In September 2025, Brian Saffer, Art Director at FT Weekend Magazine, reached out to me about the possibilities of using my typeface Sonic Waves. He was working on the cover design for an issue about a misophonia, a hatred of particular noises. Brian Saffer created an uppercase D and added a dot below the question mark, to increase readability.

At the release date of October 11th, an e-mail by a FT reader reached me, pointing out how a typeface I made for the love of music is now used for the opposite purpose. That is not unusual in type design, since we develop tools that are not finished products but will be applied for various purposes by their users.

Sonic Waves was created in 2008 for the online and offline exhibition Into Infinity organised by dublab. As an occasional DJ and designer for the web radio station, I took it on to combine these two practices into one. Inspired by the spectrographic images that Aphex Twin embedded in some of his tracks and waveform art shared in early 2000s IDM forums, I was researching the possibilities of drawing or shaping sound waves into letters. A Mac OS 9 audio software that I was still able to run on my PowerBook enabled me to achieve this. In the mode that made it possible to manipulate the waves, the proportions were horizontal stretched. The process to create the shapes I needed was to work with elliptic outlines on transparent paper that I laid on top of the screen as templates to fill in. The typeface was accompanied by sound files in scales C, C#, B, D and H. The font comprised lowercase letters only, since many uppercase letters would have been difficult, impossible or proportionally awkward to make. The middle line lays at the centre of the x-height. This creates many restrictions which already forced met to set the numbers in italic. Without that trick, 0 and 8 would be indistinguishable.

Opening spread for the article by Samantha Weinberg

The other typefaces used alongside Sonic Waves are all-caps Avenue Mono and the FT’s standard Financier Text.

A Mac OS 9 sound editor with the ability to draw sound waves manually

Audio type specimen: here’s what Sonic Waves sounds like.

This is the first time that Banco de Comercio has undergone a change in identity since its foundation in 1980 (Banco de Comercio was the only bank in the Peruvian financial system that had never changed its identity)

We changed and shortened the name to make it more memorable, simple, and clear. There was confusion among people who thought the bank was only for merchants, so we wanted to avoid that. We also gave the brand a symbol (an isotype) to solve performance problems in digital environments such as internet banking, apps, and social networks. We used the flag as a symbol to represent the achievements and resilience of its clients.

For the brand's color palette, we proposed black as the main color to convey a serious, mature, and professional image. We also added red and purple to accentuate the palette and communicate a more agile, innovative, and modern brand.

We used a modern serif typeface – Financier Text – for the logo, which stands out from the competition and maintains certain traits of the original logo typeface. We complement with a sans serif typeface – A2 London – for the branding system that can adapt to all touch points.

Redesign of the culture and politics magazine il Mulino, founded in 1951. Tomo Tomo studio were inspired by the strength and formal neatness of the magazine covers of the 1960s and 70s. And from there we started to update the magazine. A new simplicity that gives space to the contents and value of the magazine’s texts. This clarity and simplicity of typography is then balanced by a strong chromatic component of the covers, also borrowed from the history of the magazine. The interiors, composed in Financier Text (Klim Type), are focused on legibility for a reading experience that is as pleasant as possible. The new masthead/logo and headlines are instead composed in Union by Radim Peško. The cover artworks are by Cristiana Couceiro. Every issue the two cover colors will be different.

Mikhail Bulgákov (1891-1940) was one of the great Russian satirical writers of the twentieth century and, as such, he could easily have been included in the list of personalities banned or killed by dictator Joseph Stalin – since the regime and the doctrines of the Soviet Union were his main targets. Bulgákov paid dearly for this, and did not come to see any of his most celebrated titles published during his lifetime. However, he did live a relatively protected life under the Stalinist regime, after having, almost inexplicably, fallen into the tyrant’s grace. At the center of this unique situation is the play The Days of the Turbins, now published by Carambaia in a Portuguese translation – Os dias dos Turbin – made directly from Russian by Irineu Franco Perpetuo, who also wrote the preface.

The book has been designed by Brazilian studio Bloco Gráfico, with Russian constructivism in mind. Throughout the book, titles are playfully designed with Euclid Flex Pixel stylistic alternates. The core text of the play is set with Financier Text by Klim. The contrast between the design of the two typefaces is alluding to the conflicts experienced by the Turbin family in the story.

Euclid Flex is part of the Euclid family available from Swiss Typefaces.

Arbetet is the online magazine of LO, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation. The paper dates back to 1921, but despite that I’ve rarely, if ever, seen someone share their web content. Will that change with this fancy new website they’ve now launched?

A streamlined layout with a focus on photography makes up the building blocks, which are then set in a number of typefaces Kris Sowersby. Combining Founders Grotesk’s character with Financier’s elegance makes for a classic, news-y profile updated for the post-news web age.