Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the combined efforts of social distancing and #stayathome to keep our communities safe and healthy, most shops need to temporarily close their doors. Especially small- and medium-sized businesses are already hit hard and in a miserable economic situation. The city of Saarbrücken as well as Saarland, a smallish German federal state bordering France and Luxembourg, are no exception: the local retail scene is in clear danger.

#mirsinndo (Saarland dialect for “We’re (still) here”) is a lightweight, non-profit and free platform for local shops and small businesses. It helps communicating their “newly established” services a little easier in times where owners (and their clients) don’t know about what comes next. Some offer free deliveries by e-scooters, others online lessons. A local hairdresser even delivers hair colors. People are getting inventive.

In an effort to also support upcoming type design, the site uses two Future Fonts: Fancy Gig for headlines, reminiscent of local corner-shop lettering, and monospaced Arnold for everything else to evoke a feeling of friendly correspondence.

The site runs on smallvictori.es, a file-based CMS running out of a shared Dropbox folder.

Homepage

Bunkhouse.de — the website of independent German filmmaker Philipp Majer and his film production company Bunkhouse — uses GT Cinetype by Grilli Type, a typeface based on a design that was engineered for a cinema subtitling machine.

The website was conceptualized by Zymryte Hoxhaj and Manuel Wesely, designed by Manuel and developed by Bernd Schmitt.

Philipp’s work is divided into two sections: an area for full-length documentaries (with their own pages) and a grid view for his daily client work. Yellow subtitles help navigating (“Go Home”, “Play movie!”) and provide additional information, such as project titles. In the future, we plan to expand these subtitles to dynamic comment on the visitor’s behavior: Is she scrolling? Is he moving his cursor to certain things? Is she clicking, waving, searching, playing, reading?

As soon as the subtitle idea came up, it was clear which font to choose.

Once more the homepage, but with different video timestamps.

On the website, each documentary film has its own page with custom background colours (or gradients) and film credit information. Visitors can explore back and forth through the documentaries by clicking previous and upcoming titles in the black band above the documentary.

The yellow subtitle will display player states, project titles or Bunkhouse messages.

Bunkhouse’s other catalogue of work is organized in a TV-news ticker style through three filters: editing, music and industry.

Results for ‘Music’.

Side by side: ‘About Philipp Majer’ (the filmmaker), and ‘About Bunkhouse’ (the film production company).

Fun Toilet Facts is a series of diagrams and was contributed to Bureau Stabil’s toilet-themed fanzine “Klolektüre” (toilet read). The entry uses (then newly released) Granville, a modulated sans by Production Type. The crescent moon in Average loudness of toilet flush is a Webdings glyph.

Bureau Stabil published the fanzine to support WiWo e.V.’s “Mpigi & Tiiti School Project”, a local fundraising event. WiWo is a Saarbrücken-based charity group of like-minded friends with diverse projects. Back then, they were supporting an Ugandan elementary school with plans and help for new toilet facilities.