With works that exuded cool elegance and transgressive sensuality, Tamara de Lempicka (1894–1980) helped define Art Deco. Her paintings captured the glamour and vitality of postwar Paris and the cosmopolitan sheen of Hollywood celebrity. This exhibition at the de Young is the first major museum retrospective of Lempicka in the United States.

Lempicka’s work is characterized by bold lines, geometric, and angular shapes. Her figures possess a volumetric presence and monumental scale within the frame, often situated against the backdrop of a looming cityscape.

To create a backdrop for the graphic identity, we borrowed visual cues from the kind of narrow hypervertical linearity found in Art Deco architecture, vertical slat blinds, and corrugated glass. Vertical panels functioned as a backdrop and recurring visual motif within the marketing campaign and the exhibition space.

Because the vertical panel gradient referenced the Art Deco period, we wanted to contrast that by using a contemporary sans serif that brings this exhibition into the present day. For the title lock-up, Pirelli lent itself well to a tight stacked orientation which gives it a clean and concise expression.

The Legion of Honor was the sole West Coast venue for the first major exhibition of Tudor portraiture, textiles, sculpture, silver, jewelry, and manuscripts in the United States. The exhibition followed the development of the arts in England from Henry VII’s seizure of the throne in 1485 to the death of his granddaughter Elizabeth I in 1603.

We sought to capture the typographic zeitgeist of the Renaissance through the mixed use of Blackletter (Respira Black) paired with Humanist Roman (Dear Sir/Madam). The text is either fully justified or creates conical shapes using a kind of tapered typesetting. Inspired by the hyper-ornamentation of book artistry from this era, the primary lock-up variation is finished by a dingbat in the shape of the Tudor Rose, the heraldic emblem of the House of Tudor. The exhibition title wall featured gilded three dimensional letters using gold leaf foil. For aided legibility, a custom T was created.

Graphic identity: Lizzie Baur
Exhibition graphics: Meghan Moran, Kate Agarwal
Exhibition design: Xiaoxi Chen, Tristan Telander
Art direction: Amy Browne, Benjamin Shaykin, Alejandro Stein
Installation photography: Gary Sexton

Sunset Gothic is used for the identity of Alice Neel: People Come First, the first comprehensive West Coast retrospective of Neel’s work hosted by the de Young museum. The exhibition includes depictions of Neel’s neighbors in Spanish Harlem, political leaders, queer cultural figures, activists, and mothers, along with a diverse representation of nude figures, including visibly pregnant women. Neel's "pictures of people" embody a rare candor and irreverence.

Sunset Gothic is a painterly sans-serif rendered in the tradition of Los Angeles sign-painters. Throughout her life, Neel was very politically active and cared deeply about social justice. Drawing on Neel’s activism and the kind of spontaneous hand-lettering that is produced for protests, Sunset Gothic's expressive and humanistic qualities felt like an appropriate extension of Neel’s artistic approach. The addition of the underline references the signature blue contour outline featured in Neel's paintings.

Design: Lizzie Baur
Art direction: Amy Browne and Ben Shaykin
Exhibition design and graphics: Tristan Telander and Katrina Coulourides

Animation for digital promotion

Rack card (left) and invitation (right)

On site signage

Street pole banner

Poster

In gallery wall text set in Sunset Gothic

Grand Slang is used for the identity of Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy, an exhibition at the Legion of Honor museum that charts the trajectory of Guo Pei’s career as a leader in the fashion world in the early twenty-first century. Through exquisite craftsmanship, lavish embroidery, and unconventional dressmaking techniques, Guo Pei creates a fantasy that fuses the influences of China’s imperial past, decorative arts, European architecture, and the botanical world.

Guo Pei’s body of work demonstrates a vast imagination that results in great stylistic variety. Although there is no singular language that defines each collection, her vision is dominated by the notion of world-building, fantasy, and theatricality.

Focusing on the craft of the garments, the exhibition title lock-up was designed to behave like textiles through the creation of custom ligatures, interlocking letterforms together to create a pattern or texture. This treatment references not only the medium of textiles but also conjures images of the garden, root structures, as well as architecture—all recurring visual motifs in Guo Pei's designs.

