Cherry Creek Framing is a Denver-based company that was created in 2004. The new owner hired me for a brand refresh. Inspired by the block printing they would sometimes frame, I created an identity that feels classic, with room for experimentation and playfulness. As it is a field that does not evolve significantly over time, I drew inspiration from classic European typography and traditional printing methods.

Electric Lady Studios was commissioned by Jimi Hendrix in 1968 and designed by audio engineer Eddie Kramer and architect John Storyk from 1969 to 1970. The studio’s building was formerly a nightclub before being converted into a studio for Hendrix and other musicians along the 1970s.

A modified version of Photo-Lettering's Williamson Template is used for the studio's logo, with notable differences such as wider characters, and oval counters.

Rolling Stones’ recording session bill with logo, Dec 14, 1979

Plaque with logo and building number prior to renovation

Business card

Demo reel to reel tape box with logo

The crop-and-repeat move is a technique that modernist typographers keep coming back to since the late 1960s. Perhaps the most striking execution – if you want to fill an entire page with type – is the crop-and-repeat that starts from both the top and bottom and ends with a complete title in the center. So far, our earliest example of this on Fonts In Use is Mencken by Carl Bode, designed by George Lenox in 1969. This exhibition catalog cover by Jacqueline Casey is the second. Once you open the wrapper to reveal the back cover, you see Casey took the technique even further, continuing the repeat in the lateral direction.

A profile of Casey from Display, where I just acquired this item for Letterform Archive’s collection:

Casey headed MIT’s Office of Design Services from 1955 to 1989 where she and her colleagues played a critical role in popularizing functional Modernism and the International Typographic Style in the USA. “My work combines two cultures: The American interest in visual metaphor on the one hand, and the Swiss fascination with planning, fastidiousness, and control over technical execution on the other.”

She designed the poster (see last image) for this exhibition of which she said: “Golub used strong, sweeping, horizontal brushstrokes. I wanted the type to respond to his technique and the colors to his sober subject matter.”

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

This curious sleeve doesn’t fit in with the rest of the mid-1950s cool jazz aesthetic. Duotone photography was commonly used in the genre, but that’s where the familiarity ends. The lime green color (later issues were blue); the large, brushy title, set dead center; and the bleak scene of arthritic trees along a nondescript canal – it’s all a bit mysterious. It gives off similar vibes to Marcus Keef’s spooky cover for Black Sabbath. The only sense I can make of the image choice is that Miles Davis’ quintet recorded this session in the fall (November 16, 1955).

Source: oa.letterformarchive.org Image: Letterform Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Haymaker Cartoon from Photo-Lettering’s One Line Manual of Styles, 1971

The typeface is Haymaker Cartoon, an extrabold sign painter’s or showcard writer’s “casual” that appears in Photo-Lettering’s 1965 catalog, but must have been available a decade earlier to be used here.

Source: www.popsike.com The Jazz Tome. License: All Rights Reserved.

While the back cover (set almost entirely in Vogue) doesn’t include attribution, Discogs credits the design to Gil Mellé, a musician and painter who created a handful of 1950s covers for Blue Note and Prestige featuring dynamic abstract art. While I love Mellé’s work, this minimalist oddball stands out, and that charms me.

Thanks to Gary Hornseth for bringing this gem to my attention via the lovely Jazz Tome website!

Strange to your Ears: The Fabulous World of Sound with Jim Fassett is an album originally released in the 1950s by Columbia Masterworks. Hosted by Jim Fassett, this album consists of a series of strange sounds presented in a peculiar manner, and has become a cult classic for its experimental nature.

The title typeface is Morris Fuller Benton's Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed contrasted with Century Expanded Italic. Other typefaces are also found in the dotted speech bubbles.

[More info on Discogs]

Source: lithub.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Martyr! is a novel by Iranian-American writer Kaveh Akbar that combines modern situations with traditional imagery. For the jacket, prolific cover designer Linda Huang did what she does so well: pick a striking and relevant typeface and let it do a lot of the work.

License: All Rights Reserved.

Left: Salem, as advertised in the Inland Printer, Vol. 28, No. 2 (November, 1901). Right: Daria Cohen’s reinterpretation, Zangezi (2018), with additional weights, italics, and condensed (2021).

