Last season, Plac Zabaw nad Wisłą, a vibrant riverside cultural and recreational space in Warsaw, Poland, unveiled a refreshed visual identity.

The concept grew from a simple block of colored paper – playful, inclusive, and DIY in spirit. Color pairings distinguish daytime from evening events, while a set of pictograms organizes information for clarity and intuitive navigation. The system now extends across wayfinding, social media, and the website.

Creative direction and design by Kasia Łubińska of kuna works, using Tor grotesk from Threedotstype. On the website, it’s supported by Apfel Grotezk by Luigi Gorlero. The storytelling and microcopy is by Maria Wanda Dutkiewicz. Sesme Studio did the on-site painted elements.

Protest Grotesk is the typeface used by Seasonal Fruit for HEISSER SOMMER (“Hot summer”), an installation in the public space by Neckarinsel Stuttgart.

Stuttgart is a city that is missing one crucial element: water. Although the Neckar river flows through the city, it remains largely inaccessible, and on hot summer days there are few places for people to cool off or take a refreshing dip. The initiative Neckarinsel e.V. aims to change this. For several years, they have been actively engaging in local politics, raising funds, and building support to make the Neckar more accessible. Their efforts have already borne fruit: a small island in the middle of the river is now open to the public during the summer. This art exhibition, presented in a temporarily empty public display space in Stuttgart, seeks to educate visitors about this issue and encourage them to get involved.

Protest Grotesk is the typeface used by Seasonal Fruit for Wir wollen baden! (“We want to go swimming!”), published by Neckarinsel Stuttgart in collaboration with Prima Publikationen. Additional display typefaces used in the book include Sometimes Times and Blocus.

From the publisher (translated):

This water guide is a handy companion for getting into cool waters on hot days. Even in the Stuttgart metropolitan area, temperatures are rising. At the same time, Stuttgart and the surrounding region aren’t exactly known for nearby lakes for swimming. That’s why we went searching for you—and we found them: from river swimming spots to hidden waterfalls and refreshing forest baths, here are the islands for cooling off.

On 14 tours through the region, we give you insights into the many ways to swim and cool down, sprinkled with information and facts about the waters, because water is much more than just fun in the pool: it’s our drinking water, wastewater, a habitat for flora and fauna, and even a means of transport. Easily accessible by public transport, the tours invite you to stroll, walk, hike, cycle, or paddle—alone or with friends and family.

And the best part: each tour comes with a postcard as a keepsake, to send, or to share, featuring scenes from your swimming adventure.

Shortlisted for the Most Beautiful German Books 2025.

Postcard with all-caps Blocus on the back

Spread featuring all-caps Sometimes Times, rotated and with overlapping glyphs

For more than two years, 29 passionate photographers from the Society for Nature Photography went on the road for the illustrated book Wilde Elbe. They followed the river from its source – located at 1386 meters in the Czech part of the Giant Mountains – through the rugged Elbe Sandstone Mountains and wide glacial valleys to its mouth in the Wadden Sea. The resulting publication by Knesebeck is a unique portrait of the river, its landscapes and biotopes.

The 200-page photo book was designed by the Munich design office of Schmid/Widmaier, which has been working for brands, companies, museums and publishers since 2001. The team was enthusiastic from the start: “The book shows the last wild and remote places around the Elbe. The pictures sometimes make you think that you are somewhere in another, distant country.”

Of course, the impressive nature photos are first and foremost the focus of this book. It was, therefore, all the more important that the headlines and captions came into a harmonious balance with them. They are set in the Regular, Bold and ExtraBold weights of West, which was published in 2021 by Fontwerk (designed by Daniel Perraudin). Thanks to their lightness, West’s subtle typographic accents do not push themselves into the foreground. Instead, they interweave with the photographs to form a harmonious flow. The body text is set in SangBleu Republic by Swiss Typefaces.

