca with the scanner and of the libretto with spray paint, the studio wants to make the reader uncomfortable, just as it happens with the frustration due to the early loss of the author.

All headings and subheadings have been designed with a combination of Times New Roman Condensed and Proggy Clean. For the lines of the poems the font in use is Times (Regular) and Proggy Clean for all the captions.

See the full project on our website.

Flyers for Dada Nights, every Thursday at Hanabar, San Pedro Garza García, Mexico, with music, art, beer, wine, sake, and food. The event series is inspired by Dadaism and Japanese monsters.

The communication is inspired by the same Dadaism: it tries to keep an image under the radar, with printed and scanned flyers. The fonts in use seek to maintain a different essence, not so legible, using mostly digital fonts made in the studio. Flyers include different photos of analogue and digital objects mostly used in music.

These fonts can be found on our studio website and in our digital catalog.

Flyers for Dada Nights, every Thursday at Hanabar, San Pedro Garza García, Mexico, with music, art, beer, wine, sake, and food. The event series is inspired by Dadaism and Japanese monsters.

The communication is inspired by the same Dadaism: it tries to keep an image under the radar, with printed and scanned flyers. The fonts in use seek to maintain a different essence, not so legible, using mostly fonts with rounded details and developed by new designers. including several of Dum Dum Studio’s own, as well as various styles from Leah Maldonado’s GlyphWorld series.

Flyer for a pasta workshop with cannabic dinner at Dum Dum Studio in Monterrey, Mexico.

In this pasta workshop given by @parolapasta you will learn how to make three different types of fresh pasta without eggs. At the end of the course we will use a portion of the pasta for dinner and the rest you can take home for you to cook.