From Eye magazine’s website:

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture.

In Eye 105, Brian Collins offers an energetic take on artificial intelligence, while Marian Bantjes provides a more critical perspective in “Artificial idiot”, investigating the process of working with Midjourney. Rick Poynor’s “The Creative Anarchist” examines Dennis Gould’s fusion of the personal and political in his letterpress practice, and Elizabeth Resnick profiles the quiet yet influential work of Tomoko Miho.

Art-directed by Simon Esterson, Eye 105 is completely typeset in Chassi L and S, from headlines to body text, with Usual used for paragraph titles and captions.

Contents page

Eye, the international review of graphic design, is a printed magazine about graphic design and visual culture. Ravenscar was the guest typeface used throughout issue 107, showing various weights and styles of the four optical sizes.

Fine Black with Display and Text

Fine

Text Regular with Bold and Italic

Eye magazine is a quarterly print magazine on graphic design and visual culture. Each year they dedicate an issue of their magazine to type design. Featuring great names in the type field they interviewed Chantra Malee and Lucas Sharp from Sharp Type, related the journey of Anita Klinz at Mondadori, wrote about the challenges faced by Type Archive, remembered Phil Baines and finally questioned established notions of global type with Toshiya Izumo, TienMin Liao, Borna Izadpanah, and Sam Kim, Siyu Mao and Dokho Shin.

They produced three different covers with the same title set in three different fonts:
1. Sharp Grotesk Black 11, designed by Lucas Sharp of Sharp Type
2. Dash Casual Light, designed by Petra Dočekalová for Typotheque
3. Ceraph, designed by Emma Piercy for Sharp Type

The text inside is set up in Sharp Serif Text, a new text typeface designed by Lucas Sharp and released in spring 2024.

Clay: Themes and Variations from Ancient Mesopotamia imaginatively reworks sixty ancient texts in a multiplicity of styles, reflecting the marvelous variety of the source materials and their inextinguishable relevance in the modern world. The first part of Clay includes tales that have become familiar from other sources: two creation narratives, the Mesopotamian flood story and Gilgamesh. The second part explores themes of sexual love, marriage, birth, death and atonement.

The book was written by Paul Williamson and includes 129 original images by artist Debbie Loftus. The design was provided by Simon Esterson and Leo Field at Esterson Associates. Domaine Text Regular is used across the whole publication. Grey board cover, five stocks across two sections, digitally printed at Pureprint, 340×260mm, 210 pages. Published by Festival O/Modernt.

Eye magazine is an international magazine based in London that has published critical and informed writing on graphic design and visual culture since 1990. Issue No. 99, vol. 25 dives into the ecology of graphic design and business and is set completely in the full range of our typeface, Doyle.

On choosing Doyle, Art Editor Holly Catford said, “[Doyle]’s got so much character. We’ve set it big and bold for Francesco Franchi and Gottschalk + Ash. But we’ve also been able to use it in a restrained, systematic way for the Front Matter and Reviews sections. I love that it’s still got all the fun of Cooper Black, but it’s so usable.”

Read and see more images on Sharp Type News.

Starting from issue N° 11 (June 2017), Pulp features Sole Serif for headlines and text.

Originally designed in 2010 by Luciano Perondi for Italy’s leading financial paper Il Sole 24 Ore, Sole Serif has all the attributes of a newspaper face: big x-height, short ascenders and a roundish and wide italic for text and titles. Nonetheless, details like the inclined axis, calligraphic terminations, Renaissance proportions and a refined but slightly mannered design, all evoke the book rather than the daily paper.

Pulp is a ‘quarterly journal of people and paper’ produced for Fedrigoni in two editions (Italian/English and French/Spanish) by Eye magazine’s editorial staff: John L. Walters, editor, Simon Esterson, art director, Holly Catford, art editor, Sarah Snaith, assistant editor, and Janet South, business manager. Printing techniques, fonts, layouts, graphic and editorial projects, illustrations, photographs, archives, swapping ideas with the people who get all this on the move and all the paper they use for their projects: these are the topics that Pulp has been covering since its first issue (March 2014).

Valor Econômico is the largest financial newspaper in Brazil. It is based in São Paulo and was first launched in 2000. Back then three external designers worked on the project alongside with the newspaper art director, Silas Botelho, the Englishman Simon Esterson, the American John Belknap and the Scotish Ally Palmer.

Gerard Unger’s typeface Coranto 2, a refined newsface with distinctive character and clarity, is put to great use in titles and continuous text.

Pulp 01–04

Pulp is a “quarterly journal of people and paper” produced by Eye magazine’s John Walters (editor) and Simon Esterson (art director) for Fedrigoni. The first issue debuted with some Miller Banner, but most of the pages are set in Scotch Modern Display for headlines with Century Expanded (an Esterson favorite) for text. The logo is based on Futura Black. Pulp is produced in two editions: Italian/English and French/Spanish. I particularly admire the way the designers handle the bilingual content on these pages. Everything feels roomy, dynamic, and non-repetitive, which is not an easy task when setting the same stuff twice. (Credit also goes to the editorial staff for limiting the text.)

In 2015, Esterson was awarded “Art Director of the Year” by the British Society of Magazine Editors for his work on Pulp.

Pulp 01

Pulp 01

Outer paper for Pulp 01.

Pulp 01 with Franklin Gothic. “Big” is from a project covered in the editorial content that used Miller Banner.

Issue 01

Pulp 02

Pulp 03

Pulp 06

Pulp 06

Pulp 06

Pulp 06. A nice way to handle the two languages.

Pulp 06

Pulp 06

magCulture just posted a good redesign rundown of the UK’s young Mid Century magazine:

“Simon Esterson and Holly Catford have provided a modernist design that is a perfect foil for the content. Features open with Futura headlines on fields of colour taken from the subsequent room shots. This allows the photography to be take up whole spreads without interruption, particularly important in the tight 170 x 240mm format. Like the headlines spreads, pull-quotes take their colour cue from the images, while the lengthy picture captions stick to a dark cyan.”

The stencil typeface used for the magazine’s logo and large headlines is Lineto’s Le Corbusier, a font family that Nico Schweizer and Phillipe Desarzens derived from old zinc stencil sets. Despite the name of the typeface, Le Corbusier did not invent these letters, but they are very much in tune with his aesthetic.

The big and bold use of Futura in Mid Century is reminiscent of the glorious modern identity for London’s Barbican Arts Centre, so despite the obviousness of Futura for a mid-mod mag, I commend its application here.

Finally, if the goal is typical type of mid-century design, Century Expanded is a good choice for text. The handful of uses in our Collection show that it was a popular typeface in the 1950s and ’60s.

Big, bold, tight Futura + orange = The Barbican.