About the book, by Pereine Press:

The country is flooding. Every day the sea claims another kilometre of land. The prime minister holds a daily press conference. Scientists try to find an explanation, without success. The museums are emptied of their valuable works. Some people stay. Most leave. Once the evacuation is complete, and the rest of the world is already moving on, a climate activist, a young poet and an oceanographer voyage across the new sea. They are drawn back into the heart of a changed nation, seeking what they have lost in the deluge.

About the author, via Penguin Random House:

Eva Meijer is a Dutch author, artist, singer, songwriter and philosopher. Bird Cottage is her first novel to be translated into English, has been nominated for the BNG and Libris prizes in the Netherlands and is being translated into several languages. Eva Meijer was awarded the Halewijn Prize in 2017 for all of the books she has written so far.

This Hungarian edition of Zee Nu (English: Sea Now) was translated from the Dutch by Orsolya Réthelyi and published in 2025 by Magvető Kiadó as Tenger Most. The montage, which brings Haeckel’s iconic illustrations to life, symbolizes the sea, featuring a yellow ring in the middle that suggests a lifebuoy.

Contesting Modernity. Informalism in Venezuela 1955–1975 features over 130 works that chart the trajectory of the Informalism movement in Venezuela from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. The catalog accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Published by Yale University Press, 2018. 272 pages | 9.5 × 11.5 inches.

Promotional brochure for a show at KOP, an exhibition space at Project(OR) in Rotterdam, run by and for artists and designers. The exhibition featured works by Willum Geerts and David Herbert.

KOP – short for Kunstenaars Ontmoetingsplaats (“artists’ meeting space” in Dutch) – was dedicated to displaying the diversity of modern art and design by means of various exhibitions, projects and publications based on contemporary concepts. KOP also organized lectures, forums and (club) events that lessen the distinction between art and low-culture.

Designer Rob van Hoesel used a prototype version of what later became Botter, together with LL Typ1451.

Poster designed for Beating the Bounds, a multi-channel video installation by Benjamin Redgrove in collaboration with Josef Mehtola at Lot Projects, London.

The composition is set entirely in Foundry Wilson, using its pronounced contrast and sculptural serifs to build a dense, typographic field. Artist names, venue, dates and title are arranged in a stacked structure that fills the format, allowing scale shifts and line breaks to create rhythm within a tightly controlled space.

The high-contrast letterforms sit against a single-colour ground, amplifying the poster’s graphic directness. Smaller informational text is integrated into the composition without disrupting the overall typographic mass, maintaining clarity while preserving visual impact.

In March 1996 TassinariVetta took over the art direction of Casabella, the historic architectural review founded in 1928. From that moment on the magazine has become part of the everyday life of the studio, where it is designed month after month.

Aiming to go beyond the traditional concept of ‘typographic architecture’ – which sees graphic arts subject to the universal compositional rules expressed in architecture – and to offer a new perspective on the world of letters, the 2024-25 cover design sets editorial objectives ahead of graphic ones.

Taking advantage of the constraints inherent in monthly publication in sectoralization and serialization, and enhancing repetitive elements—the masthead, headlines, but above all the sequential number—the project brings editorial content to the cover through the choice of the font used to compose the number, its graphic interpretation, and the explanatory note published on the inside pages, which is an integral part of the project itself.

Faithful to the magazine tradition, issue after issue, the choice of lettering or typeface moves through the 20th century between avant-garde and modernism, with forays into adjacent spaces suggested by unlikely discards or ambiguous analogies, while exploring the development of the industrial means underlying mechanical writing.

