Typographics 2016 branding

Typographic identity designed for Typographics 2016, an annual festival held in New York City that explores the roots of modern typography and current trends in the field. Each year, more than 600 design professionals and type enthusiasts attend.

For 2016, the team’s designers chose the typefaces Eames Century Modern Stencil and Eames Century Modern, designed by Erik van Blokland for House Industries, as the central branding tool for the festival. It proved to be extremely versatile. On the one hand, it worked as legible, appealing typeface for print and digital media; on the other, Eames Stencil’s curves and forms, when seen in close-up, made exciting patterns that were still recognizable as shapes derived from letterforms. The team used red and blue, and superimposed them on each other to create purple elements that worked well for collateral materials, such as a step-and-repeat wall, a tote bag, and large-scale signage. The curves of the playful sans serif Mallory, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones, made an excellent secondary typeface for body copy that complemented Eames Stencil.

An added benefit of Eames is its extensive selection of arrows and borders built into the typeface that the team had a lot of fun working with. The name badge design was made by using a script to generate endless variations by combining the border designs with the color. The script also scaled the size of the type for the first and last names of each attendant to create perfectly justified lock-ups. The range of arrows were turned into a fun photo-op background.

See also a previously published post on Fonts In Use that focused on the Typographics 2016 website.