The Donatello retrospective shown at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie features branding and visual identity led by two design studios based in Berlin: Polyform and Studio Edgar Kandratian. The studios chose Ogg Display for the show’s typography and messaging. The scale of the project is impressive, and includes the exhibition's advertising campaign, print materials, and gallery text.

Donatello was a prominent figure in the Italian Renaissance. Ogg’s “classical” and refined aesthetic made it quite fitting for the exhibition of the sculptor. The studios’ use of Ogg, from all-caps to all-lowercase to the forward-rolling of the O in the titling, capture the movement and gestures of the typeface, too. Ogg was inspired by its namesake lettering artist’s book jacket designs, and the typeface’s timeless elegance has already made it a contemporary classic.

“Close-ups of the main motifs bring the great emotional power of the works into focus,” says Polyform’s Katrin Middel. “The typography is inspired by ancient and renaissance fonts. A subtle intervention in the typography adapts the orientation of the letters to the viewing directions of the sculptures.”

The physical exhibition closed doors, but you can still take a virtual tour (in German).

Cover of the exhibition catalog.

The Germanic Tribes. Archaeological Perspectives is an exhibition organized by Berlin’s Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum of Prehistory and Early History).

Broken up into seven chapters, the exhibition at the James-Simon-Galerie will offer insights into the archaeology of the communities who populated the area east of the Rhine and north of the Danube between the 1st and 4th century CE, for whom Caesar coined the term Germani to refer to various linguistic and ethnic groups living in this region.

The visual identity and communication for the exhibition were designed by Polyform and Studio Edgar Kandratian. The title Germanen (“Germanic tribes”) is broken up into three lines, maybe to playfully emphasize the etymological link to the modern term German. It’s shown in all lowercase letters, in white against a photographic image of what appears to be fur.

The font in use is Neue Machina Ultrabold. Released in 2019 by Pangram Pangram, Neue Machina is a concentrate of several of the most loved/hated trends and gimmicks in recent typeface design, like (almost) non-joining joins (M N 1 2), single flamboyant glyphs (g), an underbite e, and, of course, ink traps as a stylistic device. In an article for Typographica, Ksenya Samarskaya noted a resurgence of ink traps in 2018:

As a fan of error, serendipity, and misuse, I’ve always enjoyed the winks of oversized ink-trapped type. Though these days, the form falls more and more into pastiche. All these brute cutouts, these abrupt inorganic forms, who’ll likely never manage to trap any ink, mocking their earlier workhorse cousins.

In 2020, these mannered XXL ink traps have finally arrived on the big stage of Berlin’s billboards. In this case, I find them a surprising solution to the challenge of how to typographically express the foreignness of a culture from the dim and distant past, without reverting to faux-Runic letterforms.

Large-format poster in Berlin’s U-Bahn,

Exhibition website. UI design and typeface selection by Studio Edgar Kandratian and Polyform. The UX and the coding is by Smith.

The website pairs all-lowercase Neue Machine for the menu and headlines with text set in Fann Grotesque.