Irene Themann designed the visual identity for the Jazzwoche (“Jazz Week”), which is organized annually by the Jazz Musiker Initiative Hannover e.V.

Coupé (Nouvelle Noire) is used for titles. The stencil face by Philippe Apeloig is paired with Hannes von Döhren’s Pluto Sans (HvD Fonts) for text. The images show posters and brochures from the 2017 (red) and 2018 (orange) editions of the festival. See more images on Irene Themann’s portfolio website.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit was the broadest ever reaching cooperation of Bremen’s Theater-Schaffende (a theatre company made up of professionally involved people) and took place in 2013. The project consisted of 12 different ensembles and many partners. It was our job to create a public face for the project.

At the heart of the events was the internationally acknowledged theatre-piece White Rabbit Red Rabbit (shortened by us to WRRR) of Iranian author Nassim Souleimanpour. The play abdicates any direction, rehearsals or any defined stage design. Only a sealed letter with instructions is handed to the actors on the verge of their performance.

Due to this unique structure, WRRR became the base for an encounter of various ensembles from Bremen. The play deals with both minor and severe human decision-making. Viewers and actors have two options: to be a “scared cat” or to be a “guinea pig” and enter the uncertainty of Souleimanpour’s play.

Based on this, we developed a visual narrative built with Trade Gothic (Bold Condensed) and a red and white color scheme as the most important ingredients. Used throughout the entire communication of the project, letters became the guinea pigs. Just as WRRR impacted audience and actors, we made scribbles and illustrations impact our white letters / guinea pigs. We used rotated glyphs for extra distinction between the characters.

White Rabbit, Red Rabbit inspired numerous partners and viewers to interact with the project. We were happy to see that all performances were sold out and the surrounding symposia were attended by many visitors.

In extremis was an exhibition exploring climate extremes, shown at Arts House, Melbourne's centre for contemporary performance, in November 2017.

Climatic extremes are the new meteorological normal for our planet. This screen-and-audiobased exhibition offers human, interspecies, plant and geological perspectives, and visceral experiences of the fragility, resilience and collapse of systems and ecologies. in extremis is lightning storms, dry winds, urban heathaze and contorted railway lines; parched riverbeds and flooded cities; panting, sweating, fainting and hallucinating.

Exhibiting artists included Leah Barclay; Daniel Browning; Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey & Jen Hector; Jill Orr; Zoe Scoglio; Latai Taumoepeau; and wāni.

The exhibition catalog was designed by M.Giesser using Practice (François Rappo) and Lausanne old version (Nizar Kazan). A pdf version is available for download.

Source: mooi-design.com Florian Voggeneder. License: All Rights Reserved.

Error – The Art of Imperfection is a joint exhibition of Ars Electronica and Volkswagen AG, shown in Berlin from November 17th, 2018 till March 3rd, 2019.

In and of itself, an error is neither good nor bad. First of all, for us an error is “merely” a deviation from what we expect. And this is exactly where the artists in our exhibition come into play: they are the ones who often purposely challenge deviations and/or errors. What does it mean, if we’re no longer able to recognize the deviation at all? If we just can’t understand any more that this is an error which we could tolerate or not? To what extent can this error be checked at all in the digital world? But aren’t we the ones who ultimately determine the order, rules, values and standards of a society and culture? Proceeding from these central questions, four guiding principles started to crystallize, which will be further illuminated in the context of an error: irritation, order, value and control.

The typeface used for the exhibition graphics as well as in ads is BC Liguria (Briefcase, 2014). With its radical solution for joints of curves and stems, this typeface a perfect choice for a theme centered around the art of imperfection in the digital world.

Source: mooi-design.com Florian Voggeneder. License: All Rights Reserved.