This “informal profile of the Mississippi” by Ben Lucien Burman (1895–1984) with illustrations by his wife, Alice Caddy (1896–1977), was published by Taplinger in 1973. The center-aligned jacket typography pairs Filmotype Quentin, Americana, and some variant of Phidian.

Title page

22km of River is a book of collected materials and site-specific narratives found along the Svitava River in Brno, Czech Republic, a post-industrial area of the city, where the walking distance of paths on both river banks measures about 22km, exploring possibilities for reading and reimagining landscape.

For the book design, I selected a typeface from SUVA Type Foundry, Vorsik by Karri Kaljend, expressing movement and speed, aligning with the book’s theme and its geometric illustrations.

Map design for Baixo Paraopeba, Três Marias Reservoir, and São Francisco River, made as part of a series of infographics for the Instituto Guaicuy.

Roboto Condensed proved highly effective for long names. For titles and highlighted lists, I selected Montserrat.

Inner Wave is an alternative indie rock band from Los Angeles, California. Apoptosis is their latest album, self-released in 2021. The title lettering is based on Turtle. It’s not clear whether the designers, MacAndrew Martin and Collin Fletcher, worked from scans of the original 1971 Letraset release, or whether it’s Turtellini NF, a digitization made by Nick Curtis in 2011.

[More info on Discogs]

The project Neckarinsel in Stuttgart, Germany, aims to revolutionize perceptions and engagement with the Neckar river. Integral to its branding is Protest Grotesk, a unique typographic choice that intricately mirrors the fluid movement of water. This font isn’t just a static design element; it embodies a kinetic typographic system, symbolically bridging the divide between the essence of water and a resolute commitment to instigate meaningful change through architectural planning.

Protest Grotesk stands as a visual representation of the project’s core ethos, seamlessly merging artistic expression with a profound determination to reshape how society perceives and interacts with water resources. Its incorporation into the design of Neckarinsel serves as a testament to the initiative’s innovative approach, leveraging design elements not just for aesthetic appeal but as a tool to convey a deep-seated intent for transformation and sustainable development along the Neckar.

Thames Log by British photographer and film-maker Chloe Dewe Mathews examines the ever-changing nature of our relationship to water, from ancient pagan festivities through to the rituals of modern life.

Dewe Mathews spent five years photographing up and down the River Thames, from its puddling source to its great estuarial mouth. She focuses her attention on lives that overlap with the river but whose activities often go unnoticed, like ship-spotters, who log the continual stream of vessels that pass through Tilbury, and mudlarks, who comb the city sludge for Roman and Saxon treasure. Above the tidal Thames, which transforms the landscape twice daily, the young river meanders gently through the verdant countryside. There, Dewe Mathews encounters neopagan rituals, eccentric coracle builders, and the custodians of royal swans. Far from holding a fixed identity, the Thames becomes a protagonist in a series of ceremonies and practices that flow seamlessly downstream, from boat burning in Oxford to evening prayer in Southend; from mass baptisms to teenage rites of passage.

Despite its status as one of the most iconic and well-documented rivers in the world, the Thames documented by Dewe Mathews invites you to look beyond the river to consider religious and secular rituals, and how meaning and identity are constructed through practices both big and small, private and public. For some, the Thames represents a source from which to dream, or imagine other places, other rivers—the Volga, Congo, Ganges, Arcadia. For others, it will represent a final point of departure, as their ashes are scattered into its flow.

Like much of Dewe Mathews’ work, Thames Log pits documentary photography’s tendency to categorise and classify against the mystery and poetry of daily life. Organized geographically across rolling, French-folded pages, Thames Log not only records events across the spectrum of significance but also the exact GPS coordinates, dates, tides, and weather of each. Dewe Mathews invokes an anthropology of everyday life, whilst reflecting back on the process of recording and gathering visual data along the river, disclosing the personal photographic ritual that evolved.

