The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in collaboration with design studio Gretel, rebuilt its identity with the goal of putting the institution in direct conversation with the city that surrounds it. Typography is the primary device for achieving this. The type palette mainly works on two levels: outside-and-inside, or community-and-institution.

Inspired by Philadelphia’s rich visual texture of storefronts, street vendors, and murals, the vernacular type palette brings the voice of Philly into the museum and injects the identity system with contrast and spontaneity. The current library is curated (exemplified by the likes of Shatter, Cooper Black, and Balloon), but it is designed to continue growing over time. Each of these display typefaces can be used on various seasonal activations, or specifically assigned to exhibitions or departmental roles. ITC Pioneer was used for the recent exhibition The Time is Always Now, a survey of contemporary Black and African diasporic figurative art. Purple Haze is the designated typeface for PMA Members, and Megazoid is used for PMA Kids.

On the other hand, the institutional typographic voice serves an evergreen role: echoing the museum’s classical character while embodying Philadelphia’s industrial sensibility. The core typeface, Fairmount Serif—named for the Fairmount neighborhood—was custom-drawn by Ryan Bugden after a study of Philadelphia’s typographic history. Searching for a balance between the industrial structure of 1930s American sans-serifs and a classical features brought Hess Neobold forward as a key reference. Its designer Sol Hess attended PMSIA—the precursor to the museum—and later succeeded Frederic Goudy as Philadelphia-based Lanston Monotype’s type director. Fairmount Serif evolves the Hess Neobold model while incorporating more contemporaneous industrial cues. It remains relatively neutral alongside the museum’s broad palette of display faces while providing a distinct, authoritative voice of its own. Fairmount Serif was also used as a starting point in rendering the various institutional logos.

For the more workhorse level, Klarheit Grotesk serves as the museum’s body text typeface. It is set at small sizes across branding, materials, signage, and exhibition text.

See more images in Gretel’s case study.

Mockups of exhibition catalogs

Banners.

Seasonal program.

Inside of unfolded invitation, 10″×14″

For The Paris Review’s 2019 Spring Revel benefit invitation design, Topos Graphics conveyed a broad range of book design with 18 carefully-selected bookish typefaces. Topos provided this explanation by email:

We designed a book shelf environment for text elements to be placed, composing texts as if they were individual titles. Different volumes of content got different character treatments. This functioned to compartmentalize the invitation’s hierarchy of info, but it also allowed us to approach each individual element anew. Like a personal library, the result takes on a character of its own. Tinged with old- and new-era sensibilities, we felt the selections—and the suite's ​ color palette—connected to The Paris Review’s 1960s advent and a contemporary moment—both in literature and typography. Book collections, like font collections, showcase a rich diversity of history, form and taste.

The invitation unfolded to a 10″×14″ posterette, with the front and back sides designed as a kind of A-Side, B-Side of a wooden bookshelf. The shelf cubbies gave us spaces—a semblance of a grid—to place information within. And that grid functioned through the event’s other collateral, like its printed program.

The annual event’s title “REVEL” is spelled out of book spines and a clever crop of Schmalfette Grotesk’s R. Strategic moves in hierarchy, with color, scale, and type orientation, create an engagingly graphic reading of a large amount of text. The books are energetically stacked, with the bookshelf bolstering as a grid to group and separate information.

Additional typefaces reflect different eras and aesthetics of book design: elegantly readable Garamond Premier, Paperback, and Study; mid-century classics like ITC Franklin Gothic and Lydian; genre-novel signifiers Ballast, Bookmania, and Cortado; stoic and structural ITC Lubalin Graph, Swiss 721, and Sentinel; contemporary and inventive Minérale and Canela.

Larger book spines use display typefaces to prioritize the most pertinent information, like the event location and speakers. Smaller type used uniformly suggests the repeated design systems of book series—Study for the board of directors and Schmalfette Grotesk for list of hosts.

The opposite side of the unfolded invitation provides a peek at the book blocks from behind the shelves and a quiet background for a mailing label. All information is repeated from the graphic side, set more traditionally in Garamond Premier. The attention to hierarchy persists, and ruled lines parallel the organizational function of the bookshelf.

Front of folded invitation. The Paris Review’s logo is segmented on book edges.

Outside of the invitation, unfolded

Close crop of the vector artwork

Close crop of the vector artwork

Close crop of the vector artwork

Close crop of the vector artwork. Garamond Premier is used in various of its optical sizes.

