A student project made by Arina Levitskaya at HSE Art and Design School supervised by Evgeny Korneev, Москва утопическая (“Moscow Utopian”) is a book on how social utopias shaped Moscow’s architectural image during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, what ‘factory kitchens’ were built for, and why the so-called paper architecture is valuable. The book’s typography is set in CSTM Xprmntl 02 Italic by CSTM Fonts and Oceanic Text by Interval Type.

Русские в Африке (“Russians in Africa”) is a book that explores — through art, poetry, and philosophy — how Soviet Russia of the mid-20th century tried to understand the culture of African countries. The book, published in 2023 by ABCDesign, was designed by Katya Yumasheva. The typography in the publication is executed using CSTM Xprmntl 02 Bold by CSTM Fonts and Geometria by Brownfox.

Каким быть человеку?, 2023

Sheila Heti is a modern Canadian author. The covers of her two autofiction novels, translated into Russian and published by No Kidding Press, are set in Xprmntl 02 Italic by CSTM Fonts. The books were designed by Holystick.

Чистый цвет, 2022

Katarzyna Konieczka is a renowned Polish costume and avant-garde fashion designer. She has created outfits for many world-famous stars such as Madonna, Lady Gaga, Bella Hadid, and Jennifer Lopez to name a few. Her works, often prepared for photoshoots, have frequently appeared in prestigious fashion magazines. They have also been used in numerous music videos and directly on film sets. CNN has recognized her as one of the ten most promising fashion designers of the future. Our task was to create a comprehensive identity for the KONIECZKA brand.

Idea by Anna Holik, Daniel Naborowski and Adam Chyliński. Design by Anna Holik, Ola Misztela, and Basia Kowal, with art by Anna Holik.

Hosted at Somerset House in London, co-curated by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard and Claire Catterall, The Horror Show! was a journey to the underbelly of Britain’s cultural psyche. The exhibition presented an alternative perspective on the last five decades of modern British history in three acts – Monster, Ghost and Witch. Recast as a story of cultural shapeshifting, each section interpreted a specific era through the lens of a classic horror archetype with thematically linked contemporaneous, new works and a survey of the counter-culture of the time. We were tasked with designing all 2-D aspects of the show. The graphics inside the exhibition, the marketing, publicity and the catalogue. Each one needed to fit seamlessly with the other and explain the complexity of the exhibition in a sympathetic form.

To accompany the exhibition, The Horror Show! catalogue is constructed with a unique, irregular concertina fold. When closed, this features a “Frankenstein’s monster” face, grotesquely confronting the viewer. Whilst once open and fully extended, it is revealed that the face is made up of photographs of artworks and cultural figures from in the show. This collaged cut-up is a metaphor for British society, consisting of the mainstream and counter-culture, the two constantly pressing and grinding against each other. The back of the catalogue features the main collage used in the publicity for the show, with the addition of a very important key, so that you understand who everybody is in the image.

Once you have opened the catalogue, you are confronted with three sections which, as in the show, are designed completely differently from each other with contrasting typography and paper stocks for each. The Introduction section is dark black and takes its styling from the combined spaces in the show. Monster puts on the stinking clothes of Punk DIY. Ghost is grey and washed out, never fully materialising on the page. Witch is bold, proud, modern and old – daring you to disagree.

The catalogue design needed to refer to the decades in the exhibition – the 70s, 80s, 90s and onwards but also be something very contemporary. This meant a selection of fonts which referred to the era of the ‘feeling’ of each section but were used in a contemporary way. They are thrown up against each other in ugly juxtapositions, symbolising how counter-culture needs to push into the mainstream to change us all and move creativity and society forward. The layouts also referred to this historical context. The Monster section is based on the 70s and 80s and is an updated version of the DIY punk fanzine. Ghost is ethereal, with typography almost not there. Witch is bold, alchemic, and strongly gothic but looks towards the future as much as the past.

The title on the spine brings together Ouroboros, Infidel, Trickster, Nylon & Draylon, Bastard, Virus VujaDe, Terminal Grotesque, Tourette Extreme, and Bradley DJR (for the exclamation mark). The O’s are custom drawn pictograms.

Back cover: “A twisted tale of modern Britain” combines Ouroboros, Serpiente Display, Trickster, and Nylon & Draylon.

Text inside the mouth is set in Combat. The fonts used for the “MONSTER” letters include Ouroboros, Bastard, Trickster, Fleshy Font, and Newspeak

Spread with text set in T1 Korium and Combat. “Freak Scene” combines Gandur Alte with Trickster. Year dates are from Zloy.

The “Ghost” letters are taken from Lapicide and Marian Black. The italic for the text on the ear is from Faust.

