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.

Deus ex Machina is a lifestyle brand rooted in Sydney, Australia. It was founded by Dare Jennings in 2006 and, at first, revolved around motorcycling, surfing, music and fashion. The mothership in Sydney, baptized with a wink “temple of boyish enthusiasm” still exists and plays a major role, but since the majority of the business went to a group of mainly Italian investors in 2017, the company meanwhile took its official seat in Milan. The shift behind the scenes had to do with the will to expand the business globally. Apart from uncountable points of sale, Deus ex Machina, in 2024, runs thirteen flagship stores called temples, either directly or under license, from Tokyo to Cape Town and Los Angeles. Far from being standardized, these stores each offer their own mix of products, services, food and community events.

The item featured in this post is a functional jacket named “Plenty“ from the Deus Customs series. Black and of a no-nonsense straight cut, it was designed at the Deus House of Simple Pleasures in Camperdown, Sydney. Its highlights are purely typographic and feature Brush Script (“Plenty Good”), an American classic from the 1940s, and Enfantine (“Deus Customs”), a script typeface designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée from Production Type. While the calligraphic idea behind the first is that of a pointed brush used in sign painting, Enfantine distinguishes itself by monolinear strokes, a wide rhythm with open counters, and by standing upright, a feature seldomly found in script typefaces.

Deus ex Machina (god from the machine) roared into Australia’s cultural consciousness in 2006, with some neatly customised motorcycles and a quaint notion that doing something is more fun than just owning something. Deus ex Machina is a step bigger than a brand: it’s a culture. Our openness and enthusiasm strike a chord with people, wherever they are…

Deus (“day-us”) didn’t set out only to sell custom parts and hand-built motorcycles, but to celebrate a culture of creativity. The Deus ex Machina showroom/cafe/headquarters in Sydney immediately became a shrine to ‘run-what-you-brung’ resourcefulness and street-honest industrial art. — Deus

Alias Harbour is adapted in a couple of ways for this Moto-inspired jersey. The D and S are expanded to a wing design for the DEUS type, and the EX MACHINA type is stencilled.