For its September 2019 issue, W magazine examined the current state of fashion. The magazine includes an in-depth photographic exploration of different styles spotted on catwalks in 2019. In addition, a more global question remained: who embodied a modern sense of style during the year? The editorial crew chose four personalities from the film and fashion industry, each one having their own cover, in order to try and answer the question “What is fashion now?”

The title on these covers is set in Stunt from Production Type. The question is focused on contemporariness and how it can be grasped: the title renders this urge through the use of caps, but also through the very shapes of Stunt. This typeface is a contemporary sans that plays with contrast. Its huge x-height makes any information direct, straight-forward, immediately legible and visible. These features catch the eye, as much as a modern sense of fashion does.

Stunt is paired in the interior pages with Ayer and Ayer Deck from Commercial Type. The text typeface is W’s standard Whitman by Font Bureau. The delicate Ayer reminds us of yet another dimension of fashion, which is sophistication. Regarding Ayer, a calligraphic touch is welcome in the layout, a remembrance of all the manual work in haute couture, one of the last fields where calligraphy is used to symbolize luxury.

Tying in with its famous collaborations, W magazine produced a special issue called “Director’s Cut”. For this edition, the magazine invited four film directors – Alfonso Cuaròn, Yorgos Lanthimos, Spike Lee, and Marielle Heller – to create a cinematic photoshoot staging actresses they consider as their muses. This led to four different stories where cinema and fashion go hand in hand.

For the four covers, art directors Cian Browne and Jeff Burch chose Proto Grotesk Mono from Production Type. This monospaced version calls to mind what movie scripts used to look like when they were still typed with a typewriter: we immediately fall into the imagery of film, turning the photos into stills.

Proto Grotesk Mono is here mostly visible in caps, where we see some softer details that make up its originality: Where lowercase letters exhibit an assumed mechanical aesthetic, the lightness of the curved capital letters add a humanistic touch to the typeface design. This reinterpretation of monospaced types offers a contemporary perspective, while still keeping their legacy going.

For the first issue of 2019, W magazine decided to make it special with a retrospective of the previous year’s best performances. For this occasion, the magazine was published with seven different covers, all of them showing individuals who made this year exceptional, for the originality of the movies they were starring in, or in terms of sexual and racial diversity in the film industry. The Hollywood stars are portrayed by photographer Tim Walker.

This month’s choice for the cover type was a combination of Minotaur and Minotaur Sans by Production Type. Minotaur is used in tighly spaced letters from its Light weight, which gives a delicate impression of elegance, fitted to the many soft scenes of complicity shown in the photographs. The fragmentation of Minotaur’s curves hints at a Hollywood made of many different facets, heading towards a world that’s more diverse. Minotaur Sans provides a basis for the title: The eye-catching setting in tracked out lowercase letters takes the reader to a fantasy world, announcing already the main portfolio of the magazine, where Tim Walker staged the film stars in an eccentric universe with giant eggs and life-sized dolls. Minotaur Sans is additionally used for highlighting information, subtly emerging from the text block that’s otherwise set in Minotaur. The alternation of the two fonts are like two musical notes answering to each other in harmony.

The December 2018 issue of W magazine is a celebration of two typefaces with roots in France. Cian Browne, Jeff Burch and team pair Lettres Ombrées Ornées with Proto Slab Condensed.

The former is a set of heavy ornamented and shaded capitals that goes back to a design from c. 1820 by the Paris-based foundry of Joseph Gillé. Here it’s featured in a customized version, with some parts colored and some parts clipped, with occasional mirrored and upside-down glyphs.

The latter is a dense slab serif released by Production Type in March 2019. Proto Slab Condensed makes an early appearance in this issue, and is used in two of its five weights: The Extra Light can be seen on the cover, in section openers, and pull quotes. Set in all caps, its low-contrast letterforms yield a picket fence pattern. The Regular serves for headlines in the feature about influential Mexican women. Lettres Ombrées Ornées and Proto Slab Condensed are complemented by W Magazine’s usual typographic line-up incl. Whitman, Graphik Condensed, and Platform.

Proto Slab Condensed Regular (headline), Whitman (text).

For the 2018 Art Issue of W magazine, design director Cian Browne & art director Jeff Burch chose Signal Compressed as the main titling typeface, paired with an extended style of Neue Helvetica for subheads and pull quotes. Body text is set with Whitman, captions with Graphik Condensed and page number and running foot title with Platform, a signature typeface from the magazine.