Poster for the feature documentary Observer directed by Ian Cheney, anchored by the typeface Herbus.

For the Cursa dels Nassos 2025 campaign, ESIETE developed a visual system and communication assets built around Nassos Display, a custom typeface designed by ESIETE for the race. The letterforms act as modular building blocks: cropped, repeated, and recomposed into energetic shapes that amplify rhythm, speed, and impact across formats and touchpoints.

Nassos Display was selected for the ADG Laus Awards 2025 (In Book, Creative/Experimental)

Every year, Biergarten Brewery & Kitchen celebrates the Karnataka Food Festival – a tribute to a state that’s a mosaic of accents, kitchens, playlists, and Friday-night pints. This year’s identity draws from the warmth of the Kowdhi quilt of North Karnataka; square patchworks of reused fabrics stitched into rhythmic geometry, paired with colours inspired by vibrant risograph inks and traditional quilts.

Tiny square illustrations echo Kowdhi’s pattern and pair seamlessly with Bungee, Biergarten’s primary typeface with its bold, structured form. Anek Kannada brings the regional script and language into the system, adding warmth through its semi-rounded forms and generous curves while maintaining clarity at every scale. The stacking of Bungee with Anek Kannada mirrors the layered patchwork of the quilts. P22 Underground anchors the typography with a clean, highly legible foundation for body copy and functional text.

Poster for a concert with Icky Reels of Tygr Rawwk Records at Crobar in Cleveland, Ohio. Supporting acts are Nothing Phase, Slugg, and RA Washington.

MadeByShape revitalised the digital presence of Skew Studio, a dynamic brand licensing agency in London. This collaboration centred on a full rebrand and the development of a new web experience designed to position Skew Studio as a leader in its field. We introduced a bold new logo, dynamic patterns, updated typography, and playful human elements to embody Skew's innovative ethos. These visual elements were harmoniously integrated across all brand touchpoints, enhancing Skew's identity.

Furthering the transformation, MadeByShape designed and developed a bespoke website utilising Craft CMS, ensuring flexibility and control over design and content, which improved both user experience and SEO performance. The website features engaging animations and parallax scrolling, creating a dynamic user journey that effectively communicates Skew Studio’s brand message. This strategic overhaul not only amplified Skew’s digital presence but also underscored our expertise in delivering comprehensive branding solutions and innovative web design.

The display typeface us Queens Medium by Kilotype. It’s supported by Work Sans for menu and text. The logo predates the redesign.

Rauschen Max and Remix B Regular and Italic in use for Not Us Now. The book with poems by Zoë Hitzig
 was published by Changes in New York City on June 1, 2024. 
ISBN 979-8-9889042-4-3


Hardcover edition, Rowohlt, 1992

Die Musik des Zufalls is the German title of The Music of Chance, a 1990 novel by Paul Auster, translated by Werner Schmitz and published by Rowohlt in 1992. A paperback edition followed a year later in their rororo imprint. Walter Hellmann designed the dust jacket and, with different colors but the same type treatment, the paperback cover. Especially the latter (shown below) was and is ubiquitous; in the 1990s on bookshelves of friends and family, and now on flea markets – Auster is particularly popular in Germany and France, where his sales figures are higher than in the United States.

The playful yet precise typography that picks up the theme of chance made a lasting impression on me. It might have been my first consciously perceived example of alternating glyph styles that does not fall in the category of ransom notes, but rather is very carefully composed. The instruments in this typographic étude are Bodoni in upright and italic styles, plus Poster Bodoni Compressed and Avenir for the initial caps.

Paul Auster died this week at the age of 77. You can watch an interview conducted by Kasper Bech Dyg in 2014 in which Auster shares the story of how he became a writer and how he works.

