“Wingdings & Wingdings 2. Explained in HK Grotesk” is a type specimen that I have designed for Wingdings. This popular dingbat font family features three different fonts that contain a wide variety of symbols. The booklet uses the double page format to compare the first Wingdings version with the second one.

Although it was assured by their creators in the early 1990s that the placement of the symbols was random, the comparison between the two fonts sometimes presents several coincidences that gave rise to conspiracy theories invented by users. The specimen explains these coincidences and other curiosities with text set in HK Grotesk.

Made as a student project at Escola Massana, Barcelona.

“Shalom Berlin” is the theme of the 29th edition of the Jewish Culture Days, an annual festival presented by the Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin. The poster, the program leaflet as well as the website were designed by Hirn Faust Auge.

Optimo’s AG revival Theinhardt is paired with the intriguing Prophet Medium, a teaser style from an upcoming family by Dinamo. I’m not quite sure yet what to make of Prophet. It reminds me of one of the advanced TypeCooker recipes, like “Recta, as drawn by a Koch pupil”. Jan Novak’s deconstructions of plain sans-serif letterforms come to mind, too.

“ברלין שלום” is in Arial Hebrew.

Website code: Rupert Adlmaier, Hirn Faust Auge

The current exhibition at New Synagogue Berlin — Centrum Judaicum Foundation celebrates the 150th anniversary of the consecration of Berlin’s New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße. It is titled “Mittenmang & Tolerant” (Amidst & Tolerant).

The posters and flyers feature some playful patterned variations on the Magen David and, typographically, a peculiar mix of the distinguished Arnhem with the flawed and limited freebie Axis, complemented by Fira Sans.

What caught my eye, though, was the misguided attempt at adding a fancy ampersand. I first assumed, well, the designer might have stumbled upon this “alternate ampersand” in the Glyphs palette and inserted it without further thought — after all, this character can take on a lot of funny forms, including such that are composed of a cursive ‘E’ and ‘t’. However, Arnhem doesn’t have a ‘ct’ ligature. So the ligature must have been taken from another font, or built ad hoc, which makes this even weirder.

The takeaway is that the general audience is probably much more tolerant when it comes to the shape of characters (or diacritics like ogoneks or umlauts, for that matter) than we often like to believe. Context is king.

The logo of Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin – Centrum Judaicum uses Lucida Sans, both for the Latin and the Hebrew version.

While the logo on the left is a static image, the text on the right is rendered with webfonts: juedische-kulturtage.org
 

Jüdische Kulturtage (“Jewish Culture Days”) makes heavy use of FF Tisa Sans (2011) by Mitja Miklavčič, featuring several of its seven weights as well as Italics and small caps. The program is printed in four colors on newsprint and cleverly avoids halftone type by utilizing cyan and magenta as brand colors. FF Tisa Sans is used for the website, too. There, the typographic range has been reduced to a basic set of four styles.

Posters advertise the Jewish Culture Days in a Berlin subway station.

Cyan is reserved for the secondary language. The English text sometimes is arranged below the German, sometimes next to it.

Tim Green:

The star of David home plate concept was Richard Ljoenes' idea—a great icon for this title. Steve Gardner made the idea come alive with a photo shoot that was nearly rained out for the 3rd straigh time.

The typefaces here have the right tone, but I would have selected Casey and MVB Mascot which are far better script fonts than Ballpark and Fenway.