With philological respect—using fonts available under license, photographic reproductions of original specimens, or vector redrawing, as appropriate—and with the calibrated use of a color palette consistent with the magazine visual history, the graphic interpretation ultimately aims to bring the historical artifact into the present, contextualizing it in a contemporary and accessible language.

no. 976 – Lettering for the Tomba Veritti (Udine, Italy), Carlo Scarpa, 1951

no. 975 – Univers, Adrian Frutiger, Deberny & Peignot, 1957

no. 974 – Prisma, Rudolf Koch, Klingspor, 1930

no. 973 – LL Le Corbusier, Nico Schweizer (da Le Corbusier), Lineto, 1999

no. 971-972 – Memphis, Rudolf Wolf, Stempel AG, 1929

no. 970 – Ingenieur, Wim Crouwel, 1964, The Foundry Types, 2012

no. 969 – bayer-type, Hebert Bayer, Berthold, 1931

no. 968 – Mexico 68, Lance Wyman, 1966–68

no. 967 – Our Bodoni, Massimo Vignelli, Tom Carnase, WTC (World Typeface Center), 1989

no. 965-966 – Futura Black / Paul Renner / Bauer, 1929

no. 963 – Fat Face, Herb Lubalin, Tom Carnase, ITC International Typeface Corporation, 1970

no. 962 – Kabel, Rudolf Koch, Klingspor, 1927

no. 961 – Stop, Aldo Novarese, Nebiolo, 1970

no 959-960 – New Alphabet, Wim Crouwel, 1967

no. 958 – Frankfurter, Bob Newman, Letraset, 1970

no. 957 – Universal, Herbert Bayer, 1925

no. 956 – Oakland, Zuzana Licko, Emigre, 1985

no. 955 – Aldina (Aldino), Nebiolo, redesign Adalberto Libera, 1938

no. 954 – Kombinationsschrift, Josef Albers, 1926–28

no. 953 – Bifur, A.M. Cassandre, Deberny & Peignot, 1929

Ragtime

From Paul Dini & Chip Kidd’s Batman Animated (1998):

These imaginatively rendered title cards were a high point of each Batman episode. While some (like “Harley’s Holiday” and “Time out of Joint”) were character portraits, most often the cards depicted an emotional impression of the given episode’s theme. According to Eric Radomski, who designed many of the cards, “Going with the overall retro-forties feel we were giving the show, we wanted to treat the episodes as mini-movies. The title cards allowed us to create great drama in a very subtle fashion. It was a process of trying to capture what the overall episode was, and not just show a scene or moment from it.”

Most of the title cards of Batman: The Animated Series’ first season (which first aired in 1992–1993) use fonts that were available from Letraset.

See also the post on the series’ logos.

Engravers Old English

Pendry Script

Rundfunk

Commercial Script and Compacta Italic

Pendry Script

Cable (Kabel) Light

Univers 49

Brody

Univers 49

Peignot Medium

Alpin Gothic

Plaza

Pendry Script and Compacta

Windsor Bold Outline

Compacta

Plaza

Peignot Medium

Brush Script

Microgramma Medium Extended

Mistral

Compacta Bold Outline

Univers 49

Goudy Handtooled

Mistral

ITC Benguiat

Brody

Univers 49

Plaza and Univers 49

Mistral

Laser

Univers 49

Stencil Bold

Univers 49

Univers 49

Papyrus

Berling Bold

Mistral

Mistral

Ragtime

Berling Bold

LCD Outline

Cloister Bold

Shatter

Helvetica Extra Light and Medium

Goudy Extra Bold

Freestyle Script and Flash

Plaza Inline

City Medium

Murray Hill Bold

Plaza and Univers 49

Ragtime

Tarragon

Compacta Outline

Titus Medium

Augustea Open

Cortez

The sign featuring Agincourt, spotted in 2012

Der Weiße Schwan (“The White Swan”) is a pub and also a beer museum located in the old city of Heidelberg, Germany.

In 2012, their hanging sign with a painting of the eponymous water bird featured the name in Agincourt. The display blackletter was designed by David Quay and named after the England’s victorious battle in the Hundred Years’ War. Letraset released it in 1983. The sign thus can’t be any older than that (but probably was made later).

Sometime between 2018 and 2020, the sign was renovated, with a new swan and also a new typeface. Or rather, an old one: Weiß-Gotisch was first cast by Bauer in 1936 and is named after its designer, Emil Rudolf Weiß.

The new sign as documented in 2025, with Weiß-Gotisch. The article “zum” is now capitalized.

The sign on the façade uses custom-made letterforms. They are still based on a typeface, though, albeit loosely: it’s a bolder rendition of another design by Emil Rudolf Weiß, namely Weiß-Rundgotisch. See its glyph set for comparison.