Her choice was Zangezi Condensed, a fresh, fashion-forward take on Salem, in which Daria Cohen took a turn-of-the-century dazzler, narrowed it, and increased its stroke contrast, giving it even more spike and sparkle than it already had. The idiosyncratic type is the perfect companion to the contemporary use of antique illustration. Huang also deftly delivers the commercial necessities – a blurb and “a novel” – in an inconspicuous way.

Huang on the design:

Despite its heavy themes, I found Akbar’s novel to be insanely funny,” Huang told Literary Hub. “I cackled many times while reading the manuscript. More than anything, I wanted to evoke this unique tragi-comedic tone on the cover. One of the central, recurring images is this Iranian ‘Angel of Death’ warrior. I experimented with scale and ultimately found the warrior in miniature to be most striking, with ‘a novel’ set in a deadpan speech bubble. I was also lucky to stumble upon the perfect decorative typeface to activate all that negative space. To me, humor is one of the most alluring qualities in a book (and really, in life) so it was an absolute treat to work on Akbar’s novel.

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

The version of the cover seen in bookstores today.

Martyr! quickly became a New York Times best seller – soon enough for the cover to get an extra speech balloon celebrating that fact. You can also see an improvement on the letterspacing in “Akbar”.

A Digression and Suggestion

Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved.

Once you get to the end of a book, “a note on the type” is a great way to learn about the creation of the letterforms you’ve been staring at for hours.

Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved.

Back jacket flaps usually include an author bio and designer credit. This is good. Could they include a bit more?

The interior of this book, designed by Betty Lew, includes “A Note on the Type”, a lovely hundred-year-old publishing tradition which not only credits the text face (in this case, Dante), but tells a bit of its story. Why not have a typeface credit on the jacket flap, too? Sure, you’re reading a lot more Dante than Zangezi when you read this book, but it’s the cover that often sells the book. Also, the type used on book covers is more likely to be something newer that the interior text, and thus more likely to be made by living designers. Isn’t it time we give them a nod?

Letterpress printed poster, 64×97.6cm, on mirror coat paper

Letterpress printed poster for Typographic Printing Program 2024. Printed from hand carved linoleum (squares and larger type) and freshly cast Ludlow hot metal slugs (tiny 6pt type).

All lines on this poster are dead-straight. The morphing of the straight lines happens by the strategic placement of the positive and negative letterforms. It is crucial to have one letterform in mostly every corner of the grid. So I needed a total 34 words with between 9 and 13 letters each. That’s one example why it is impossible to design a good poster with content that is not fitting the visual concept—and vice versa. They go hand in hand.

Format: 64×97.6cm
Paper: Heavymetal, 170g/m²
Edition: 300 letterpress printed posters

Process of cutting the linoleum for printing. Though all the lines of the checkerboard are straight, they already appear bent.

Printing process of the hand-cut linoleum on a letterpress proof press

The first music cover by German designer Peter Krüll features a brilliant use of Glaser Stencil repeating the words “BILL EVANS TRIO” and removing some of the typeface’s stenciled pieces until the word “PIANO” subliminally appears. (At least that’s my impression.)

Krüll was teaching typography at the University of Dortmund at the time. From 1996 to 2023 he is a professor at the University of Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm. After this cover for West Wind Records Krüll went on to design many albums for the German label ACT, but none quite as typographically playful.

[More info on Discogs]

Source: annyas.com License: All Rights Reserved.

“Rankin/Bass present” is lettering based on Weiß-Initialen Serie II, or Weiss Initials Series II, with the alternate forms for A and E, rendered bolder, with rough contours and a bouncing baseline.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a Christmas TV special that first aired on December 6, 1964. It was produced by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. – then doing business as Videocraft International, Ltd., and later as Rankin/Bass Productions – in collaboration with the Japanese MOM Productions. From Simon Byrne’s article for Watch the Titles:

Based on the Johnny Marks song of the same name, it tells the story of the famous misfit reindeer with the glowing red nose who – together with his friends Hermey the elf and the bearded prospector, Yukon Cornelius – have a series of adventures, including run ins with an abominable snowman, a winged lion and an island of unwanted toys.

The stop-motion classic has been telecast every year since 1964, making it the longest continuously running Christmas TV special in the United States. It was directed by Larry Roemer, with assistance from Kizo Nagashima. The animation was supervised by Tadahito Mochinaga.

