Apricots from Damascus is an apexart franchise exhibition and publication project organized by Atıf Akın and Dilek Winchester, about art in a state of mobility and exile, with a specific focus on İstanbul and current artist communities. The project culminates with an exhibition hosted by SALT, İstanbul, in December 2015.

Design studio Pentagram created this playful and colourful identity system for the Garden Museum in London. The identity makes good use of Humanist 970, a version of Adsans by Walter Tracy, and Amira by Cyrus Highsmith.

Pentagram writes:

The museum’s wordmark is set in Humanist 970, a font that is based on Doric, a very early sans serif released by the Stephenson Blake Foundry in 1816. As with other fonts released during this time period, it is organic and imperfect in nature, creating a characterful letter set. The secondary font is Amira, a contemporary addition, that has a graphic, woodcut-feel closer to the traditional visual language of gardens.

Read more about the design process here.

Juice is a free youth magazine by Des Moines Register. From its launch in 2005 until c. 2010, it was art directed by Tracie Louck, using Stainless and Dispatch as the primary typefaces.

80/35 Music Fest cover

515 Alive cover

Best Dessert layout

Wine Fest layout

First issue, June 2005

Mid Day is an Indian mainstream newspaper in compact format that carries the following sections from Monday to Saturday: local news, national news, international news, lifestyle, films, and sports. Of these sections, local news is stated as the tabloid’s key focus. The newspaper was established in Mumbai in 1979 and has an estimated readership base of half a million people. It is among the top 10 Indian newspapers by readership. Since its introduction in 2016, Sindelar has been used in the newspaper for text as well as for headlines and appears in combination with the sans serif typeface Benton Sans. The logo in Dispatch was introduced with a previous redesign by Mario García in 2006.

Various impressions of the newspaper’s new typographic appearance.

Smart Money, the magazine of personal business, invests the slab serif Dispatch and its sans counterpart, Stainless, both designed by Cyrus Highsmith, to profit power and excitement in the magazine’s headlines.

The image above is from today’s Wall Street Journal. Font Bureau has more about the 2007 redesign:

When careful use of color first appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, it was also graced with Cyrus Highsmith’s Escrow, a new series of Scotch that referenced Monotype’s 1908 Scotch No. 36.

Escrow was drawn for headlines and Escrow Text for captions, with small caps for section heads. Jim Parkinson was commissioned to customize the nameplate.

Sharpening overall appearance within Journal tradition is the work of Design Director Joe Dizney and design consultant Mario Garcia. They recognized that the distinctive headline typography drove the look of the paper.

‘Escrow is the spectacular singular element that holds the whole thing together,’ says Dizney, and provides the required hierarchy and subtlety within the disciplined palette of The Wall Street Journal. It is businesslike and glowing with austere life.”

Morf is a Dutch magazine in (formerly) book form about design-related texts, topics and theory. Published by the Premsela foundation and given away for free to Dutch design students.

This page shows the English summary to Piet Schreuders’ important essay Lay In – Lay Out, originally written and published in 1977.

Amira was designed specifically for Natural Health. Magazine design by Roger Black, Robb Rice for Danilo Black.

Great ideas can still emerge over conference food.

Such was the case when Eduardo Danilo, renowned Latin American publications designer, and Cyrus Highsmith met again and started talking type to stave off their culinary disappointment. Danilo loved W.A. Dwiggins’s palate and sense of counter form, and wanted more. Highsmith shared this appreciation and soon enough went about making Quiosco, the new Dwiggins-inspired newspaper text.

Danilo found the perfect venue in La Prensa Gráfica to get a taste of the new typeface. The glyphs have a rich imaginative life, while permitting more compact word space in narrow columns with no loss of readability. It is a delicious compliment to any adventuring publication. FB 2002

When the FontFeed featured a brief review of “Typography for Lawyers” a couple of days ago I finally felt encouraged enough to ask about something that puzzled me ever since I first saw the book. Matthew Butterick’s desk reference is commendable when it comes to mission, structure, content and style of writing. However, as a book designer (as well as a teacher), I have ambivalent feelings about the vast choice of typefaces applied throughout the volume. Butterick uses no fewer than eight type families, namely:

• Lyon Text roman, italic, bold and small caps for body copy and subheads
• Arno Display for chapter headings
• Quadraat Sans on the cover and inside for tips, tables and info-boxes
• Cheltenham for subchapter headings
• Verlag Book and Black for cross headings, captions and marginalia
• Alix for monospaced text
• Amira Bold caps for captions to examples
• Whitney Index White Round for enumeration
• plus more typefaces in samples which I will not list here

And again different typefaces on the website (via @font-face):

• Concourse for headings (a new sans-serif by Butterick in progress)
• Charter for Text

Six of eight families in the picture above, Arno for the headline, Cheltenham Bold Condensed in the margin, Lyon for body copy and Lyon Italic for subheads in the margin, Verlag for marginalia and in all caps for cross headings, Quadraat in the “How to” tips, Amira all caps as caption to samples. Click any images to enlarge.