From the Biennale of Sydney website:

The publication was designed using DaVinci (Virgile Flores) and Atlas Grotesk (Commercial Type). Editorial coordination by Cherie Schweitzer and Sebastian Henry-Jones. Creative direction and design by Zolo Press; design development by Fumi Congan; production coordination by Paul Murphy with the support of Base Melbourne.

See also the post about the Biennale’s visual identity.

Thibaut Cuisset (1958–2017) was a French photographer who became famous for extensive series of landscapes that he portrayed, often returning more than once to the same region. For him, photographing meant travelling. He was especially fond of the light at noon when objects would cast close to no shadow. Cuisset was awarded with the Prix de Photographie by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2009.

The exhibition Thibaut Cuisset: Loire, for the first time, united all of his series shot in the Loire Valley, between 2001 and 2010. The assembled work was on display from November 2021 to May 2022 at the Jeu de Paume museum for photography at the castle of Tours, literally sitting above the river. A printed catalog accompanied the show.

The exhibition design was conceived of by Atelier Benoît Cannaferina, located in Paris. For the typography, Cannaferina opted for Signal, designed by Emmanuel Besse and available from Production Type. This narrow-running sans has its roots in the French road signage standard Caractères, officialized in 1946. It comes across constructed but not constructivist. The fonts used here are the Bold and Bold Italic styles, with all typesetting executed in no-nonsense ragged-right alignment. Signal is paired with Area Inktrap. The wide-running sans by Matthieu Salvaggio is the museum’s corporate typeface.

The new branding of Memphis River Parks is successful in its use of GT Haptik Black. The quirky typeface matches OCD’s colourful palette and succeeds in creating interesting signage in what may be otherwise mundane locations.

From OCD’s case study:

The new concept plan turned previously fragmented public property into one connected riverfront. The icon is a mini-map of the new configuration. It captures the six-mile River Line running through the five park districts: Greenbelt, Mud Island, Fourth Bluff, Big River and MLK.

The icon was driven by that tricky switchback at the hip of the path. That hitch informed type selection; Grilli Type’s GT Haptik had a particularly evocative R. And then the arches of the Hernando de Soto Bridge, the swirl of the river and the curve of Beale Street Landing informed the layout of the system. […]

No two signs are the same. The pieces are color-coded by district.

Design Partners: Jennifer Kinon, Bobby C. Martin Jr.
Designers: Hanah Ho, Talia Cotton
Signage: Andrew Freeman
Signage Photos: Bob Bayne

“Way-finding totems are commonly placed where paths intersect, or where the path/orientation is not immediately clear.” — OCD

“… and ankle height garden signs are placed to reinforce that you’re on the right path.” — OCD

On the website, GT Haptik is used in Black, Bold, and Medium weights, with its less eccentric stylistic alternates. It’s paired with Lora for text (not pictured).

Every year on a weekend in November, around 100 exhibitors present their works and products at the Potentiale in Feldkirch, Vorarlberg. The Potentiale festival offers a platform for designers to present their works to the public. The focus of the 2017 edition was on typography.

Jost Hochuli and Roland Stieger, two renowned typographers from the close-by St. Gallen in Switzerland, presented at this occasion a booklet named Das Alphabet der guten Nachbarschaft (“The Alphabet of Good Neighbourhood”), which demonstrates their appreciation for the Austrian Vorarlberg region. The booklet was conceived and designed by Jost Hochuli, with texts written by Lena Hopp. It was published in the Reihe Ostschweiz and is available from Verlagsgenossenschaft St. Gallen.

The campaign for the Nachbarschaft project at Potentiale was designed by Alltag. Just like the booklet itself, it uses Jost Hochuli’s typeface Allegra.

The cover shows the river Rhine which marks the border between Vorarlberg (Austria) and St. Gallen (Switzerland).

Table of contents, title page

The headlines on the left are reproduced from a poster for the 1919 referendum when Vorarlberg voted whether they wanted to join Switzerland. The typefaces are Schmale Herold, a bold condensed Etienne with manicules, and Boutique.