From Nina Stössinger:

Fresh from the printers: The German edition of the Danish writer Arthur Krasilnikoff’s novel «Das Auge des Wals» (The Eye of the Whale), a wonderful story of a childhood spent in the 1940s’ Faroe Islands, told in 111 short chapters. I have designed and typeset the book.

A wonderful edition from a wonderful designer. The soft FF Legato plays very nicely with harder latin serifs of Patria, at a decidedly readable tempo. Published by Verlag Martin Wallimann and now available from Edition Bücherlese.

Promotional poster

The Nordvest Tour Travelogue is a very different kind of type specimen. It chronicles our nine-day travel across the North Atlantic, following the old viking routes that eventually led Leifr Eiríksson to the discovery of America almost half a millenium before Christopher Columbus. Our travel was a personal one: With sails set for solitude and uncharted waters, the wide horizons of the Faroes Islands has an inexplicable pull. And it serves as a great metaphor for the dedication and dare behind Nina Stössinger’s Nordvest. A useful reversed-contrast text face seems an oxymoron, but Nordvest proves its worth: The sole typographic voice preforms in text, as well as headlines.

The texts explore the language, art and culture of the Faroe Islands. The postage stamps that accompanies each entry are re-set with Nordvest and features work from local artist. The wooden topographic models doubles as abstract landscapes and illustrations.

Editorial work by the Monokrom team, Nina Stössinger, Verena Stössinger and Caren Litherland. Graphic design and photography by Frode Bo Helland. Woodwork by Nikolai Sabel and Frode Bo Helland.

Typologic is Nina Stössinger’s studio for type design, typography, and code, established in fall 2014. The fonts used on the website are Nina’s own FF Ernestine combined with Mallory MicroPlus by Tobias Frere-Jones. Latter was added on the day of its release, December 1, 2015.

Don’t miss the interactive Typologic nameplate, a proof-of-concept that hints at the possibilities of live interpolation of fonts on the web, here with SVG font data.

Detail from the news archive

The designer writes:

Bäume fliehen nicht (“Trees Don’t Flee”), a moving, sensitive and multifaceted historical novel by Verena Stössinger, based on an authentic story and historical documentation; I have designed and typeset the book with great care, trying to lend a soft, quiet, subtly warm form to this gentle, but inquiring approach to jarring wartime memories.

Bäume fliehen nicht is published by Verlag Martin Walliman, and cover image is photographed by Michael Kenna. The book is typeset in Satyr and Octane (unpublished) by Sindre Bremnes.

Basel University’s Sprachenzentrum, its central language teaching/training facility, is celebrating its ten-year anniversary. What started out as an improvised little place staffed by one person has grown into a bustling centre of learning, teaching, and lively exchange, with now more than a thousand students enrolled in its many classes.

For the anniversary festivities I was happy to design this fine 36-page brochure, printed on two different stocks (Tempo for the images, Munken Lynx Rough for the text), along with the accompanying invitation card. The booklet presents a multifaceted image through 18 texts (in different languages) and 12 large photographs by Christian Flierl.

The client gave me the freedom to relate only loosely to existing materials; I adopted the circle (commonly used in their materials – see logo and website) as a design element in different functions, but chose the type freely. I was looking for a combination that would feel “celebratory” enough for the anniversary, but energetic, somewhat “youthful” and a little joyous – basically the opposite of tired and dusty. Siri (especially the Black, for display) and Eames (for text) turned out to make quite a striking combination, crisp and pretty and bold.

When it turned out that portions of the text needed to be set in Russian or Greek, I settled on a compromise setting those from Scotch Micro (which in terms of color, contrast, and proportion clicked quite nicely with the Eames used for Latin, much better than did the regular optical size of Scotch Modern), as I did not want to lose the Eames for the Latin-based majority of the text. For the one Russian title I was thankfully allowed to draw the needed Cyrillic glyphs matching Siri myself.

Ästhetik des Opfers is an academic volume investigating rituals and patterns around sacrifice in different cultures and times. I was commissioned to design the book cover after already having designed a poster and flyer for a conference on the same topic a few years ago. Those older materials (flyer seen here) used a pattern of blood splotches that worked well as an eye-catcher, but the editors preferred something a bit calmer, more distinguished, for the book. After looking back over my earlier research and sketches, we decided on this image of a Viking burial site.