Letitia Lehner, founder of MOOI Design and director of design for the exhibition:

We took a lot of inspiration from the test pattern that traditionally marked the end of broadcasting on TV. In our work we always approach topics from a very visual standpoint and here the identity of the exhibition space was our priority. So we wanted to generate this test pattern in the space as well. What happens is that after the normal condition of the exhibition there is a moment of error, the test pattern dissolves, the pixel patterns break down, colors dissipate, try to recalibrate themselves, run through the whole color spectrum and produce completely unexpected results, including in the sound system. We tried to think through this moment of error up to the smallest detail. So, for example, our CI colors are there again, red and royal blue – red is the color of error and in the digital world, at least the world of Windows computers, royal blue represents the screen of death. We even work with fragmentation in the typography; the writing comes apart and keeps putting itself back together.

Source: www.flickr.com vog.photo. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Source: www.flickr.com vog.photo. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Source: www.flickr.com vog.photo. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Source: mooi-design.com Florian Voggeneder. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.flickr.com vog.photo. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Source: www.flickr.com vog.photo. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Source: mooi-design.com MOOI Design. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: mooi-design.com MOOI Design. License: All Rights Reserved.

Design concept and exhibition design: MOOI Design
Client: Ars Electronica Export
Curated by Manuela Naveau
Production: Bartneck Print Artists, DesignArtDX e.U., Transparent Design, DIREKTA Druckerei & Direktmarketing GmbH
Light installation “DIN”: Claudia Rohrmoser
Realization outdoor advertising: deluxe neue kommunikation gmbh
Photo documentation for MOOI: Florian Voggeneder

Editor’s note: This post was first published in November 2018. It was greatly revised with additional info and images in March 2019.

Veronica Corzo-Duchardt, design lead, in collaboration with Jessica De Jesus and Margot Harrington

Bitch Media publishes Bitch, an independent, quarterly magazine with the tagline “a feminist response to pop culture.” In 2018 they rebranded their monthly membership program as The Rage—a dramatic shift from the previous, cheerful B-Hive branding. The name doubles down on anger, “the most untouchable aspect of respectability for those of us in marginalized communities,” per editor-in-chief Evette Dionne. The flexible design system for The Rage centers around Cortado, set in all caps and individually distorted for different applications such as totes, mugs, bookmarks, and membership cards.

Corresponding with the new system, Bitch released “The Future Is Furious,” a mini-issue “about women’s anger—and, more specifically, about how that anger is policed, dismissed, and overlooked” (PDF download). Interior pages pair Cortado (undistorted) with Lelo and Tiempos. The design team shared this note by email:

During our research phase of the rebrand, we were heavily influenced by hand lettering of protest posters and 80’s and 90’s punk aesthetics. When searching for a typeface we looked for something that felt hand-lettered, elevated and had a bit of punk attitude and urgency, Cortado stuck a perfect balance of personality and edge for the Rage Rebranding. For the final logo Corzo-Duchardt manipulated print outs of Cortado on an old photocopier to push the emotion of anger and urgency even further.

“The Future Is Furious” cover lettering (Jessica De Jesus, design lead)

“The Future Is Furious” interior spread (Jessica De Jesus, design lead)

“The Future Is Furious” interior spread (Jessica De Jesus, design lead)

“The Future Is Furious” interior spread (Jessica De Jesus, design lead)

“The Future Is Furious” interior spread (Jessica De Jesus, design lead)

This publication was developed after a briefing by Maria Fernanda Antunes for the discipline of Editorial Design at ESE Coimbra. The output should be a magazine in Portuguese; it should include a barcode, a price, a title and existing (magazine) articles of different dimensions; and publicity. It was also demanded for us to choose between areas of study such as cinema, music, illustration, photography, etc. We settled on a magazine about photography, and restricted its scope to erudit photography.

Back in 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce exposed a plate of tin to the sunlight during eight hours, obtaining what may be considered the first photograph of the world. Homaging the creator of the photographic era, Niépce is now the name of this publication.

The magazine aims to to offer a pleasant reading experience, and to perpetuate formats of photo-albums that may fall into disuse – in this case we reused old “catalog bags” photo-albums. On opening the album (10x15cm), the bags show the photographs, that in turn hide the articles.

