Standby, published in 2022 by Southern Illinois University Press, presents a unique practical philosophy of design for the stage. Breaking with the habitual separation between the domains of writing and design, I lobbied to design and typeset the book myself. The result was honored as a selection in the international AUPresses Book, Jacket, and Journal Show.

The design of Standby represents a contemporary interpretation of Renaissance book typography. One of the guiding principles of the design was not to introduce any element or manipulate the type in any fashion that would not be achievable in lead. Almost every piece of text, including extracts, headings, and chapter titles, is set in a single face and a single size. The typographic palette consists exclusively of roman, italic, small caps, and full caps. Pilcrows and midpoints are employed judiciously throughout. Captions and numerals for lists often hang in the margins, bringing some life to the space surrounding the textblock. In a deconstruction of a traditional Aldine chapter opening, chapter titles appear on the recto before the text begins. The opening text shows faintly through the paper, uniting the title and text in an implied single-page layout. The “S/B” device on the half-titles, built from the text face and a custom slash character, represents the traditional stage manager’s abbreviation for “standby.”

The text is set in Mário Feliciano’s Rongel. Rongel marries a certain kind of upright, almost staid formality with an unusual sharpness and tension in the letterforms. It has stage presence, conviction, a sense of theatricality which lends itself to this book about theatre. Rongel also feels not quite of this time, and indeed it is not — its roots lie in eighteenth-century Spain. The titling face, a classical homage with a sense of humor, made a pleasing contrast and alluded to mid-twentieth-century title page design.

A few characters in the text were borrowed from other faces as needed. For instance, the superior note numbers are set in Fontwerk’s Romaine, because I required proportionally spaced superior figures. All delimiters are set in roman, even in an italic context. All ampersands are set in italic, even in a roman context. I made a three-quarter-em dash and set it with spaces on either side. I likewise built my own ellipsis with my preferred spacing. All acronyms and roman numerals are in small caps. Subheads are capitalized sentence-style throughout. Extracts are italicized rather than set down in size.

A companion website and a suite of marketing materials employ the same typefaces and design aesthetic. More information about Standby can be found on the dedicated website. Additional images may be viewed on my portfolio website.

Casa do Conto (or House of Tales in English) is more than your average hotel. It is a place where you go and do not want to leave your room. I won’t write a full review of the hotel, as this is not the place for it, but if you are planning a trip to Oporto — as you should — stay there!

The R2 ceilings give it an extra layer of whimsicality. On the studio’s website you can read about the process of getting the letters into the concrete:

“the phrases were set into concrete panels using Styrofoam letters placed in a formwork. The use of concrete set limitations such as type size to ensure legibility, as well as depth of the letters which was conditioned by the steel bracing of the concrete slabs. The design and execution of the project took nearly three months.”

Every room has a story from different author related to the city and its architecture. Which makes you want to explore the building, and come back to stay in different rooms.

You can see some pictures of the process at R2 Facebook page. Architects: Pedra Líquida.

[This entry was originally published by Tânia Raposo on 23 March 2013. It was expanded with additional images provided by 205TF on 30 January 2018.]

Lounge ceiling

Reception ceiling

Suite Residence AT

Suite Residence AD

Suite Residence AD ceiling

Suite Residence NG

Suite Residence NG ceiling

Suite Avenue JF

Suite Avenue PB

Suite Avenue PB ceiling

Suite Avenue FL

Forager, designed by Topos Graphics and Flying Pyramids, is typeset in four different fonts: Poster Bodoni, Garamond, Rongel, and Futura.

The use of Poster Bodoni with Garamond are both references to The Macmillan Company’s 1942-published edition of The Birds of America — the wonderful and classic book by naturalist and painter John James Audubon. The Birds of America contains lusciously colored illustrations (or engraved plates) of a wide variety of birds in the United States. This particular edition uses Poster Bodoni as the typesetting of bird species names, with tracked out Garamond small caps as the ‘setting for those species’ scientific names.

With Forager, we set out to instruct the audience in a similar way to Audubon’s classic—designing the layout to mix full-page “plates” (in our case, photographs) with descriptive texts. Because of this formal, aesthetic, and historical influence, it seemed appropriate to use both of these typefaces for our display typesetting of Forager’s botanical plate names.

Rongel, released by Mario Feliciano in 2004, is an historical revival of a font in the style of Garamond — the latter of which is considered to be among the most legible and readable serif typefaces for use in print applications. While Garamond dates back to the 1560s, Rongel is based on Feliciano’s interpretation of Muestras de los punzones y matrices de letra que se funde en el obrador de la Imprenta Real, Madrid, published in 1799. Forager’s descriptive body copy texts are set in Rongel. This is to both read as somewhat nondescript yet classic and scientifically legible.

There is no special reason for use of Futura, save for its also being straightforward and workmanlike — a nice counter to the serifs used throughout the book.