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

The story’s narrator is Sam the Snowman, voiced by Burl Ives.

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

Instead of MCMLXIV (1964), the roman numerals read MCLXIV, i.e. 1164. An error, or an obscure nod to the Romanesque period?

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

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

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

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

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

The opening titles feature hand-drawn capitals with an unconventional distribution of thicks and thins, peppered with perky curls, with roughed-up contours as found in ruling pen calligraphy, and playfully arranged on a bouncing baseline. They are not taken from a typeface, and yet are closely patterned after prefabricated letterforms.

Source: www.flickr.com Scan: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Showing of Lawless Type in Lettera 2. Teufen: Niggli, 1961.

The source is Lawless Type, an alphabet reproduced in the second volume of Lettera. Started by Armin Haab and Alex Stocker in 1954, this book series was published in four volumes by Niggli in Teufen, Switzerland. The books were distributed in over 70 countries, and used by designers both as inspiration and as a direct source of display letterforms. Lettera 2 was edited by Haab together with Walter Haettenschweiler and came out in 1961. In the appendix, Lawless Type is described as follows:

With latinizing tendencies and italic elements, the skilled typographer can produce a sans serif with a naive effect all of its own. The individual faces [this should read ‘glyphs’ when compared to the original German text], however, must be readapted to each sequence of letters.

A note on YouTube by the Miser Brothers Press, who distributes merchandise related to the TV special, says that “[t]he lettering that is featured on the packages in the original end credits [not shown here, but stylistically in tune with that seen in the opening credits] was done by Tony Peters and Arthur Rankin, Jr.” Peters was the storyboard artist and Rankin was the producer. Rankin, who had worked as a TV art director, also drew the characters, so he probably directed Peters on the lettering.

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

Lawless Type was designed by Walter Haettenschweiler. While the first edition of Lettera 2 exclusively credits the prolific designer from Zug, the fifth revised edition from 1976 additionally mentions co-editor Armin Haab. According to Martino Stierli,

it was inspired by the American artist and graphic designer Ben Shahn (1898–1969), who professed a socially critical realism but also experimented early on with typography and graphic design. Haettenschweiler’s homage to Shahn […] embodies elegance and festivity in its strict linearity, but by means of its title also expresses a certain rebellion against too much faith in rules.

In: Haettenschweiler. Schriften für die Welt, Logos für Zug. Zug: DNS-Transport GmbH, 2006 [my translation from the German]

Below is a piece of Shahn’s lettering that exemplarily illustrates this style of his, made for Haggadah for Passover from 1966. It includes the A with the asymmetrical top bar and the curling G. See also the painted jacket maquette on Letterform Archive’s website. This particular work can’t be the one that Haettenschweiler referenced, as it was published several years after Lettera 2, but Shahn employed this style already in earlier works.

Composite image: Florian Hardwig. License: All Rights Reserved.

Haggadah for Passover. Copied and illustrated by Ben Shahn, with a translation, introduction, and notes by Cecil Roth. Boston: Little, Brown & Company and Paris: Trianon Press, 1966.
Left and center: cover and spine, title page. Images: Invaluable.

Right: vellum box stamped with gilt lettering. Image: Henry Sotheran Ltd.

Source: hdl.handle.net Gerard Unger. License: All Rights Reserved.

A sampler of letterform variants found in Romanesque lettering, compiled by Gerard Unger and reproduced from his doctoral thesis, Alverata: hedendaagse Europese letters met wortels in de middeleeuwen. Universiteit Leiden, 2013.

Shahn didn’t invent the peculiar construction for A and G himself either. His lettering in turn takes cues from medieval inscriptions from around the 11th and 12th century. In his doctoral thesis from 2013, the late Gerard Unger examined the history and design of such Romanesque capitals. According to his research, capitals from this period – which precedes the Gothic style – are characterized by the blending of three types of letters from different times and cultures – namely derivations of Roman capitals, of uncials, and insular or Celtic letter forms, homogenized in terms of weight and contrast – as well as by exuberant variation and inventiveness. Among the endless variations collected by Unger is “the A with a flat top or with a transverse bar on top”. He also mentions the “coiled G” as a form frequently found in this period [all quotes: my translation from the Dutch].

