Hiday is a magazine about branding and digitization by Bloom Identity, based in Bern, Switzerland. I love the way they use Dunbar Tall, Low and Text all together in an editorial context. They make use of the full range of weights available in Dunbar, using a range of sizes from large pull-quotes and headline to smaller credits and site navigation. Note that, while all text is German, the hashtags and menu are in English.

OPENDOEK is the Flemish organisation for the support of theater in all of its different flavours. As a part of their general rebranding, undercast redesigned its magazine called OP&DOEK.

A diverse typographical palette was created to allow for flexibility and surprise in the layouts. The main typeface used for headings and other display-purposes is Balboa by Jim Parkinson, making good use of its great variety of weights. As a contrast, Grad (Mark Simonson) was chosen for subheadings and shorter texts such as intros. For the longer running texts, Adelle Sans was selected for its warm tone of voice and legibility.

Esquire Classic is the full archive of Esquire: every article, every issue. We worked with Esquire’s design director David Curcurito to nail down font pairings that were quintessential without being overbearing when positioned next to the content.

The typefaces are Graphik by Commercial Type and Granger, a house typeface developed by Carvalho Bernau.

Hed and dek in Chiswick. Publico is used for deks in the front-of-book news sections, but in the Well, they go elegant. 

This relaunch issue marks Women’s Wear Daily’s transition from trade newspaper to weekly magazine. The 105-year-old publication — often referred to as the Bible of Fashion — had a clean, modern aesthetic before the redesign, but lacked the tools to tell a wider range of stories in a variety of voices. The new type palette, featuring Forma by David Jonathan Ross (commissioned by Roger Black last year for his redesign of the Edipresse Tatlers), and Chiswick, Publico and Dala Moa from Commercial Type, brings a new level of nuance and style to news, gossip, entertainment and fashion content alike.

Commercial Type was commissioned to help develop a new logo for the Eye section, and Dala Moa quickly spread throughout the section once the logo was in place. 

Feature package opener set in Chiswick and Dala Moa.

Forma

Front-of-book news section

Headline in Forma. Dek in Publico. Section flag in Chiswick next to Jim Parkinson's logo for M magazine.

Chiswick

Phases is an online magazine focusing on contemporary photography, publishing weekly a selection of 3 portfolios from talented emerging photographers.

Monthly published magazine LA Downtowner focuses on culture, food, drinks, fashion, and the people in Downtown Los Angeles. On the corresponding web appearance Agenda is used in different variations.

Copyright: Кантри. Стиль и образ жизни
Art-direction: Anastasia Grigoryeva

The Moscow based magazine Кантри. Стиль и образ жизни (Country. Style & Lifestyle) brings together Helios (Alexey Kustov, Sergey Shanovich/TypeMarket), Georgia (Matthew Carter/Microsoft) and ALS Syysscript (Julia Sysmäläinen/Art. Lebedev Studio).

While combining Microsoft’s ubiquitous “system transitional” with a Cyrillic Helvetica interpretation in classical role allocation is a safe but not very daring solution (particularly for a lifestyle magazine), including ALS Syysscript adds spice and leads to quite a unique type trio.

ALS Syysscript is used multifunctionally – either in large heads as an image-maker, together with Helios or Georgia, or in small running titles and caption texts.

Released two years ago, ALS Syysscript has become Art. Lebedev Studio’s most successful typeface. These aspects might have contributed to this:
‧ a casual expression of strong personality,
‧ wide language support unusual for a script font (WE, CE, extended Cyrillic),
‧ the versatility of Syysscript/Syysscript Eco, the latter a simplified version with shortened extenders designated for texts in small sizes.

Layout of an opening-spread

Copyright: Кантри. Стиль и образ жизни
Art-direction: Anastasia Grigoryeva

Copyright: Кантри. Стиль и образ жизни
Art-direction: Anastasia Grigoryeva

Running titles

Copyright: Кантри. Стиль и образ жизни
Art-direction: Anastasia Grigoryeva

Captions, info texts

Copyright: Кантри. Стиль и образ жизни
Art-direction: Anastasia Grigoryeva

Copyright: Кантри. Стиль и образ жизни
Art-direction: Anastasia Grigoryeva

The month before the 2014 World Cup held in Brazil, French magazine étapes: published a special issue devoted to Latin American graphic and type design.

Abril Text and Abril Display, accompanied by a sans serif, were used to set the texts and headlines throughout this special issue, creating a warm texture on the coated paper. The display weights also give a touch of elegance to this one-off publication.