Paperback edition, rororo, 1993

Tanssilattia vuorella (“The dance floor on the mountain”) is a collection of poems by Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski (1937–1983), and the first part of his Thiarnia suite. Translated to the Swedish by Mia Berner and the author, it was published by Bonniers in Stockholm in 1977, under the title Dansgolvet på berget.

All words on the exclusively typographic cover are set in two sizes of tightly spaced Baskerville Old Face.

Full typographic and pictographic web design for Wees Wijs using Crossfit Black and two widths of D-DIN. Wees Wijs is a campaign of the Better Care Network Netherlands to improve the life of orphaned children and to inform about the pros and cons of volunteers working in orphanages.

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

Blackout cover art

From Wikipedia:

Blackout is the fifth studio album by American singer Britney Spears. It was released on October 25, 2007, by Jive Records. Its production and release occurred as Spears’ personal struggles were highly publicized and overshadowed her professional projects.

The album art and three of the singles (“Piece of Me”, “Break the Ice”, and “Radar”) use Linear for the titles, and much of the secondary text like tracklists and liner notes. Linear is one of those fonts that encourages the mixing of capitals and lowercase, by making the capital height the same as the x-height. There are actual ascenders and descenders but they extend by only a tiny amount (in l, p and y for example), but here they have all been eliminated by choosing whichever form avoids the extension.

The consistency of “Britney Spears” in particular makes it a wordmark used for a short period (the fans agree too, it often appears in fan art associated with this period).

Art direction and design by Glen Nakasako, Jackie Murphy, and Jeri Heiden, with photography by Ellen von Unwerth.

[More info on Discogs]

Blackout, CD back cover

“Piece of Me” CD single cover, limited edition. The sticker with German text uses ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

“Piece of Me” back of CD single

Artwork for official music video for “Break the Ice”; appears to be the same as the single, but possibly with a vignette effect added. Note shadow effect to suggest the lettering is suspended above the background.

CD art. Note the text is not rotated. Until you put it in a CD player.

“Break the Ice” CD single back cover. Small text appears to be in Trade Gothic.

“Radar” CD art, promo version

Tor grotesk is featured on the cover of Marcin Wicha’s award-winning book Kierunek Zwiedzania (loosely translated as “The Exhibition Route”) published by Wydawnictwo Karakter. From the publisher’s website:

In Marcin Wicha’s book, a walk through an imaginary exhibition of Malevich’s works becomes a pretext for a story about utopian projects and unfulfilled dreams, about the Russian Revolution and our contemporary world.

Design by Przemek Dębowski.

The square is a studio and a production company based between Paris, Lille, and Cape Town. In 2019, the founder of I Carré Production and The square wanted to bring together his two production companies under the same entity in order to be better identified, to frame each production department and to develop internationally.

For the overhaul of the new identity, I chose to create a simple and subtle language. The name The square has been retained because it can be identified internationally and allows to segment the departments by specific sub-entities.

The logo is based on Neue Haas Grotesk, with a custom square q.

The website uses Roboto for text.

14 Great Tales of ESP is an anthology of stories edited by Idella Purnell Stone and first published in paperback format by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1969. The book features stories by Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Murray Leinster, Fredric Brown, and others.

The cover title pairs Papirtis Pulsate with Anzeigen-Grotesk, which is also used for author's names and heading on the back cover. Additional text on the back cover is set in Trade Gothic. Fawcett World Library mark looks to be set in Grotesque No. 9.

È difficile?... è difficilissimo!... ma cos'altro?

Revisitation of Enzo Mari’s famous text. The original book has been reinterpreted emphasising the author’s extremely firm and radical positions, as if he intended to impose his own thought as the Word.

Made as a student project in the Progettazione per l’editoria course at ISIA Urbino in 2019/2020, supervised by Leonardo Sonnoli and Irene Bacchi.

Milton Glaser’s Neo Futura a.k.a. Glaser Futura Stencil, better known as Glaser Stencil, in use for Quatro, a short-lived fruity soft drink from the United Kingdom.