Unger touches upon revivals and echoes of Romanesque capitals in the 20th century. One example is Shahn’s lettering. Unger offers a possible explanation for the presence of Romanesque-inspired forms in the artist’s work: immediately after completing his training in 1922, Shahn traveled through Spain and Italy, among other places. He probably saw Romanesque inscriptions or manuscripts along the way and made notes of them, later incorporating them into his graphics.

Source: www.flickr.com Scan: James Puckett (edited). License: CC BY.

Detail from a specimen for Weiss Initials Series II, showing its alternate forms for A and E as well as the curling G

A second example is Weiß-Initialen II, a set of initials by Emil Rudolf Weiß. To Unger, it is “as clear as day that these were designed along the lines of the Romanesque capitals”. First cast by Bauer in 1931, Series II was later extended as Weiß-Lapidar, with added numerals and punctuation as well as a second bolder weight. At least in a broadcast from around 1989, the end credits of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer aren’t rendered in Lawless Type. They are set – you guessed it – in Weiß-Initialen II.

Source: vimeo.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: vimeo.com License: All Rights Reserved.

For further reading on Romanesque letters, see Gerard Unger’s doctoral thesis (in Dutch) and the design notes for Alverata, his interpretation of “contemporary European letters with roots in the Middle Ages”.

Lawless Type was adopted for phototypesetting, under various names, but to my knowledge, there is no direct digitization. There are two digital fonts based on the title lettering for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: Island of Misfit Toys, a freebie with alternates made by Steve Ferrera in 2006, and Snow Job JNL, drawn by Jeff Levine in 2017. The former was used for a series of postage stamps issued by the USPS in 2014 [see comment]. Bensgothic is a font based on Ben Shahn’s lettering, started by Harold Lohner in 1998. For information about digital interpretations of Weiß-Initialen, see our typeface page.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

From top to bottom: Lawless Type (Walter Haettenschweiler, 1961), Island of Misfit Toys (Steve Ferrara, 2006, using those glyphs that come closest to Lawless Type), Snow Job JNL (Jeff Levine, 2017), and Bensgothic (Harold Lohner, 1998)

My Favorite Things is the seventh studio album by jazz musician John Coltrane, released in March 1961. It was the first album to feature Coltrane playing soprano saxophone, which is prominently displayed on the cover photograph.

The sleeve was designed by Loring Eutemey, now midway through his tenure at Atlantic Records. He selected a bold, narrow Didone – Olympic – to fit four lines of large type comfortably in the empty space of the photo. The colors are as bold as the type. Without an actual record sleeve in front of me, it’s difficult to determine the vibrancy and hue of the blue background and red type on the original design. As you can see here, the colors vary widely in the online reproductions of of the various album issues.

It was many years before the vibrating colors of psychedelia would be in vogue, but I wonder if he selected these tones of red and blue for that purpose. (Loring studied at Cooper Union around the same time as color vibrator Victor Moscoso.)

Or maybe I’m readying too much into it. Either way, it’s a great effect and a great cover.

Stereo version.

1973 reissue.

ANIMARIO is an international festival of contemporary animation organized and hosted by Matadero Madrid, Centre for Contemporary Creation. This year’s edition is focused on Chinese animation. The graphic identity including the animated posters was designed by Mario Cano with BallPill by Benoît Bodhuin and STHeiti for the Chinese text (just like for the previous edition). ABC Whyte is the text typeface used alongside BallPill in the program booklet.

The other fonts – Cineteca’s custom Matadero Stencil and Madrid’s Gill Sans, are not part of Cano’s design.

Shattered Records was a music store in Cleveland, Ohio, that specialized in punk and metal records. According to Curse of Denial’s reminiscence:

Shattered was instrumental in bringing overseas underground death and black metal records to Cleveland as well as all of the staple bands on Roadrunner and Earache. […] Plus he had all of the hardcore you can think of and tons of rare rock records. It was a kick ass little shop.

The LA Times said they “specialized in obscure punk and metal treasures ranging from limited-pressing singles by such early punk bands as the Germs to African Metallica releases and Japanese Guns ’N Roses promotional items.”

The neon sign for the store boldly attempted to render the extremely complex forms of the Shatter typeface in the notoriously crude format of neon tubing. With the typeface name matching the name of the business, it’s also an example of an LTypI.