For the typography we chose Courier for photographers’ names and biographies, the familiar Adobe Garamond for body copy, and Arial for main titles and some highlights. A careful typographic hierarchy was made for obtaining the best balance between economic use of space and readability, and to create a sufficiently distinct-but-not distracting layout.

As it was demanded to use a barcode, we fully embraced it and assumed it as a main element in the cover. It was also demanded that the magazine included price information so, despite this being not a commercial project, we included a price on the back cover.

All the photographs are followed by a sticker with a respective label. That is not only important because it gives information about the images (title, author, date), but because it slightly covers them.

An observer that is really interested in seeing the whole photograph must remove it from the bag. By doing that, articles about the photographer as well as them biography will show up behind the photos, turning the observers into potential readers.

An article about photographer Nan Goldin, hidden by one of her photographs.

We chose to include publicity (also demanded) in camouflaged way, by making it to appear in the form of an article, only marked with a discrete “sponsored” side by its author. In this case, it is an article referring to an exhibition.

Front cover

This is one of the first uses of Milton Glaser's Glaser Stencil typeface, which was released in 1969. In his 1973 book Milton Glaser: Graphic Design, Glaser calls it “Neo-Futura”. Art direction: Harris Lewine. I especially like what he did with the exclam on the title page.

Note the irony: The year after this book was published, the author, Clifford Irving (1930-2017) concocted a scheme to publish a fake autobiography of the famously reclusive and paranoid billionaire Howard Hughes. Irving lied to his publisher, McGraw-Hill, saying that Hughes had told him he admired this book — which is about an art forger.

The plot unraveled, and in 1972 Irving pleaded guilty to “conspiracy to defraud”. After conviction, he spent 16 months in prison.

Back cover

Endpapers

Title page

Enormous flowers, luscious color, and desert landscapes. Georgia O’Keeffe pioneered revolutionary ways of visually interpreting the world, leaving a lasting legacy for generations of viewers and artists. The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art brings together a significant group of O’Keeffe’s works as the centerpiece of an exploration of her continued force as a touchstone for contemporary art. Viewers encounter paintings and sculpture by this founder of American modernism alongside works by emerging artists that evoke and expand upon O’Keeffe’s enchanting artistic language. — ncartmuseum.org

The Beyond is an exhibition catalogue designed by Pentagram / Eddie Opara for a travelling art exhibition (organised by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art) that explores the links between the art of Georgia O’Keeffe and contemporary art. The catalogue shows works by O’Keeffe and others.

The design employs the graphic motif of a straight, centered line, suggesting a leap or shift from one perspective to another––from the representative to the abstract, from here to the intangible “beyond.” The typography mixes Marr Sans, an eccentric and sharp grotesque (designed by Commercial Type), with Grifo, an expressive, neoclassic serif (by R-Typography). — Pentagram

EC Pinheiros magazine covers everything the associates need to know about Esporte Clube Pinheiros, the largest multi-sport club in Latin America. The challenge here was to create a graphic project capable of embracing their eclectic daily life. We developed a system where the variation of typographic weights was in charge of homogenizing the content without making it bureaucratic. In addition to the magazine's new graphic design, we take care of the art direction and layout of this monthly publication.

See also our post about the anniversary publication for the Pinheiros sport club.

Gerstner-Programm FSL Medium and Bold in use for the new corporate identity of the Centre culturel suisse. Paris. Redesign by Marietta Eugster Studio. Web development by Tristan Bagot and Benjamin Bonnet. Launched in January 2019.

The Swiss Cultural Center (CCS) aims to promote Swiss culture in France. It’s a branch of Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Foundation for Culture.

Detail from the event calendar, showing Gerstner-Programm FSL with its characteristic ampersand. It is paired with Times LT.

Founded in 2001, Rational Games provides professional coaching services to select customers worldwide. The unique feature of their method is the playful approach used to teach concrete negotiation skills. In short: playful negotiation training for serious people.

The interaction of unconventional methods and definitive conflict resolution is visualized by a typographic system that combines a classic grotesk typeface with playful letters. The new word mark symbolizes the strategic moves that take place during a negotiation on a subtle, graphic level. Within the word mark and headers, rational arguments alternate with emotional movements. Despite the use of bright red letters – a color known for its association with conflict – its use speaks for the dynamic optimism and friendliness of the new brand identity.

