Front cover

AA Bronson’s House of Shame brings together AA Bronson’s work from recent years, emphasizing the social dimension of his collaborative artistic practice. Edited by Vincent Simon, it was published by Edition Patrick Frey. Berlin-based designer Fritz Grögel provided the book design. He kindly lets us in on his concept and typeface choices.

AA Bronson’s queer and spiritual art is rarely pleasing and sometimes provocative. It touches on social taboos such as homosexuality, age and death, and deals with supernatural and irrational aspects of life that are not in vogue in our secular, rational modern age. For some viewers, it may seem like a freak show at first glance. For Fritz, this was precisely the starting point for the book design: to present the “House of Shame” in the style of 19th century fairs, where people who did not conform to the norm were put on display.

He built this concept around various display typefaces by Andreas Seidel of astype: the Block-like Wood Heinz No.2 and No.4, the slab-serif Wood Poster Eight, and the narrow siblings Wood Bonnet Grotesque No.4 and Antique No.7 are all excellent digital interpretations of old wood type fonts. Most of them come with “worn” alternates that help emulate an authentic printed look. These wood type revivals were used to structure the large sections of the book.

For the few longform texts, Christoph Dunst’s Novel (Atlas Font Foundry) is used, described by the designer as “a warm oldstyle roman that offers all the bells and whistles for fine, bibliophile typographic work”. Captions are set in Albert-Jan Pool’s FF DIN, for Fritz “the classic choice of typographic restraint”. Especially when combined with some of the “wild” images, it establishes a clear distance. In the appendix, Novel and DIN are used together, in a differentiating manner.

The format and layout of AA Bronson’s House of Shame aim to be unpretentious yet of high quality. Instead of doing a coffee table book, Fritz opted for a medium format that can be viewed on the train. Glossy finishing and lamination were deliberately avoided; the flattering haptics of the predominantly open papers should speak for itself. The outcome is an arresting publication that makes me want to learn more about AA Bronson and his work.

Half-title page

Title page with a combination of Wood Bonnet Grotesque No.4, Wood Heinz No.4, and Wood Poster Eight, all in caps. The superscript and underlined “OF” was made using the Wood Heinz Deco Caps, referencing catchwords as they were common in the Victorian era. The superscript o in “№” is part of the numero glyph as included in Wood Heinz.

Extended title page with a list of contributors, set stacked and justified in various wood type styles.

Opening spread of Vincent Simon’s foreword, with the author’s name set in Wood Heinz Deco Caps

Wood Heinz No.2 for the heading is contrasted with the calm Novel for body copy, featuring its compact and only slightly inclined italics.

Table of contents

Chapter opening featuring Wood Poster Eight with a stray O from Wood Bonnet Grotesque No.4.

Unlike the foreword, Paul Clinton’s essay is set justified, with indents to mark paragraph beginnings.

The running title is added on left pages, set in a rotated line of all-caps FF DIN.

The text is sandwiched by two halves of an exhibition view of We Are the Revolution (2011).

Chapter opening featuring Wood Bonnet Grotesque No.4

“Clean” versions of the wood type fonts are used for chapter headings, bridging the gap to the content.

Fritz notes that a major challenge lay in the visuals, which came from many different sources and ranged in quality from perfect gallery shots to blurry cell phone images.

It was important to the artist to focus more on those images that show the artists and visitors interacting during the performances. The image formats in the book are hence diverse. The crucial thing was to always pursue a kind of visual storytelling that would allow the reader to immerse in the exhibition spaces while sitting on the sofa.

This chapter opening switches around the typefaces previously seen for “Asshole”.

In the interview conducted by Frédéric Bonnet, questions are highlighted by Novel’s Bold Italic.

A smaller size of Novel is used for footnotes.

Caps from Wood Bonnet Antique No.7 with lowercase letters from Wood Bonnet Grotesque No.4

In the second, choral part, friends bear witness in a kind of logbook, reflecting on the five-year history of the artist community. These text contributions (here the one by Bradford Kessler) are set ragged right.

The appendices are introduced by a typographic block that echoes the title page.

Each line is set in another of Andreas Seidel’s wood type revivals.

Appendix: artists & contributors

Appendix: illustrations

Novel and DIN are used in various styles to differentiate the various text elements.

Colophon

Back cover

From the portfolio website of design studio Dornig:

In 2005, the Hilti Art Foundation was opened in Vaduz as an annex to the Liechtenstein Museum located there. It is home to the art collection of the Hilti family and includes works from classical modernism to current art trends.

In close collaboration with Uwe Wieczorek – the curator of the collection and the exhibitions – four publications have been produced so far, including the comprehensive collection catalogue in 2 volumes in 2019/20. A particular challenge was the alternating use of coated paper (illustrations of works) and uncoated paper (texts). For a small part of the edition, a high-quality slipcase was also made by hand.

For covers and interior, designer Kurt Dornig paired Jost Hochuli's Allegra – used in particular for volume 2, Art from 1950 to the Present – with Novel by Christoph Dunst.

Until 1 July 2018, Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, Italy presents the exhibition Bellini/Mantegna. Two Masterpieces Compared. Two depictions of the same subject – the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, one by Giovanni Bellini, the other by Andrea Mantegna, are shown side by side for the first time in history.

At first glance they look completely alike, and yet you understand that the two mirror-works have completely different personalities. But who came up with the marvellous composition?

