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ArtReview’s website is potentially the only place on the Internet so far to use Lexicon (its No.2 variant) as a web font.

Headlines and other functional elements are set in Monotype’s Neue Haas Unica.

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Nizioleti (Abyme, 2017) in use on the cover of the April 2022 issue of ArtReview, reporting from the Venice Biennale. The cover was designed by Pedro Cid Proença at ArtReview.

Nizioleti was originally designed – and named – after the street signs of Venice (“nizioleti”) for the identity of the 2012 Venice Biennale by John Morgan studio – who also redesigned ArtReview in 2013.

The magazine is set in Lexicon throughout. Its masthead is based on Haas Unica.

Philip Surey applies gold leaves onto the painted letters.

Inscriptions designed by John Morgan studio for The Order of St Augustine’s Church in Hammersmith, London, restored and refurbished by Roz Barr Architects (completed February 2018). This is the first application of the typeface Persona, released by Abyme in June 2022. Persona is a display sans serif based on Hans Möhring’s Florida (c. 1931) and inspired by Renaissance letterforms characteristic of the Florentine architecture, painting and sculpture of the fifteenth century.

Inscriptional text is set in a new cast iron light ring suspended above the altar, also designed by Roz Barr Architects, and gilded across the apse wall and below the Stations of the Cross by Philip Surey.

The inscription on the apse wall reads: Qui vult vivere, habet ubi vivat, habet unde vivat. Accedat, credat ut incorporetur, ut vivificetur (Those who long for life have here its very source. Let them come here and believe, unite with You and live).

Read more about the project at the Abyme Revue and at The Architect’s Journal.

The apse wall and cast iron light ring.

Gilded apse wall inscription.

Gilded apse wall inscription.

Cast iron light ring inscription.

Phil Surey painting the Stations of the Cross.

From the publisher's website :

Anna Nyburg’s Émigrés: The Transformation of Art Publishing in Britain examines the impact on the British illustrated publishing industry of émigrés from Germany and Austria in the first half of the twentieth century, looking in particular at the art publishing houses of Phaidon Press and Thames & Hudson.

Amongst these German-speaking émigrés was a 30-year old Berthold Wolpe, who went to enjoy a remarkable career in Britain as a book designer at Faber & Faber and a type designer for the Monotype Corporation. It thus seems only natural that John Morgan studio picked two of Wolpe’s signature typefaces, Fanfare (1937–1939) and Pegasus (1938), for the cover of the book.

The inside pages add their own typographic flavour to the whole project, with Bram de Does’ Lexicon No1 (the one with short ascenders and descenders) being used in one weight and two sizes only.

Park Books:

An exploration of the role of narrative, history, appropriation and craft in the work of London based 6a Architects.

D&AD:

The design, developed by John Morgan, is inspired by the processes of bricolage, which is also a prominent influence on the work featured in the book. The large type size, combined with black and white photographs, focuses the images on the ideas, drawing new connections between them and allowing chapters to be read as independent pieces or as parts of a larger discussion.

John Morgan Studio:

First published in 1981, AA Files is the Architectural Association’s journal of record. It contains essays and articles on architectural history and criticism, work by contemporary practitioners and designers, photography and art. It was redesigned by John Morgan studio in 2008, from issue 57 onwards.

“There are two ways of looking at graphic design. You can over value technological change. The technological-revolution-that-is-changing-everything is all that matters. You would then consider only the very latest innovations in design as being meaningful. The ipad magazine app that came out last week that “shows us the future of magazines”. The phone coming out next week with a swizzy new screen that displays text with unparalleled clarity. With this view, any design that is not about exploiting technology is regarded as pretty much passé. Irrelevant. Another way of looking at design is that you can see it as a continuum. That the challenges of making magazines, for example, are essentially the same today as they were twenty or forty or sixty years ago. This argument says that although the media that deliver us the reading experience are changing by the hour – our eyes and brain are not changing, and that the experience of reading and looking are pretty much the same as they always have been.

AA Files is produced using some of the latest technology, but produced as old technology. A magazine, printed with ink on paper. But, in its old-fashioned way, I think AA Files is a fabulous example of both design and content. A perfect marriage of the two. Magazines need to be attractive, clear, powerful, coherent and identifiable, and yet full of incident and change. Magazine the word is derived from the Arabic for a store-house (transliterated as makhzan). AA files is a magical store-house. For what is ostensibly a magazine about architecture – the house magazine for members of the Architectural Association – the content is the freest possible definition of architecture and its concerns.” — Quentin Newark, 2011

The magazine uses Big Caslon for masthead and numbering on the otherwise empty front page. Inside, Arnhem is complemented by its finer self for headlines.

John Morgan Studio:

We produced a new graphic identity for the international architectural practice in 2008. The scope of works covered design of all printed and electronic matter for offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai. The extensive identity manual and the design of over 200 templates enables the practice to produce communication items sympathetically and efficiently in house.

The identity is about as stripped down as you can get, employing white, white and more white. Occasionally we get a glimpse of DCA Grotesque, a custom cut of Monotype Grotesque featuring, among other features, a custom ligature for the logotype.

[…] we worked closely with Robin Nicholas from Monotype to create a new bespoke weight of Monotype Grotesque to fill the gap between the existing regular and the more ‘grotesque’ bold. The medium weight is closer in character form to the regular weight and is used as a substitute for the bold. In addition to the new weight, the character spacing and fit of the whole type family (light, roman and bold) was refined.

John Morgan studio has been art-directing high-profile art magazine ArtReview since September 2013. For the “Future Greats” issue, Morgan and his staff channelled their inner Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) and emulated the layout of BLAST, the short-lived Vorticist revue launched by Lewis in 1914 (see image below, as well as the dedicated entry).

The typeface on the cover is most likely Stephenson Blake’s Grotesque No.9, which had indeed been used in the original, groundbreaking pages of BLAST. The one for the masthead looks very much like a modified version (an intermediate weight between Regular and Medium) of Team77’s Haas Unica.

Page from the first issue of BLAST (1914)

Working with John Morgan Studio, Monokrom created a new typeface – a variation of the Vinter family – for the visual identity of Royal Drawing School. The new styles will be included in an upcoming expansion of the Vinter family.