Between 2018 and 2020, Nouvelle étiquette, a French graphic design studio, and the PampaType foundry co-designed a set of bespoke typefaces for the visual identity and signage system of the Saint-Étienne of Metz Cathedral, one of the most significant Gothic cathedrals in Europe.

The celebration of the 800th anniversary of this cathedral, which boasts the largest area of stained glass windows among European cathedrals (including Marc Chagall’s famous vitraux), led to a public tender in France that was awarded to Nouvelle étiquette, which was submitted along with PampaType, invited to co-design the typefaces.

The custom typefaces designed for the information and signage systems are as follows.

Cathédrale Lumière is an uppercase typeface conceived for use on the spiritual tour phrases inside the building, which are projected with light on the cathedral walls by gobo projectors specially installed on site. In terms of style, the Lumière type is an attempt to integrate the incredible richness of medieval scriptural traditions in a (shall we say) generous way.

Cathédrale Métal, the accompanying text type, was designed to set the information texts engraved on the steel panels installed throughout the building. This set includes three weights (Régulier, Gras, Noire) in roman & cursive styles. Their anatomy discreetly evokes the density and texture of text in Gothic script, i.e., somewhat compact, slightly angular in shape and with short ascenders & descenders that make it possible to reduce the interlinear space.

Finally, the medieval theatrical characters, monsters and chimeras that appear in the sculpted decoration throughout the building inspired a third style: Cathédrale Enluminée, a set of carefully hand-drawn illuminated letters to be used as initials in publications and on special occasions.

Art direction: Nouvelle étiquette (Metz, FR). Design & scenography: Generique design (Montreal) and Nouvelle étiquette. Light design: Quartiers Lumières (Toulouse, FR) and Nouvelle étiquette. Steel engraving & gilding: Malinvaud (Limoges, FR). Typeface design by Francis Ramel, Julie Luzoir (Strasbourg, FR) and Alejandro Lo Celso (Córdoba, AR).

Read the full case study on the Pampa Type website.

The cover for the first New English Library paperback edition of Nick Sharman’s horror novel, The Cats, features a cat-themed LTypI use of Fat Cat. The heart-shaped counterform of the ‘A’ was either an after-market adaptation from another glyph in the typeface like the ‘E’, or it was an alternate glyph from a source I haven’t seen before. The accompanying slab-serif is Rockwell.

The design is credited to Stephen Knowlden, with the illustration credited to David McAllister.

Nick Sharman should not be confused with me, Nick Sherman :)

Kids, don’t try this at home: pairing two very similar typefaces can be tricky, all the more so when they belong to a peculiar genre. I wouldn’t bother to try and make two multiline faces work together on the same page, but the one and only Nolan Pelletier can pull it off.

For the cover of Divine Intervention, he used Neo Prisma for the band name, and Prisma for the title. The former is an early-1970s face designed by Nicola Russo and issued by Mecanorma. The latter is Rudolf Koch’s display companion to his Kabel, first cast by Klingspor in 1930. Drawn with multiple parallel lines, Prisma was a pretty novel concept at the time. While the original Prisma has strokes with four lines in the smaller sizes (20, 24, 28 pt) and fives lines in larger ones (36, 48, 60 pt), this version has three. Is this a homemade “Prisma Text”? Or did Nolan use Prismaset Three from Lineto’s massive revival and expansion, and beef up its strokes? Anyway, together with his signature style illustration featuring concentric circles and stars, everything falls into place.

Client Liaison is an Australian indie pop/electronica duo. Divine Intervention is their second studio album, released in October 2021.

[More info on Discogs]

“Waiting for the bus on a sunny winter day in Scarborough, January 1974” – @TorontoArchives

Only in the 1970s: Turtle (Letraset, 1971) in use for a futuristic bus shelter in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, Ontario. Neil Nawaz comments: “That font is so groovy, I don’t care it’s unreadable.” Comparing the letterforms to this glyph set, it looks like the designers actually redefined the counters a bit, making the letters slightly less ambiguous. This is particularly visible in C and G. Turtle’s rounded stroke endings echo the stadium shapes found in the windows, the entry, and the shelter’s footprint. I wonder whether this was a one-off design, or whether there was a whole series of these stops.