Design: Lizzie Baur
Art direction: Amy Browne, Ben Shaykin, Alejandro Stein
Exhibition design and graphics: Chris Busch and Kate Agarwal

On-site signage

Wallscape

Poster

Black-tie invitation (front & back)

Black-tie invitation (interior)

Exhibition title animated and projected at gallery entrance

Grand Slang used for wall text titling

A little tilting to the left, some skewing to the right – that’s about all what designer Benjamin Shaykin needs to emulate a perspective view of Broadway’s neon signs with typographic means. No cheap glow effects, no flamboyant multitude of colors. Just a carefully composed interplay of angles and sizes, in two shades of red, with sprinkles of illuminated windows in the background that hint at the depth of the nocturnal streetscape.

The typeface choice is perfect. Ohm by Type Supply comes in three weights; Light, Medium (outlined), and Bold (multiline), all of which have here been used together. A stray O from the Light was sneaked into a word set in the Medium, representing the inescapable broken letter, nervously flickering high above the night owls. Ohm’s blocky caps with their tube-like contours are contrasted with the hundreds of light bulbs from Superpois, a dotted sans by studiocharlie that is used for the subheading. The author’s name is shown in caps from Router by MCKL.

Bernstein Meets Broadway. Collaborative Art in a Time of War “offers an in-depth look at the emerging career of Leonard Bernstein”. The book by Carol J. Oja, William Powell Mason Professor of Music and American Studies at Harvard University, was published in Oxford University Press’s Broadway Legacies series.

Wordmark

Media Sans is used for the identity of Early Rubens. The exhibition at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco presented works by Flemish master painter Peter Paul Rubens. On display from April 6 to September 8, 2019, the show focused “on what is arguably the artist’s most innovative period of production, from 1608 until about 1620. It was during these years that Rubens rose to the highest ranks of European painting.”

The Media Collection by Production Type spans five subfamilies with fonts of different widths. For the compact lockup used on invites, tickets, postcards and other collateral, the museum’s designers worked with the Black weight from Media Sans Condensed, in two lines of all caps. A similar treatment featuring the wider SemiCondensed was employed for the exhibition title and the section panels in the exhibition. Media Sans is paired with Domaine Sans Text by Klim Type Foundry.

Typography & Design: Jerod Rivera
Art Direction: Amy Browne
Animation: Ben Shaykin
Exhibition Typography and Treatments: Tristan Telander & Kate Agarwal

Animation used for announcing the exhibition on social media.

Exhibition title in Media Sans Condensed Black.

The panels use Media Sans Condensed Black for the section title and the drop cap. Body copy is set in Domaine Sans Text.

Invitation (front and back)

Postcard (front)

Postcard (back)

VIP ticket

Invitation (inside)

In the exhibition.

Benjamin Shaykin’s cover for Eric Hofbauer and Dylan Jack’s Remains of Echoes.

Benjamin Shaykin calls this design “a cover cover for an album of covers.” Improvisational duo Eric Hofbauer and Dylan Jack’s Remains of Echoes consists entirely of cover songs. Its title loosely riffs on lyrics from Jimi Hendrix’s “Up from the Skies” (one of the tracks featured here), which appeared on Hendrix’s second album, Axis: Bold as Love. Faint echoes of that cover resurface in the flurry of colored dots Shaykin unleashes among the repeating, stacked, all-caps lines set in Tobias Frere-Jones’s Garage Gothic. The liner notes by music historian David R. Adler use Berton Hasebe’s Styrene B (with its alternate double-storey a) for running text.

Another possible echo (to my eyes): Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar’s Vibrations cover. It’s covers all the way down.

The liner notes by music historian David R. Adler use a gutsy, fresh pairing of Garage Gothic with Styrene B.

Influence: Axis: Bold as Love → Remains of Echoes

Influence: Axis: Bold as Love → Remains of Echoes

Poster (22×31 in.) and identity materials for the 2011 RISD Grad Show.