I wanted the type to have a lot of class, radiate intelligence and historical awareness, and also a bit of tension. I experimented with combining centered and right-aligned text; suspended high over the picture, held by a thick asymmetric rule, is the main title in Nick Shinn’s glorious Scotch Modern. For the supporting text, I found that Sindre Bremnes’s Telefon compliments Scotch Modern very well: Despite following a different ductus and referring to two distinct time periods, these two beautifully drawn faces seem to breathe the same air of historical awareness, and compliment each other well.

A few years ago, I was commissioned to design a poster and program flyer for a lecture series at Basel University that focused on the reception, and literary repercussions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses throughout literary history. It was then that I came up with a composite image of the book as traveling suitcase as the central visual.

Last year, when two professors of the same university prepared to edit an academic volume on the same subject, they approached me to reinterpret the design of the poster for the book cover.

I opted to keep the key visual, but what needed a refresh was the typography. The previous materials, designed by a younger and less type-savvy me, had used Frutiger – a solid but not very interesting choice. So for this book cover I switched to Swedish Siri. Besides being a fresher – and not stereotypically Swiss – design, Siri had the advantage of being relatively dense and space-saving, useful for such a verbose title (especially since the editors wished that the subtitle be just as “visible” as the main title). The wide range of weights also came in handy – right down to the thinnest of weights used for the (potential) series ident, “Weltliteratur intertextuell”,  in vertical orientation.

Nina Stössinger:

I am happy to have been commissioned to design a new logo and identity for kobebeef, Marc Rinderknecht's Zürich-based web design & development studio. Fresh and contemporary, the logo aims to make you look twice, coupled with a palette of strong, fresh colors. Logo is based on FF Netto, paired with Abril Text.

Basel-based designer Nina Stössinger has been commissioned to develop the logo and the overall identity for “Mobiles Urbanes Wohnen”. The project included business cards and a simple website.

MUW, which stands for «Mobiles Urbanes Wohnen» (loosely translated as «Mobile Urban Living»), is a Swiss startup specializing in the design and construction of high quality, novel life/work spaces which strike a balance appropriate to modern urban society between comfort, lifestyle, and flexibility.

The website runs on Wordpress and makes use of the iA3 Template, which helps to cater for smaller screen sizes. The logo is set in the baddest style of Erik van Blokland’s Eames Century Modern, the Black Stencil. For the rest, Nina relied on two screen-optimized fonts served by Webtype: Antenna for logo and headings, Benton Modern RE for text.

http://muw.ch/

Identity and printed materials (image folder with product brochures; flyers) for Rainer & Tobias Kyburz, product and furniture designers. In a tight design collaboration the logo/identity, business card, and basic typographic concept were designed by Nina Stössinger, the printed matter by the Basel-based agency Love Letters. The concept uses Supria Sans throughout, also in the logo. In the mark itself the fat initials were drawn from scratch, while the ampersand is slightly tweaked from Dala Floda.

Nina Stössinger:

Maakii Makis are animals with very big eyes, which excel at communicating and know their way around the media jungle. For the Basel- and Cologne-based media production company Maakii I developed this fresh identity that aims to be simple but surprising.

The 'K' and other glyphs were modified.

“Zu bürgerlicher Eintracht und Vertraulichkeit – Ein gartnernzünftiges Geschichtenbuch”, published in November 2011 by Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag, Basel. This 256-page, illustrated storybook celebrates the rich and eventful 750-year history of the Basel Gardeners’ Guild and its complex interconnections with Basel’s local history, with a diverse selection of stories, images, and glimpses into Basel's past.

Nina Stössinger:

New work: Logo, business card & correspondence card (as well as a small, temporary website) for Azenes GmbH, Actuarial Consulting. The core concept for this wordmark was to achieve a tension-filled balance between trustworthy stability and potential dynamism. Type: Breuer Text (tweaked in the logo), combined in printed matter with Ibis Text.

Breuer originally has a horizontal "e" bar (plus all sorts of tapers and stuff, as it's made for text sizes), and I did some pretty heavy tweaking here – including tilting the bar of the "e" to go with the "a".

Invitation card for opening party of Nina Stössinger’s studio. Click to enlarge.

For the eternal question of how to combine typefaces, contrast is often the answer. Look to pair fonts from different classifications, of different weights, or styles. Like Courrier International, this invitation by Nina Stössinger hits all three of those points. The card uses only two fonts: Bureau Grot Black, a heavy bludgeon of a sans, and Whitman, a serif with an elegant italic.

Click to enlarge.

Nina achieved harmony between such opposites within the same paragraph by sizing the type so the x-heights matched. It also helps that, though Whitman was made in 2008, neither typeface is an ultra modern design. They feel like they come from similar eras.