Houstonia Magazine, July 2014 — Best Mexican Restaurants

Samples from the July 2014 issue of Houstonia magazine — a city magazine out of Houston, Texas. The cover story is “Mexican Gold” about the 50 Best Mexican Restaurants in Houston. I chose the relatively new typeface Icebox, by Cyrus Highsmith and Font Bureau, to bring a little fun into the package. The “magnetic letter” style typeface reminded me of the papel picado banners often used as decoration in the Mexican restaurants of the area. To mimick this, I used the typeface for display, mainly in a variety of colors and attached to a “string” rule, like banners. I also used Icebox in it’s typical upper/lowercase style for smaller detail listings such as the “Fast Facts” sidebars — which you can see a detail of below. For the cover, the word “Mexican” was a customized version of the typeface that was integrated with a “50” in Turnip and “Plus” and “to die for” in Quiosco. 

I believe this usage of Icebox was so successful that we’re looking to expand the use of it in the magazine moving forward. Other typefaces used in the design of Houstonia are Font Bureau classics such as Turnip, Quiosco and Salvo Sans — evident in the images.