GSAPP Transcripts (2014–2015)
Cover of Group Efforts. This volume uses Concrete Roman.
From Neil Donnelly:
Published by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, GSAPP Transcripts puts lectures and events into print, paired with texts by faculty. The series design is an exercise in stability and variation. Consistency across volumes is reinforced through page size, body type, and layout. Colors, display type, sequence of papers, and the embossing texture on the cover change in response to the content of each volume. Cross references connect transcript and response, linking passages in each section.
Series format and Preservation Is Overtaking Us with Stefan Thorsteinsson; 2000+ and Group Efforts with Sean Yendrys.
I had a hard time identifying the typeface used for the body of the books, and so Donnelly was nice enough to do the work for me, providing some great insight in the process:
The proportional serif in the GSAPP Transcripts series is Matthew Carter’s Olympian, and the mono is a custom face we drew for these books (it’s essentially Olympian Mono).
The display face in the Grafton Architects volume is a digital version of this that I drew, based on lettering called Modern Sans Skeleton by John Vinycomb. He was a printer in Belfast and probably drew this in the late 19th or early 20th century. I was after something with an Irish lineage, and I was drawn both to the simplicity and eccentricity of this.
The Group Efforts cover is Concrete Roman, based on one possible outcome of Donald Knuth’s Metafont.
See more images on neildonnelly.net.
Grafton Architects features Donnelly’s version of Modern Sans Skeleton.
For Preservation Is Overtaking Us, Albertus is used as supporting typeface.
2000+ is distinguished by the use of Antique Olive Black in red, with some custom backward and forward slanting.
1 Comment on “GSAPP Transcripts (2014–2015)”
Really nice!
Finding monospace fonts that pair well with text serifs isn’t easy. Courier is monospace and serif, but quite wide, it tends to look “low” on the page. Assuming you’re not going to be hardcore and draw your own, an little-known option I recommend a lot is Go Mono from Bigelow and Holmes, which is quite condensed and “large-appearing” on the page. It’s quite good for matching density with body text when you need to put in a url in a footnote, like a YouTube link.