Deus ex Machina – “Pipes” and “Nimbus” apparel

Deus ex Machina is a lifestyle brand rooted in Sydney, Australia. We recently featured a no-nonsense jacket from their collection. This time we’d like to share two apparel prints that are undoubtedly about having fun – fun with content, and fun with fonts.

The first one is a T-shirt titled “Pipes”. In it, a cartoon from the Andy Capp series, very famous in Great Britain and Australia, stands central. It depicts a man playing a phantasy instrument reminiscent of bagpipes. The punchline below reads “loud pipes save lives” which is a famous excuse among motorcyclists to justify the noise of their machines. This line as much as the brand name above the drawing displays Cardinal Fruit, a sub-family in the larger Cardinal collection designed and published by Production Type under the guidance of Jean-Baptiste Levée. Cardinal Fruit is a condensed roman style referencing the advertising aesthetics of the 1980s, especially in the field of personal computers. “Deus Recs and Publishing” is added in Grilli Type’s GT America Mono.

The prints on the “Nimbus” shirts and longsleeves feature Cardinal Fruit, too. It’s used for the brand name, combined with Deerfield JNL, a boxy all-caps sans designed by Jeff Levine, for “Worldwide Service Manual”. Here the “meaning” of the message goes deliberately bananas: “We’ve tipped the cap to the modern day grovers and gone all out on the logo-heavy, non-sensical slogan vibe, added a few flashes of color and voila: a long sleeve set to lift even the most pessimistic of outlooks.”

To be complete, additional fonts visible in the images are Cal Fraktur Modern, Windsor, and Eurostile.