These pages are from The Culture Keeper, the 2022 edition of the Kresge Foundation’s Eminent Artist Monograph. I was the designer, photographer, and production artist for the book.

The book tells the story of artist Olayami Dabls, whose work often uses found materials such as mirror shards and urbanite. The typography of the book really began with the blocky letters of Alfarn, which was surprisingly similar to the signage on the outside of Dabls’ African Bead Gallery. I utilized the multiple capital widths available in Alfarn, and also created my own extreme letter variations for some of the titles. In April, about midway through production, Alfarn 2 was released, which was carefully lightened a touch to open up the counters, and features a full lowercase and a few new capital glyphs. Stunned at my second instance of Alfarn’s good fortune, I re-set most of the type in Alfarn 2.

For the body text, I used Fern Text, leaning on its translational contrast to offer a friendly anchor to the wild menagerie of type and collage-like art that dominated the reading experience. I set the optical size at 14, four points larger than the text itself, which tightened the justification behaviors very effectively. Subheads in New Spirit complemented Fern’s humanist touches, and I used Skolar Sans Extended for the captions and sidebars.

I found Alfarn’s punctuation somewhat wanting, so I manually replaced each punctuation mark with Ohno Fatface. Even though Fatface doesn’t really fit the whole geometric vs. translational typography of the book, the quotation marks bounced against the hard corners of Alfarn, in the same irreverent way that the artist Dabls would use clashing colors and materials.

This book is available for free to US residents. You can order a printed copy by completing this form. The book is also available as a pdf download.

Event graphics for the book's launch party were designed by Alejandro Herrera, senior graphic designer at the Kresge Foundation, based on the book's design.

Upon learning that the African Bead Gallery would be the subject of the book, my first idea was to create a digital font that followed the cues of this iconic hand-painted sign. Then I found Alfarn, which was shockingly (and blessedly) exactly what I was thinking of.

A spread from the book, title in modified Alfarn. The photo is of a work called Iron Sticking Out Of Wood, part of the African Scripted Language Wall

Fern Variable at work, showing off the small cap numerals

An introductory page showing the use of Ohno Fatface for punctuation with Alfarn

The typographical cover of the book displays many faces in order to recall Bauhaus typography

A precise and previously unpublished archival research collects and reveals the biographical events of all the “girls” of the Bauhaus, the Bauhausmädels. Design historian Anty Pansera involves the reader by transporting them to the fascinating life inside the school where male and female students lived together with masters of the caliber of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Kandinskij, Klee, and free time was shared between parties, readings, political discussions, love stories, exhibitions, artistic performances, music (Bauhaus had its own orchestra), sports; in the background, of course, the tragic rise of Nazism which led to the closure of the academy, the prohibition of practicing for artists, and which forced many of the women (more than 14% were of Jewish origin) to flee and exile, when not to death in a concentration camp.

Published by Nomos Edizioni in Italian, the book shows unpublished archive photos of the school and collects in an extensive infographic some data relating to the Bauhausmädels, while on the back cover and in the flaps there is a visual representation of when our protagonists took part in the life of the school.

The infographic on the flap and inside cover

Chapter openings