“Weisser” is here spelled with a double s instead of an eszett (ß). This isn’t quite according to the rules, but perfectly readable. Blackletter aficionados will notice another, more serious error. Can you spot it? (And no, I’m not talking about the use of all caps for “BIERMUSEUM”).

This upteenth remake of The Body Snatchers directed by Abel Ferrara, produced in 1993 and released in 1994 features a very 90s looking design with elongated and skinny letters and wide spacing.

The title typeface is the then brand new Tube. Designed by Lewis Tsalis, it was released with T-26 in 1994. [Edit: no, it’s rather David Quay Mekanik (1988), with a modified N, see comments.] The subline “The Invasion Continues” is added in stretched Futura Extra Bold.

The poster for the theatrical release is credited to B.D. Fox & Friends Advertising. The tagline is in Engravers Roman.

The Blu-ray Disc cover has the title with a monochrome bevel effect. The tagline here is shown in Futura Condensed.

The quote on the back of the DVD cover is in Industria. Additional text uses several styles from Helvetica.

The Book of the Film* is a publishing project made at isdaT, presenting initial research on books in film openings. I first collected appearances of these generic books in films, which I then supplemented with theoretical texts. Finally, a typology based on the images in the collection concludes this edition.

*The title is a reference to a parody scene featuring generic books in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

City Atlas is a book that immediately recalls the travel-guide format: narrow, oblong, with rounded corners that fit easily in the hand. Much like Architectural Roots (Dell Upton, 1986), which inspired its conception, the book uses the atlas form to reflect on architectures shaped by migration. But City Atlas is not a conventional atlas. Instead, it collects stories, spaces, and signs of migrant work.

The project began between 2015 and 2019 in Saarbrücken, where Prof. Amalia Barboza, teaching at Saarland University (since 2019, she teaches at Kunstuniversität Linz, Austria), observed how the city could be read through its restaurants, shops, and other businesses built and run by migrants. The resulting book combines ethnographic observation with a visual archive and reflections on the ways people design their working environments, from the choice of a name to the decoration of an interior, often shaped by memories of home.

While its subject matter is serious—the visibility of migrant labor in a climate of political tension—the book also carries a sense of curiosity and openness. The photographs and short texts encourage the reader to linger on details: the signage of a shop, the decoration of an interior, the choice of a business name. These fragments, when seen together, form a panorama of urban life shaped by migration. Like a true atlas, it asks its readers to move across borders and cultures.

For the cover and appendix, large-scale lettering uses New Alphabet by Wim Crouwel (The Foundry). It is a constructed alphabet for stories of constructed spaces.

The main part of the book is set in Pantasia by Wei Huang (Counter Forms).

OPS Past Perfect by OPS Type is used for essay headlines and pagination, while the essay body copy itself is set in Times, providing a classical and neutral grounding.

All reconstructed shop logos use Suisse Int’l by Swiss Typefaces. This provides a unifying framework, standardizing disparate designs into a coherent visual register.

The book design guides the reader gradually. A short introduction eases the entry, followed by a recurring graphic motif: the shape of a boarding pass, signaling the themes of travel and migration. Text sections are interwoven with photographic sections, establishing a rhythm between narration and image.

The photographic work, all produced by Prof. Amalia Barboza, explores the same foil collages in three ways. First, they appear as framed images. Then the same foils are projected using an overhead projector, creating ephemeral, layered visuals. Finally, the foils are collaged onto window glass, merging printed architecture with the actual cityscape.

The layout is bilingual: all German text is printed in black, while all English text appears in Pantone 287 dark blue, giving the two languages distinct visual identities.
The essays follow a classical book-typography style, in contrast to the main section of 35 shop portraits, which are set in monospaced Pantasia. Within this grid, quotations are treated specially: they appear 1.5 times larger and shifted on the baseline, breaking the rigidity of the mono system while maintaining the grid. To avoid collisions of ascenders and descenders, additional baseline shifts are applied—these sections are “unicased.”