While all of the above are excellent typefaces, each of them suitable for a whole publication like this, I see no real need to combine them all in one book. Why not pick just two or three of them and make use of their full range of variants, styles and weights?

I tried to list the typefaces in order of appearance which usually resembles the hierarchy roughly but couldn’t clearly make it out. At some point a too diverse typography can also lead to confusion rather than guidance. What kind of text am I reading? What belongs together? Differentiation of various types of texts and structures is necessary but shouldn’t feel arbitrary.

So I asked the author and designer of the book, and got a wonderful report about dauntless eclecticism, orchestrating typefaces, and what happens when you work on a project over a long period of time (which I should know all too well). Now I feel like an academic party pooper. Matthew writes:

That’s an interesting story (I mean, if you like fonts) —

While writing the book, I tried to find a balance in tone between 1) authoritative and useful, and 2) approachable and relaxed. While designing the book — which I did in parallel with the writing — I wanted that tone to carry through visually. I wanted readers to open the book to any page and say “oh, this looks interesting” and not “oh, this looks like a homework assignment.” In other words, make it read more like a magazine than a dictionary.

That was fine by me, because my favorite typography has always been the serious-but-eclectic American magazine, starting with Spy in the ’80s and currently best represented by The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine (which is absolutely my favorite thing to read every week).

My affinity for this approach is also probably traceable to my original typographic training, which was in a small letterpress shop. The essence of letterpress work is making do with what you’ve got and finding novel ways to combine things. It’s an eclecticism borne from necessity and limited choice (which is different than eclecticism borne from unlimited choice).

Early designs of the book used fewer families. I took my own advice and started by choosing a body-text font. My first choice was Sabon, but I wanted to give a push to a current type designer, so I discovered Lyon and went with that. The sidebars needed to contrast with the main text. Metro is one of my favorites, but it hasn’t aged well, so I used the Metro-influenced Verlag.

Nearly everything in the book was Lyon or Verlag at some point. For certain elements, functional and visual considerations dictated otherwise. For instance, the section headings in the margins were originally Lyon Bold. But late in the design, I had to make those margins a pica narrower, and Lyon Bold didn’t fit enough text. So I switched to FB Cheltenham.

A similar story for the technical instructions. At legible point sizes, Lyon and Verlag took up too much vertical space. So I went with FF Quadraat Sans italic, which is quite condensed but not steeply angled, and has a color and texture that blends smoothly with Lyon.

Arno Display, used for chapter headings in the book, was originally the font on the home page of the TFL website, so that was a nod to visual continuity. For monospaced text, of course I used my own design, FB Alix. As for Whitney Index, I would’ve used Verlag Index if it had existed, but it didn’t, so I went with the next best thing. (There’s that letterpress resourcefulness at work.) And Amira — I just happen to like it a lot and wanted to find a place for it. So that’s some gratuitous eclecticism.

In his article, Yves suggested a font superfamily. They have their place, but I have mixed feelings about them. First, a lot of superfamilies have a great sans and a not-so-super serif, or vice versa. Second, and more importantly, superfamilies can match a little too well, creating a somewhat relentless consistency from page to page.

I think about it like the difference between a song played live by a full band, where everyone puts emphasis in slightly different places, versus a recording where all the parts are played by one musician with a multitrack recorder. True, I do recommend in the book that mixing fonts by the same designer can work well. But ordinarily, I prefer to mix fonts from different designers, for that “full band” feel. — Matthew Butterick

“Less is more” — Butterick on mixing fonts in “Typography for Lawyers”. “Most documents can tolerate a second font; many fewer can tolerate a third; almost none can tolerate four or more.” Click to enlarge.

 

Chapter on system fonts with a warning in Helvetica condensed (right): “This chart is offered as a harm-reduction device.” Click to enlarge.