Close up of Minérale, Schmalfette Grotesk, Paperback Italic, and a little bit of Chrysaora

Close up of the writer hosts section using Schmalfette Grotesk

In September 1966, the festival and congress Visioner av Nuet (“Visions of the Present”) took place in Stockholm. The event aimed to investigate the impact of technology on humanity, society and art. Computing was only in its infancy, yet discussing its consequences and exploring what it would mean to make use of it artistically was considered paramount at that time. Almost half a century later, artist Anna Lundh produced an updated version of the festival, based on research into the event from 1966, to reconsider its original concerns in a world fully immersed in the technology that in 1966 was called “the new”. What lies in the “and” of art and technology now? Who is occupied with technology and its role in society? Which values do we want to maintain, and which should we challenge? Lundh’s festival, Visions of the Now, took place on 24-26 May 2013 and gathered over thirty international artists, musicians, theorists and scientists, in a series of lectures, panels, open discussions, art and music performances.

For the 2013 festival, Konst & Teknik designed a catalogue, titled Catalogue (!), containing — among other things — essays and scans of the correspondance regarding the 1966 festival. The catalogue was distributed to the festivals' visitors and signed with today’s date using a inkjet printer pen. The addition of a second catalogue, titled Proceedings, was added with a series of documentation photos and an introduction letter to an archival box, released in September 2017 by Sternberg Press.

Both Catalogue and Proceedings reference heavily the researched material in its design choices in its usage of the original letterhead font (Bank Gothic), typewriter fonts and more, while still trying to keep the box current — an attempt to blend the past with the future in its approach to (printing) technology.

The Nature of Photographs (Phaidon) is a primer on fine photography by famous photographer Stephen Shore, modelled after his many years of teaching the subject. The layout uses A2 Typewriter in small bursts, referencing an aesthetic of pre-digital photojournalism. The light gray color makes sure that the type never takes attention away from the wonderful photographs.

[Editor’s note: The font in use here is an early, pre-release version of A2 Typewriter – MS]

The cover layers the iconic Stones symbol in a traffic stripe pattern, a reference to the traveling exhibition.

Pentagram:

For over five decades, the Rolling Stones have continually reinvented themselves as musicians, performers and cultural icons, transforming music, art, fashion and popular culture in the process. This incredible legacy is explored in Exhibitionism – The Rolling Stones, the major exhibition that recently opened at London’s Saatchi Gallery. Pentagram’s Abbott Miller and William Russell have collaborated on the design of the exhibition, which is produced, originated and conceptualised by Tony Cochrane and Thea Jeanes-Cochrane of IEC Exhibitions and curated by Ileen Gallagher. As part of the project, Miller and his team have also designed Exhibitionism – The Rolling Stones, the book that accompanies the show.

The book’s primary typography is in Berton Hasebe’s Druk “which is [also] used in the exhibition graphics and helps create a context for the band’s late 1960s origins.” The body copy appears to be set in Henrik Kubel’s A2 Typewriter.

The opening title page spread pictures crates from one of the band’s tours.

Text from interviews conducted with the band.

Opening spread of a section about Edith Grove, the band’s first flat in Chelsea. The apartment is recreated in the exhibition.

Recording section opener.

Text from interviews conducted with collaborators worked with the band.

Tape boxes from the original recording sessions.

Handwritten lyrics in a section about songwriting.

Mick Jagger’s 1963 Gibson Hummingbird guitar.

A quote from Keith Richards accompanies one of his guitars from c. 1971.

Fashion designer John Varvatos writes on the Stones as enduring fashion icons.

Tartan suits worn by Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger, c. 1966.

Looks worn by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, c. 1973–1974.

Athletic look worn by Mick Jagger on the 1982 European Tour.

John Pasche on designing the iconic Tongue and Lip Design logo.

In the exhibition

Detail from the exhibition graphics.

Black Suburbia: From Levittown to Ferguson is an exhibition presented by The New York Public Library's Shomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, one of the leading institutions focusing exclusively on African-American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. The exhibition examines the complex narrative of the African-American suburb from the 20th century to today, looking to communities such as Hempstead, NY, Ferguson, MO, and Shaker Heights, OH, as case studies for a contradictory yet hopeful dream. Pentagram's Eddie Opara and team designed exhibition graphics and print materials for Black Suburbia which address the unique triumphs and challenges of the black suburban struggle.

Developed in collaboration with the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, Black Suburbia, tackles issues such as suburban segregation, institutional discrimination, and residential racism in black communities from the late 1800s to current day. Opara wanted to stress the severity of these issues in the exhibition's logo, which sets type within an upside-down American flag. The application references the United States Flag Code, which states that the flag "should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property." The red stripes of the flag are echoed throughout the titling of the exhibition.