City Atlas was produced by Quatroprint in Brno, Czech Republic. The book is printed in two-color UV offset and comprises 228 pages on slightly transparent, thin paper (Munken Polar Rough 90 g), giving the volume a delicate, tactile quality. The binding is a Swiss-style sewn structure with blue thread and an open spine, allowing the book to lie flat.
The cover is made from cardboard with a partial UV glossy coating, designed to evoke the texture of passport cloth, reinforcing the themes of travel and migration. The corners are rounded.

The book invites readers to engage with cities as layered spaces of culture, labor, and imagination, offering a rich experience that extends far beyond its pages.

Monoform was created in 2005 and used here on a leaflet designed by One Point Six studio in Manchester, England. It is very similar to a typeface I drew in 1993 called International.

Sign at Birmingham New Street, photograph taken 20 September 2024

In 1994, Britain’s conservative government started dismantling the country’s railway network as part of their privatization policy. A new company called Railtrack was given the task of maintaining the railway infrastructure – the tracks, signals, bridges, the major stations – while other new companies (the ‘train operating companies’) were created to provide services on various routes and to pay money to Railtrack for the right to access the tracks.

These new companies were able to move away from the classical British Railway branding – that famous Rail Alphabet typeface in stark black and white established in the 1960s. For example, Great Western Railway Company adopted Adrian Frutiger’s Glypha typeface.

The brand design for Railtrack was developed by leading agency Citigate Lloyd Northover (founded by John Lloyd and Jim Northover). Northover writes:

When commissioned to update the UK rail system signs (in part for digital application), we proposed alignment with the continental use of blue grounds with white lettering in preference to the earlier black on white, thus making the words and pictograms stand out more clearly. The new type design, which we called Brunel, saved space and improved clarity. Brunel was carefully realised by typographers David Quay and Freda Sack from our design brief, with different weights to accommodate illuminated and non-illuminated messages. The typeface was envisaged for use across the UK rail network, but as individual rail operators adopted their own designs Brunel became restricted to the major stations managed by Network Rail.

Freda Sack, David Quay’s partner in The Foundry, talks about the development of Brunel:

We seemed to get a run of transport projects. Working with consultancy Citigate Lloyd Northover we developed the typeface Brunel (1998). It was commissioned for use in mainline UK railway stations, and was a favorite project for me, again because of the strict parameters. For that project, though, we were, on the whole, designing for much larger use on signage, including some of the first plasma screens. It was a great brief. The typeface had to look English – although of course it is used all over the UK – and had to have authority. In addition to its basic information/directional functions, the type was also required to bring some visual consistency to station environments, countering the confusion of the prevalence of visual identities adopted by the various new train operating companies then being formed, and the visual noise of station concourse shopping.

David Quay comments:

Railtrack too was a challenge, but a pleasant one [...] that I named the font ‘Brunel’ after my childhood hero, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The Brunel font was never released commercially. If it had been, the name might have been reconsidered, because there was already a typeface called Brunel – an English Modern serif typeface designed by Paul Barnes in 1995 with later input from Christian Schwartz in 2005. Schwartz describes their Brunel as “an anthology of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century English foundries.”

At some point Railtrack's Brunel font became known as NR Brunel (NR for Network Rail). This was because, after a string of disasters and poor decisions, the Railtrack company had been renationalized and renamed Network Rail in 2002.

Thanks to a post on Daniel Wright’s excellent The Beauty of Transport blog, we can follow the results of a freedom of information (FOI) request which leads us eventually to a copy of Network Rail’s design manual: Design Guidelines 2010, developed by Steer Davies Gleave. This shows specimens for NR Brunel Regular and NR Brunel Bold and asserts that:

This is the only font allowed on signs.

This font is an evolution of the ‘Brunel’ typeface, previously in use and designed specifically for wayfinding purposes.

(This FOI response also provides a copy of the Brunel font, now named as NewBrunel and dated 2010, in TTF format. I expect that including this was an administrative oversight on the part of the FOI responder.)

Originally the tops of the ascenders of letters such as b, d, h, k, and l were flat, but at some point (perhaps also in 2002, or as part of the ‘evolution’) they were given sloping tops. Also, the 1 digit was given a base to stand on.