From the Guardian:

Quatro was the most notorious of several 1980s attempts to pitch sugary froth to an aspirational teen market. Stats were gathered, groups were focused, ad breaks were booked. The results were a decade distilled: chiselled youths roamed a foggy Blade Runner cityscape, obtaining bespoke laser-hewn cans of the grapefruit, lime, pineapple and orange crush via a steampunk cashpoint. But even a demographic naive enough to count debit cards as cool wouldn’t swallow all that, and four years later the account was closed.

Since 1996, the Quatro brand is owned by the Coca-Cola Company. It’s used for a grapefruit-flavored drink sold in South America. Despite being off the market for more than thirty years, the original Quatro with its four fruit flavors still has fans. There’s even a dedicated Facebook group that lobbies to bring it back.

Hat tip: Lubalin Center

Collection of Quatro paraphernalia incl. coasters, towel, cooling box, from the Quatro Facebook group:
“Quatro is a sparkling mixed crush of pineapple, grapefruit, orange and passion fruit juices. Tastes great on its own or why not try a Q&V, a delicious blend of mixed fruits and vodka / Magic Soft Drink – Miracle Mixer”
The supporting typeface is News Gothic or similar.

A Christmas tree made from rectangles of different sizes and proportions printed in three colors, and a shaded and decorated slab with bifurcated serifs, on the covers of a paperback series with sheet music:

A collection of wonderful songs, stories, and pictures about joyous Christmas Season, including all the favorites, such as Jingle Bells, O Christmas Tree, The First Noel, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, Silver Bells, Silent Night, O Little Town of Bethlehem, and many, many more.

Shown here are the versions for Piano/Vocal and for All Organ. Authored by Doris Millspaugh with contributions by Neal Levin and edited by Roger Bobley, the books were published in 1973 in the Educational division of Charles Hansen Music & Books.

The festive typeface originated as Ornamented No. 43 at the Conner foundry and was patented in 1881. It was recut in the 20th century by Typefounders of Phoenix/Los Angeles Type Founders who gave it a catchier name, Tangier. By the early 1970s, Tangier had been adopted for phototypesetting both by Photo-Lettering and VGC. In 2015, Alan Jay Prescott digitized it under the name Tanglewood PDS, but it’s not clear to me if his revival has been released. You can always order a font of 30pt foundry type from Skyline Type Foundry.

“MORE SWIRLS per pound” – Tangier as shown in Photo-Lettering’s One Line catalog (1971)

Etribes is a management consulting firm “serving corporations with particular focus on the individual challenges of digitization”. Their website uses Aribau Grotesk throughout; the logo appears to be based on some form of Garamond.

Logo

FK Grotesk and FK Raster Grotesk in use for the new corporate identity of the Bauakademie, Berlin.

The visionary spirit of German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841), who pointed the way to the modern era with the Bauakademie building, will rise again in Berlin’s historic center. Bundesstiftung Bauakademie will reconstruct Schinkel’s former academy building on the original site.

The Bauakademie has taken on a new brand identity. Its visual image is now defined by clear, simple shapes that express the Bauakademie’s self-image as a pioneering institution for sustainable planning and construction. The basic element is the square, a particularly memorable and variable shape. It also alludes to the square footprint of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s historic Bauakademie, whose former location will be the site of the new Bauakademie building. The color scheme features the primary color gray and the accent color luminous green, which is used to evoke associations with themes such as sustainability, nature and technology. The entire graphic concept was developed under the motto of “physical and mental space of the future” by Stan Hema brand agency (Berlin).

Overview

Stationery

Business cards

Website

Website

Kapitel Bollwerk season opening poster (Bruxelles Special) designed by Tobias Bolliger.
All text is set in Milkman, an open source typeface designed by Giulia Boggio blending capitals from Blocus (Martin Desinde) and Fabio XM (Giulia Boggio) in order to give the typeface a contemporary gothic feel.