Metro City was a Polish magazine published in Warsaw from 2010. It used Bree throughout, in titles and body text, combining it with an occassional display typeface. Metro City dealt with city culture, interviewed various people in the scene and provided a guide to cultural events in the city.

Contrary to the fast-paced news industry The Slow Journalism Company — publisher of the Delayed Gratification magazine — stands for a decelerated but comprehensive and final reporting.

London based graphic and web design agency C2 Clear Creative designed an easy to understand website for the company using Miller Display for headings, ITC Franklin for sub-headings and short text passages and Georgia for continuous text.

Liguria is a small region in the northwest of Italy. It lends its name not only to the fourth issue of the Okolo magazine, but also to the font designed by Jan Novák for the same issue. The Okolo group focuses on creating origi­nal design projects, spanning a wide range of design categories. Okolo magazine was the first occasion on which Jan Novák’s typefaces have been publicly used.

Houstonia magazing "50 Best Mexican Restaurants" cover.

Samples from the July 2014 issue of Houstonia magazine — a city magazine out of Houston, Texas. The cover story is “Mexican Gold” about the 50 Best Mexican Restaurants in Houston. I chose the relatively new typeface Icebox, by Cyrus Highsmith and Font Bureau, to bring a little fun into the package. The “magnetic letter” style typeface reminded me of the papel picado banners often used as decoration in the Mexican restaurants of the area. To mimick this, I used the typeface for display, mainly in a variety of colors and attached to a “string” rule, like banners. I also used Icebox in it’s typical upper/lowercase style for smaller detail listings such as the “Fast Facts” sidebars — which you can see a detail of below. For the cover, the word “Mexican” was a customized version of the typeface that was integrated with a “50” in Turnip and “Plus” and “to die for” in Quiosco. 

I believe this usage of Icebox was so successful that we’re looking to expand the use of it in the magazine moving forward. Other typefaces used in the design of Houstonia are Font Bureau classics such as Turnip, Quiosco and Salvo Sans — evident in the images. 

Opening spread for the cover feature.

Secondary feature spread.

Third feature spread.

Fourth feature spread.

Detail of the Icebox usage in the "Fast Facts" sidebar.

ZEITmagazin Online is the newly launched digital version of the supplement to Die Zeit, the most widely read German weekly newspaper. It was designed by Edenspiekermann (Team: Erik Spiekermann, Christian Hanke, Moritz Guth, Harry Keller, Christoph Rauscher, Julian Panzer, Peter Rudolph, Sara Hesse and Michael Börner; art direction Zeit Online: Tibor Bogun, art direction ZEITmagazin: Katja Kollmann). Unsurprisingly, the resulting reading experience is remarkable. In this post, I share a few observations and quibbles.

The fonts in use are Tablet Gothic (José Scaglione & Veronika Burian, 2012) and FF Franziska (Jakob Runge, 2014). See more of the freshly released Franziska in the Blog post.

Homepage (top), detail. The challenge of putting type on images has been tackled by offering a choice between white type on a dark gradient overlay and black type on a bright gradient overlay. That’s a more sophisticated approach than plain boxes or — especially for smaller type — text shadow. Still, it doesn’t work for all images. The image shown above was soon replaced with the one shown in the image at the very top of this post.

Mode (Fashion) & Design. I’m not a fan of letterspacing lowercase letters, especially when they are bold. Increasing the tracking messes with the rhythm of inner-letter and inter-letter whitespace as defined by the typeface designer. In a Bold, counters are small; spacing should be accordingly tight. Here, the rationale might have been that otherwise the dense type would completely obscure a certain portion of the image. At least the smaller center-aligned type in the top right box shouldn’t have been letterspaced, though.

The high-contrast figures for the ranking of the most popular posts and articles are from Tiemann-Antiqua. This typeface is the headline typeface in the print edition of Die Zeit and has also been heavily used in the printed ZEITmagazin. This is the only appearance of Tiemann online.

At least on iPad proportions, the floating portrait box has extremely short lines. With long German compound words and no hyphenation, this can lead to ugly results. Interestingly, Tablet Gothic has been paired with Franziska’s italics here. This might have been an unintended and temporary thing, though: I see (faux-)obliqued Tablet Gothic now.

Tablet Gothic has italics, but they haven’t been included as webfonts here. Italicized words consequently are created automatically by the browser and rendered as faux-italics. A typographic taboo? In principle: yes. In practice: only if you can tell without looking into the source code. Tablet Gothic’s italics are obliques anyway — they don’t have cursive forms. Is having true (i.e. optically corrected) obliques worth serving another font file (or two)? The best solution would probably be not to use any italics for Tablet Gothic at all, and instead use Franziska Italic, just like for the portrait boxes shown above. It’s an unusual yet charming solution and doesn’t affect the page load time.