Usage of NR Brunel has been steadily increasing across the network since it was introduced nearly thirty years ago, with new and refurbished stations boldly going full Brunel. It might even have become the new official standard font for all UK railways if the Chris Green/Peter Hall ‘Better Rail Stations’ report had been implemented in full. The advice on page 30 of this 2009 report was:

Station Signage

To ensure network consistency and reduced franchise costs, all signage should be in standard ‘Brunel’ script with white letters on a dark blue background. Thereafter, name signs should not be changed when train company ownership changes.

However, the newly-nationalized British Railways has decided that in the future all railway signage should use Rail Alphabet 2:

Great British Railways will introduce Rail Alphabet 2 across the rail network, replacing the many different fonts used on railway signage.

So the Rail Alphabet will gradually replace the Brunel font which had originally ousted it back in 1998. But it’s likely to be many years before the final traces of Brunel disappear from our stations. Until then, you can happily spend a few minutes contemplating the convoluted history of the UK rail network – both as political football and as a succession of design choices – while you’re waiting for your train.

Photograph taken at Kings Cross 29 May 2025; type in both white on dark blue and black on white

Photograph taken at Paddington Station on 29 May 2025. Colour matching is hard…

Photograph taken at Paddington Station on 29 May 2025

Photograph taken at Waterloo Station on 29 May 2025; the new standard Rail Alphabet 2 is used for the big signs in the background, while the previous standard Brunel is still used for other signage (at the time of writing)

Photograph taken at Waterloo Station on 29 May 2025

Photograph taken at Cranbrook Station on 2 June 2025; this station was built in 2015, but the version of the Brunel font used here has the flat-topped ascenders

Network Rail’s design manual Managed Stations Wayfinding, developed by Steer Davies Gleave, 2010

Karuta is a traditional Japanese card game where players listen to short descriptions read aloud from a reader’s card. Each turn, players race to grab the matching card with the corresponding picture or text, and the player with the most cards at the end wins.

Font Karuta is a variation designed for typography enthusiasts. Instead of pictures, the reader announces the font name and description on the reader’s card, and players compete to pick up the card displaying that font. The player who collects the most cards wins the game.

This edition is the “extension package” featuring only blackletter designs.

From top left to bottom right: Respira Black, FF Brokenscript, a couple letters from Breitkopf-Fraktur, Blackmoor, Claudius, an e and an exclamation mark from Old English, Wallau, Amador, Fakir, San Marco, American Text, Caslon-Gotisch, Engravers Old English, Marian Black, Fette Fraktur, Lucida Blackletter, JAF Herb, Gutenberg Textura, Alte Schwabacher, Goudy Text, Fette Kanzlei, and a tiny bit of Fette Gotisch. Featured in the game but not shown in the images are Deutsche Schrift and Wedding Text.

The box front features the title in Amador, with Clairvaux for the list of included typefaces. The Japanese font appears to be DNP Shuei ShogoMincho. The Font Karuta logo is in Akko.

The German-language game instructions are set in Gutenberg Textura with a headline in Blackmoor, in caps of alternating colors.

Gátak (“The Dams”) is the Hungarian title of the novel Els dics by Catalan writer Irene Solà. Originally published in 2018, her reflection on storytelling was awarded the Documenta prize.

This is Ada. This is the weasel. This is Loki, and this is the dark soil like an open mouth. This is Vicenç from Can Ballador asking Ada if she hasn’t smashed her car yet. This is Jessica S. in her corner in rural England and this is old Ballador inside a tractor. This is Tripi, and these are the silures swimming in the darkness of the Sau reservoir, and this is Samantha, the cow, and the wild boars in hiding. These are the dams. And these are the words, and the stories, and the tales, and the things you say, you explain, you tell or think, or hear or know or feel or steal, like a river of cold, wet and rapid water.

Front cover. The Batman logo in Plaza is paired with Compacta. “The Batman Adventure” appears to be Mekanik, stretched.

The Batman Adventures was a comic book published by DC Comics from 1992 to 1995, as a tie-in to the cartoon Batman: The Animated Series. The first 16 issues were lettered by Tim Harkins, but starting from issue 17 (dated February 1994, but actually on sale in January), lettering duties were taken over by Richard Starkings of Comicraft.