A booklet announcing the new identity

Dartmouth College’s updated identity system by Original Champions of Design centers around two typefaces, Dartmouth Ruzicka (an exclusive customized version of Study) and National 2. Study has a historical link to the university, who published Rudolph Ruzicka’s 1968 book Studies in Type Design, the inspiration for the typeface.

Excerpts from Dartmouth’s visual identity guidelines by OCD:

Originally designed by Rudolph Ruzicka, Dartmouth Ruzicka is a typeface that speaks to the legacy and history of Dartmouth. Type designer Jesse Ragan picked up where Ruzicka left off to modernize Ruzicka’s typeface and bring it into the 21st century. Using Dartmouth Ruzicka as the main typeface for communication materials highlights the cultured, scholarly side of the College.

National 2 is a deceptively simple sans-serif with subtle details that give it a distinctive, but not distracting, personality. While National 2 travels through and touches on a lot of historical material, it is designed to thrive in our contemporary typographic climate. Using National 2 as the main typeface on communication materials plays up the strong, bold spirit of the Dartmouth brand.

Different combinations of the typefaces evoke different facets of Dartmouth’s personality. Dartmouth Ruzicka communicates the legacy and prestige of the college while National 2 has a clean, modern presence. No matter which combination of typefaces you choose, always use contrasting weights and sizes to create a hierarchy of information.

The all-caps “Dartmouth” logotype is based on other lettering by Ruzicka, which is not available as a typeface.

“Dartmouth Life,” an alumni publication

A spread from “Telling Our Story”

Sample uses from Dartmouth Visual Identity Guidelines

Guidelines for departmental lockups

“Typography Styling” from Dartmouth Visual Identity Guidelines

Cover and interior grid redesign of the Instinct de liberté collection by Lux Éditeur, which proposes texts likely to deepen the reflection on the advent of a new society, sensitive to libertarian principles.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) is an Australian symphony orchestra that was initially formed in 1908. Since its opening in 1973, the Sydney Opera House has been its home concert hall and performs more than 180 concerts a year with some of the world’s most illustrious conductors and soloists. The orchestra’s current chief conductor is David Robertson. [Wikipedia]

The current brand identity was conceived by Sametz Blackstone Associates in 2013. The primary typefaces are Emtype’s Ciutadella and Linotype Walbaum. The former is mainly used in all caps. The latter often is featured with its italics. The logo is in lowercase letters from Benton Sans by Font Bureau.

The Conference Company (TCC) specialises in the design, organisation and execution of large-scale conferences throughout New Zealand and Australia. They also apply this expertise to award ceremonies under the name The Awards Company. It is a strategically interesting delineation yet a straightforward naming practice.

Expressing what either company does was clearly not an issue, however, in a fast moving industry, where innovation is essential, the graphic identities of The Conference Company and The Awards Company had grown tired. With this in mind, TCC founder Jan Tonkin commissioned Studio South to help clarify company values, understand future ambitions and explore how to position them as innovative thinkers and leaders in their field.

The resulting is a new identity with a logotype built from Atlas Typewriter and supported by Atlas Grotesk, as well as a pattern, a colour palette and a governing system that both defines and unites both companies under a distinct new visual language. This links stationery, print communications, posters, name badges and signage.

Read more about this project on BP&O.

Archiving is a natural process. Our brain constantly collects memories and groups them in sections that help us to understand and relate to what surrounds us. We autonomously collect information from dialogues, visual input, actions. For each memory we relate a series of key words and facts.

The website collects all texts that the writer produced and it divides it in keywords and quotes. The users can interact with one or the other side of the archive. The transversal dialogue is aiming to generate new ways to discover the content and information.

Sebastian Groes is a scholar of modern and contemporary literature and culture, writer and musician.