Header for a longform article (with video).

Longform text in Franziska with floating blockquote in Tablet Gothic

Inconsistent quotation marks: straight (“dumb”) quotes and guillemets are used next to each other. Read more on the difficulty of getting quotation marks right on the Web in this related Blog post.

GT Sectra was originally designed for the long-form journalism magazine Reportagen, a publication containing interesting stories from all around the world. The Zurich-based design studio Moiré accompanied the whole production process, designing not just the magazine but also the typeface. Each edition is printed in black plus one spot color. This is a selection of their beautiful design for the publication.

Paper is an award-winning magazine with a dynamic newspaper-like format, which focuses on style, culture and fashion. It is highly recognized for its clarity in design as well as its high-quality photographic and typographic direction. Paper is mainly addressed to the culturally and visually passionate for quality, whilst it produces strong editorial coverage, offering a range of topics including fashion, urbanism, design and arts. Paper is published as a supplement to the Greek financial newspaper Imerisia. Through its attentive design, it brings together the classic values in a modern world. Regal Pro, a typeface which  expresses the contemporary world of elegance, is used as a primary typeface for the magazine in various of its different forms such as Regal Text, Regal Display and Regal Finesse. Engravers Gothic is also being used for the small titles on the top of every page and the introduction of each category, as well as Helvetica for some body text.

Published by American Express, Travel + Leisure is one of the world’s top travel magazines, recognized for its stylish photography and smart writing. Pentagram of New York has redesigned Travel + Leisure with a dynamic new format that matches the magazine’s chic, sophisticated tone. It introduces a clean, modern design that clearly delineates sections and opens up page layouts. The designers worked with the editors to restructure and reconceive the magazine’s departments using Encore Sans as the main typeface supported by Superior Title. They are used for both the US and Southeast Asia issues. Encore Sans is currently utilized on the website and the iPad edition of the magazine as well.

“The new custom logotype is based on Sweet Sans.”—Pentagram

Works That Work is an “international magazine for the curious mind, intending to surprise its readers with a rich mix of diverse subjects connected by the theme of unexpected creativity that improved our lives.” It was launched in February 2013 by Peter Biľak, publisher and typeface designer in The Hague, NL. In an article about the project on his company’s website Typotheque, Bilak says “and as strange as it may seem, one of the first things that I started working on was its typeface.” Well, this doesn't sound surprising at all, at least not if you know Biľak just a little bit. He continues:

It was clear from the start that Works That Work would be an […] ambitious project: not only would it stretch across multiple platforms (online, eBook, PDF and print), but its content would also be available in various configurations. The typeface would be the sole constant characteristic, identifying the magazine regardless of whether a reader purchased a single article online or a complete issue in print. I wanted the typeface to be the voice of WTW — confident enough not to need to show off, with the comfortable, relaxed manner of an engaged storyteller, ready to handle long stories, but also small captions or titles. I named it Lava.

Shortly before the magazine was announced, I approached Susana Carvalho and Kai Bernau and asked them to design it. The design brief I gave them was unusual in that its sole stipulation was Lava; everything else was left up to them. […] After over a year of testing, we now feel confident enough to release Lava publicly as a no-nonsense workhorse typeface that can handle large quantities of text with ease.

Read on in the detailed article about the design of Lava and Works That Work on Typotheque.

Lava webfonts perform well on high- and low-resolution screens.

Works That Work is available in various digital format, also using Lava onscreen.

Readymag is a platform to easily and quickly publish a digital magazine. In their newsletter they make good use of some of the typefaces that are available for their magazines, for instance Mark van Bronkhost’s Sweet Sans throughout for labels and body copy, combined with Freight Big for headlines, and supported by Nobel for text and the bright, huge numerals in their latest issue. 

All the seven members of the Coline family appear in this special issue of the french cultural magazine Télérama, following an exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris. Coline is a family divided into three sub-families: 1. Coline Première, a sturdy and pure roman for continous text,  2. Coline Cursive, influenced by handwriting, 3. Coline Extrême, the eccentric cousin of the family.

Special issue: La Bohème, September 2012.

Art direction by Benoît Santiard.

Editorial uses of Thomas Thiemich’s Fakt – Semicondensed, Condensed, and Semicondensed Slab – in the German De:Bug magazine. Thomas says they’ve been using Fakt since issue 150. The alternate glyphs are on view in a couple spreads. H&FJ’s Sentinel makes an appearance as body text here also. Images are captured from the magazine’s pdf archive issues.