Dialogue and sound effects are hand-lettered. Titles and credits are in the Lite and Dark weights of Dutch Courage, which were created by Comicraft for The Batman Adventures. Dutch Courage appears to have been inspired by Plaza, which was used for the logo of Batman: The Animated Series.

Page 1, showing Dutch Courage Dark (“Tangled Web”), Dutch Courage Lite (other titles and credits), and hand-lettered dialogue. Small print in Helvetica.

Page 7, showing titles in Dutch Courage Lite and hand-lettered dialogue.

From Schilt Publishing:

Produced in conjunction with the FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other brings together 33 artists of African origins from around the globe whose works challenge traditional notions of Blackness and transnational histories in relation to concepts of liberty, rights, and representation.

In their unique practices, the featured artists turn an eye to social, cultural, and political conditions that inform and influence concepts of representation as they pertain to image production and circulation in Africa and beyond. These artists question the ways in which subjectivity is constructed and deconstructed by the camera, and in the process, reveal legacies of resistance by those who defy traditional ideas of sexual, racial, gender-based, and other marginalized identities.

Kade by David Quay is used throughout in two weights. The typeface used for body text is Wei Huang’s Work Sans.

The cover image is by Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

Amsterdam Football Club Ajax, commonly referred to as Ajax (and outside the Netherlands as Ajax Amsterdam) was founded in 1900, and is one of the major and most iconic clubs in Dutch football history and known for its emblematic red and white colours.

Back in 2019, Ajax commissioned 310k, Amsterdam-based creative studio, to refresh their brand identity without loosing their core characteristics.

From 310k’s website:

The new identity revolves around the club statement “for the future”. The new word mark and extensive design language was created to accommodate and unify the many departments within the AJAX organisation. Obviously the crest and club colours are not to be messed with but everything else was fair game. Flexibility and variation was a key factor in this identity.

The main fonts used for AFC Ajax’ identity are Suisse Int’l and Gridnik, from the late Dutch legend Wim Crouwel, often used in combinations. Suisse Works is used sporadically and independently as a third font to convey messages, slogans and historical facts from the club. Additional fonts used in the club’s branding are Lexia Advertising (not shown here) and Kurversbrug, used between 2017 and 2021 for the jerseys.

Suisse Int'l and Suisse Works are available on Swiss Typefaces website.

For one day in December 2024, the Ajax players wore an ellipsis (…) on their backs, instead of their own surnames. From Ajax: “As a call to silence social hate, the Ajax Men's and Women's teams are playing with three dots on the back of the jerseys. The three dots are a symbol for silence social hate and reporting these hate messages.”

The Vega Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting artists through the production and acquisition of moving image works. The new website, as a kick-off to an identity refresh, playfully visualizes the constellation network Vega has been and continues building with its collaborators. Every artwork and program Vega has helped support has become a star in the Vega universe, awaiting visitors to explore the foundation’s growing systems of support and appreciation for moving image practices.

LL Vectrex is used for headlines and menu, paired with Foundry Gridnik for text. The circled glyphs of the Vega logo are from a custom font named Vega A.

Design by Ming Hsun Yu with creative direction by Chris Wu, Wkshps
Website development: Lukas Eigler-Harding
The original visual identity concept was designed by M/M Paris

For its 2023 edition, the International Film Festival in Cannes called the Nantes based studio Appelle Moi Papa to rethink the invitations and menus for official dinners. All the compositions were hot-foil stamped with gold on white paper. Between modernity and classicism, the official sans serif from the festival identity, Foundry Monoline, is paired with the voluptuous Carta Nueva, a typeface designed by My-Lan Thuong. This pointed-nib calligraphy inspired typeface underlines the refinement and the glamour of the event in Cannes. This was printed by La Maison des Impressions in Paris.

The talented Korean artist Song Keong-a illustrated and designed this series of posters for the Korean Cultural House in Luxembourg, to celebrate the Korean Culture Day, in 2022 and 2023. She used the Perec typeface (PampaType) for the two posters below, and Foundry Sterling (The Foundry Types) for the one shown above.