The design process was characterized by concepts such as comparison and mirroring. The two artists are represented in a balanced way, communicating at the same time the stylistic differences. The mirrored construction allows reading the image in two ways. The logotype is based on two typefaces derived from Roman capitals (used by both artists within their works), opting for a more graceful style for Mantegna and a more linear style for Bellini. This choice is derived from the comparison of the two works, where Mantegna’s gives greater sacredness to the figures, embellishing them with haloes and decorations, while Bellini’s places the characters in a more familiar and human dimension. [paraphrased from the Italian press text]

The font chosen for Mantegna is Charlemagne Bold. Carol Twombly’s display typeface is inspired by versal capitals of late tenth-century England which in turn revived classical Roman letterforms. Bellini is typographically represented by a customized pairing of elements found in History, Peter Biľak’s playful layer system based on Roman inscriptional capitals. The wordmark combines History 04, a monolinear sans serif skeleton, with History 09, a layer of long tapered serifs. Of the latter, only the top serifs were used. The proportions of E and L were adjusted, maybe to compensate for the different lengths of the two names.

Christoph Dunst’s Novel Sans is used for secondary information on the poster and the book cover as well as for the texts in the exhibition. The standard typeface used in the visual identity of Querini Stampalia is Futura. It here appears for the museum’s name alongside the stylized ‘Q’ mark which was designed by Studio Camuffo in 2002.

​Exhibition design by We Exhibit. Graphic design together with Studio Visuale.

Kudos to Rinaldo for the helpful pointers — grazie mille!

The catalog accompanying the exhibition is published by Silvana Editoriale.

This exhibition catalog, designed by French duo Michelines (Clémence Michon & Line Célo), is the result of various excavations in the Brumath area during the last decade. The many found objects are perfect testimonies of the whole spectrum of a typical Gallo-Roman city life: urban topography, daily lifestyle, production and exchanges, beliefs and religion, necropolis and death ceremonies.

Full of pictures, the catalog is aimed at enthusiasts and curious people willing to discover the life of ancient men and women who inhabited the land around Strasbourg and, by their craft and commercial trades, contributed to the development of this region.

Echoing rough handicraftsman work, titles are set in the curveless Minotaur (whose name is also a nod to the Roman mythology), while the main text is set with a more refined Novel.

Éditions des musées de la Ville de Strasbourg / 252 pages / 24 × 26 cm

Straightforward font foundry TypeMates launches a new shop and website developed with diesdas.digital. For presenting their own typefaces they chose typefaces by other designers for interface and reading elements:

Making great typefaces doesn't prevent from using even better ones.

Novel, a serif by Christoph Dunst, is paired with Commercial Type’s Atlas Grotesk by Susana Carvalho and Kai Bernau. Due to differences in x-height, the light weights of Novel — used for text — are scaled by factor 1.08 to match the regular and bold of Atlas Grotesk — used for smaller interface elements and headlines.

In September 2013, the second edition of Tÿpo St. Gallen took place at the local Schule für Gestaltung. This year’s theme was “Weissraum” (“whitespace”). The puristic visual identity for the typography symposium was built around Christoph Dunst’s Novel Bold (Atlas Font Foundry, 2008).

The letters ‘T’, ‘y’, ‘p’ and ‘o’ were used as decorative wayfinding elements in front of the venue — as a mobile hanging from a tree, and as floating styrofoam objects in a pond. A giant letter ‘y’ made for an impressive speaker’s podium. For technical reasons, it had to lose its hallmark diaeresis in these dimensional applications.

Visual identity: TGG Hafen Senn Stieger
Speaker’s podium and idea for dimensional styrofoam letters: Class for Polydesign 3D under the direction of Doris Schranz, Schule für Gestaltung St. Gallen

Novel was also used on the conference website.

Posted as part of a little survey about websites for conferences on typography and graphic design – how do these specialist events present themselves typographically, in 2013?

Swiss minimalism for Tÿpo St.Gallen: One font only (Novel Pro Bold), no color, lots of white – the theme translates to “whitespace”. Very calm, very clean, but neither aseptic nor boring. When you have a non-standard diaeresis in your name, you don’t need a fancy logo. Novel’s fascinating figures shown at huge sizes and reoccuring details like extreme indents are means enough to build a strong identity. Minor quibble: the schedule is a little confusing – which description belongs to which speaker?

Webfonts: ✓ (1 style, self-hosted)
Designer credits: ✓
Typeface credits: ✗

Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) was a Flemish painter, architect, and interior designer.

From 1902 to 1917, van de Velde was based in Weimar but was engaged throughout Europe, and it was during his time in Weimar that he created some of his greatest works. The dynamic Erfurt-Weimar-Jena region is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Henry van de Velde’s birth in 2013 by highlighting his achievements and those of his associates. Visitors will have the opportunity to acquaint themselves with all aspects of early modern art at a whole series of exhibitions and other events.

Commissioned by the Weimar tourist office, design studio Goldwiege conceived a brochure and a website for the Van de Velde year 2013. They employed two strong colors – dark purple and golden yellow – and a beautiful typeface. Novel was drawn by Christoph Dunst in 2008. In the following year it was amongst the TDC² winners – presumably not least for its adorable italics.

Identity, print materials and website for the “German Design” conference in San Francisco:

[translated from source]

Visual identity for a symposium on change and contemporary German Design. 
Design and development of online and print media.

“German Design: Shaping the Future Today”
San Francisco, October 2, 2012
germandesignconference.com