An undated business card for Jane Lander, who was a representative for Push Pin Studios between 1960 and 1967.

Designed in the neo-Victorian style that was popularized by Push Pin and others in the 1960s, the chosen typefaces all date from the 19th century.

“Jane Lander” is in an Ornamented face with concave stems and pointed terminals in the shape of concave diamonds. This style appears in Boston’s catalog from 1860. There are considerable differences across the sizes, and also between the cuts sold by various foundries. The wide R matches the Two-Line Great Primer Ornamented No. 6 as shown in Farmer’s 1867 specimen. This cut is also listed as 36 Point Ornamented No. 16 in a Morgan Press foundry type specimen, which might have been the source for Push Pin Studios. It’s paired with a light Ionic or Clarendon that’s also used for the smaller text in green.

“The Push Pin” likely is lettering – the P in “Push” appears to be inspired by Crayonette. The typefaces used for the names in cartouches and boxes are the left-leaning Pisa (1897), the dramatic Relievo No. 2 (1879), Rimmed Condensed (1866), and Ronaldson Condensed (before 1889).

From Within is the only album release by Sapphire Thinkers, and “a very appealing example of ’60s sunshine pop, similar in sound to other LA co-ed groups like the Mamas and Papas and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, but with a more underground sensibility.” — Tiny Idols

It was released on Hobbit Records, a short-lived sublabel of GRT Records in Los Angeles. Art direction and photography by Michael O’Bryant, with cover art by Kevin Leveque. The typeface is Siegfried, an Art Nouveau oddity originally issued by the Woellmer foundry in Berlin in 1902. While the band name on the front cover shows hand-drawn letterforms, the back cover has Siegfried in unmodified form. This makes it easy to see how the lettering artist aimed for a tighter fit, note especially the modifications made to the E’s.

The Hobbit Records logo features another typeface with roots in German Jugendstil: It’s Edda, first cast by Schelter & Giesecke in Leipzig in 1900. It here is used with a modified (or alternate) H – in the original Edda, this letter has the form of an enlarged minuscule, just like in Siegfried.

[More info on Discogs]

Recreation of the Hobbit Records logo using an image found on another record and a digital version of Edda. Note that this version doesn’t match the original in all details.

Thirst:

Pizzeria Bebu is a fresh take on classic thin-crust pizza. Bud Rodecker created an identity system that is a new take on Italian iconography with fresh ingredients. The base of the logo is the red wedge, topped with an “Italian” reverse stress typeface, and custom lettering for “Pizzeria.” While the parts aren't authentic Italian ingredients, when combined they represent the Bebu way.

The type selection for “Bebu” is Arbor by Vllg a reverse stress typeface. Reverse stress typefaces are also sometimes categorized as Italian, although their origin in Italy is questionable. Most likely, they were labeled Italian as a marketing gimmick to sell fonts.

“‘Pizzeria’ is set in a custom typeface that uses American ingredients with an Italian flair. The discovery of a new stressed sans serif letterform came by overlapping two Zs of Trade Gothic Extended, a classic American Typeface. From there we extended it to an uppercase alphabet for Pizzeria Bebu's secondary typography.” — Thirst

Byte Bars is a brand of delish snacks from Denver, Colorado. The identity conceived by Cast Iron Design is based on mouth and tongue illustrations, a vibrant color palette, and the Cheee typeface by James Edmondson. Cast Iron Design writes:

Competing in a saturated snack bar market, we developed a strategy for Byte Bars that subverts stereotypical “crunchy granola” aesthetics. Cheee by Oh no Type Co. was used for all of the brand’s wordmarks and featured prominently on the packaging—lending the brand a youthful irreverence. Hobeaux—also created by James T. Edmondson—was used as a display face to support the brands’ illustrative logos. Anchor by Process Type fits right in with its round letterforms. The condensed nature of Anchor also helped with the challenges of designing a small package.

Representing a cross-generational, free-spirited vibe, the shapes of the type and icons are influenced by the groovy 1960s and the vivid color palette is drawn from the electric poppiness of the 80s and early 90s.

See additional images in their case study.

Editor’s note: This post was first published in September 2018, showing preliminary designs. It was greatly revised with additional info and images of the implemented brand in January 2020.