More Marian Black and Lapicide, with Melancholia Italic used for captions

Captions feature Faust Italic, upright Melancholia, numerals from Gosna, and Tourette Normal.

The text on the left half of the eye is set in Ni Resolution Blackletter. The “WITCH” letters are from Infidel, Nylon & Draylon, Ni Resolution Blackletter, Virus VujaDe, and Prototype.

Titles feature overlapping letters from Ni Resolution Blackletter and Nylon & Draylon. The byline is in Terminal Grotesque, the text in Larish Alte.

More text in Larish Alte, with initials and page numbers from Ni Resolution Blackletter

Depo is a restaurant in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, with a constantly changing menu, regular music nights and film screenings. On its social media, Depot uses a mix of Georgian and English and two styles from the Xprmntl 02 family, Bold and Italic. Entering the restaurant, guests see the logo set in Loos. The identity of the restaurant was designed by one of its founders, Grigory Samgin, and the logo was designed by Yuri Ostromentsky who is also a co-designer of both Xprmntal and Loos.

Read the entire article on the type.today website.

NATI (НАТИ, Russian abbreviation for New Archive of Limited Edition Art) is an initiative of Shaltai Editions gallery, an homage to the project conceived by Moscow Conceptualist artists Andrey Monastyrsky, Lev Rubinstein, Nikita Alexeev back in the 1980s. They packed the works of artists close to their circle into folders, calling them the Moscow Archive of New Art, MANI (МАНИ). Each participant put a new work they wanted to submit into an envelope, while a compiler brought all the envelopes under one cover and wrote an accompanying text.

From the interview with the designer Maria Rudakova:

When it became clear that the construction would be made of metal and plexiglass, I started looking for a typeface that I would associate with these materials — Brutalist and wide. I decided to play with justification — and found out that Metal was a perfect fit for it. I chose the № 8 style — it has a certain balance, not too stretched and not too narrow. The typeface does the large part of the work for you in page headers and at large sizes — even two words on the line look good.

Read the entire article on our website.

For the contribution Visit by Boris Groys, CSTM Xprmntl 02 Italic by Yury Ostromentsky was used.

Peru 1982 is a self-published book by London-based photographer Tony Hutchings. In the early 1980s, he undertook a six month road trip across the South America country in an old Volkswagen Beetle, documenting the landscape, culture and people that he encountered.

The title is set in CSTM Xprmntal 02 Bold, available from Tomorrow.

Used by the indigenous peoples of the Americas for millennia, it was only in the last decade of the 19th century that the powerful effects of mescaline began to be systematically explored by curious non-indigenous Americans and Europeans. Mike Jay looks at one such pioneer Havelock Ellis who, along with his small circle of fellow artists and writers, documented in wonderful detail his psychedelic experiences.

This is a web republication of the original essay by Mike Jay. Essay has been adapted from a section in Mike Jay’s Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic published by Yale University Press in 2019. The original can be found on Public Domain Review.

Titles and (animated) drop cap: CSTM Xprmntl 02 Italic (Yury Ostromentsky, CSTM Fonts). Text set in Plantin (Frank Hinman Pierpont), with captions and marginal notes in Freight Micro (Joshua Darden).

In July 2019, four movies directed by Italian legend and master of horror Lucio Fulci were re-released in France in selected movie theaters. For this retrospective event, the distribution company Les Films du Camélia created a unique poster and a video trailer. Each movie gets its own distinctive typeface: Perversion Story (Una Sull’altra | One on Top of the Other) is set in Ohno Blazeface, L’emmurée vivante (Sette note in nero | The Psychic) uses an unidentified condensed sans, La longue nuit de l’exorcisme (Non si sevizia un paperino | Don’t Torture a Duckling) features CSTM Xprmntl 02 Bold, and Le venin de la peur (Una lucertola con la pelle di donna | A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) is presented in Plinc Cooper Nouveau. The general typefaces of the mini-festival are Chercán and Knockout.

Like I did in the past, I can legitimately assume that the designer once again used Fontstand for its design, as the identified typefaces (except Knockout) are all available on this platform for renting fonts.

“Non-central Moscow” is a student project made by Viktoria Makeeva at the HSE Art and Design School in Moscow. The typography uses the Regular, Bold and Italic weight of CSTM Xprmntal 02, a set of three stylistically different typeface explorations by CSTM Fonts.

This visual research is part of a thesis on branding in Central Moscow. VI considers the phenomenon of noncentrality, the main characterizing its concepts. VI is made in the genre of the author's book and is inspired by the alphabet. Under each letter is the concept from Central Moscow, its definition and photographic materials. — hse.ru

See more images on the school’s website.