The Designed this way podcast is an initiative to start candid conversations with designers and other creative folks, to bring out the stories about the realities of living a creative life.
Not just the stories of courage, hard work and success but also the stories of mistakes, rejections and doubts. These wide-ranging conversations also reveal the diversity of thoughts, practices and opinions that exist in the creative world. It’s made for young creatives and such who are young at heart. It's designed this way.

The typography uses Massimo Grafia, a release by Ubertype, that comes with at least five — and for some characters with as many as fourteen — alternate letter shapes, from hyper-extended to script-like.

From Dunod publishers (translated from French):

We've all been amazed one day by the amazing diversity of the plant world. But every plant has a story. Katia Astafieff, a traveler passionated by plants, tells us ten incredible adventures of plants from elsewhere, such as tobacco, kiwi, rhubarb and the strange rafflesia. Ten plants, but also ten explorers on expeditions to the ends of the World risking their lives, researchers of green gold, Indiana Jones of botany. Let yourself be guided in the footsteps of the British spy Robert Fortune, disguised as a mandarin to steal the secret of tea from the Chinese, or the eccentric Joseph Rock who brought to the West some seeds of a delicate peony hitherto unknown.

Atelier AAAAA designed the cover and interior of this book. Main titles are set with an outlined Stratos. Body text is set in Calenda Plus while paratext and chapter openings use Hellenic Typewriter.

Cover design for Jan Gehl’s essay A Vida Entre Edifícios (translated by Tiago Mesquita Carvalho from the original “Life between buildings”). Designed by Ana Teresa Ascensão and published by Tigre de Papel and Cicloficina dos Anjos.

The title and author's name are set in Azo Sans (R-Typography). The title is is repeated in big, red, cropped and rotated capitals in the background. Scattered over the background are blue images and a pattern of broken words that are related to the content of the essays, set in what looks like Courier.

Extratone’s frontpage is designed to be modular enough so as to remain unpredictable, and it changes often. Here, for May 2018, it uses Playfair Display for its secondary byline, Cormorant for its primary byline and its excerpt, Playfair Display SC for titles, and Quattrocentro Sans for a large numeral.

Extratone is an independent online magazine created and maintained by volunteer contributors, so we needed to minimize the overhead of our platform both financially and architecturally as much as possible while still allowing it room to be visually compelling and typographically adaptive. In the pursuit of frugality and ease-of-use, we managed to build The Extranet using exclusively open-source type properties into a platform that satisfactorily manifests the principle design philosophy which we agreed would best compliment our editorial mission.

Specifically, we wanted to avoid black text on white background in unilateral typefaces across a single page and agreed early on that a diverse palette of tried-and-true serifs would be fundamental to the design’s identity instead of a few more attention seeking or radical types. We also knew that the ideal readability as it is quantified in digital media was an unimportant metric for us, and we were willing to sacrifice it to achieve a busier, more vain reading experience that would require visitors to slow down and have a look at the design instead of forcing it stylistically to be nothing more than a tool of delivery. (So far, our exceptionally low bounce rate would suggest that our product works as designed.)

Because we chose to experiment and build the look ourselves from a position of relative inexperience with web design instead of seeking out a professional solution, The Extranet as it exists now represents more than two years of exhaustive trial and error that was a significant learning experience for myself, especially. It has been tinkered with, poured over, and broken exponentially more than if we'd chosen to turn its creation over to third-party hands. As a result, our team's become bizarrely sentimental and proud of it as a part of our organization's identity.

Body and meta text both use Christian Thalmann’s versatile Cormorant family, which also often function in larger roles (e.g. on the About page shown).

Frontpage titles, bylines, and all main navigation use Claus Eggers Sørensen’s open-source Playfair Display of varying weights.

Headings, section titles, and the header’s oversized central mast use two variations of Fabian De Smet’s Butler – Regular weight and Stencil, respectively.

Impallari Type’s Quattrocento Sans is used for the footer’s links to legal documentation and occasionally for pull-quotes, where appropriate.

Cormorant is occasionally called upon for larger text.

The use of Adobe's Source Code Pro for the Best of the Open Web list is an example of our occasional bespoke single-use cases.