Poster for a performance at REDCAT, the first-ever retrospective of Vertical Blanking, a video art, performance, and experimental music duo consisting of ia Kamandalu (formerly Kim McKillip) and Michael J. Masucci. REDCAT is the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater in Los Angeles.

The official South African website of the global manufacturing corporation BIC rises above and sets an example for its peer localisation sites with pristine crisp photography, pixel-perfect web layout elements, and a strong branding implementation including its typography.

BIC South Africa’s main landing page falls on a welcoming image displaying an array of pens, stationary lighters and razors, with a BIC mascot, logo, and title message set in CJ Type’s Dunbar Tall in ExtraBold style. The sleek and sharp lettershapes of Dunbar reflect the utilitarian simplicity and efficiency of BIC’s products with a hint of quirk such as the lighter buttons or the Dunbar letter e.

Dunbar is consistently applied through headings and product category landing page titles with the body paragraphs set in Julieta Ulanovsky’s Montserrat in a mix of its Medium and Regular weights. The website menus are set in Montserrat Regular and Bold styles.

Interestingly, upon entering the shopping pages, the website defaults all its fonts including the menus, headers and body text to Impallari Type’s Dosis typeface. Other localised sites of BIC default to Noto Sans, however several of these websites currently land on a “coming soon” page.

CJ Type’s founder shared that “they licensed Cyrillic in addition to Latin” and “they requested Kazakh glyphs” – possibly for future localized uses on the webpages for Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine.

The CSR pen donation initiative page uses Avenir and the handwriting font Journal in addition to the Dunbar and Montserrat brand fonts.

Shop pages maintain Dunbar in lighter weight for page title, however default to Dosis for menus, headers, buttons, and paragraphs.

Shop pages maintain Dunbar in lighter weight for page title, however default to Dosis for menus, headers, buttons, and paragraphs.

Branding from South African localized site rolled out to social media graphics

Cannon is Lee Lai’s follow up to the Lamda Award winning graphic novel Stone Fruit. The title and author’s name on both the cover and the spine are typeset in Velzyland. On the cover, the wavy letterforms of Velzyland pair nicely with the rhythmic bird feather motif. And the angled baseline on the cover works especially well with Velzyland’s extreme slant of 25 degrees. On the spine, “CANNON” is stacked vertically alternating from red to black, further echoing Velzyland’s wavy rhythmic effect, and it’s sandwiched between the author’s name and the publisher name, D+Q, shorthand for Drawn & Quarterly. All of the type appears to be hand-rendered, as evidenced by the organic edge details which are not in the typeface, though the spacing is consistent with the typeface.

The poster for the tour with Tom Gauld and Mimi Pond uses Noto Sans.

Stadttheater Gießen, or casually also called Theater Gießen, is a municipal theater and the cultural center of the German town Gießen. With two stages and 700 seats the theater hosts and entertains its guests with plays, musicals, operas, operettes, and dance performances.

Their typography uses CJ Type's geometric sans Dunbar Tall across all mediums including posters, brochures, website, and online presence, as well as for the “STADT THEATER GIEßEN” logo in all caps behind the brand’s iconic squiggle lines. The logotype is set in Dunbar Tall Medium.

Dunbar includes OpenType features catering to German language use, such as stylistic alternates for capital umlauts, as well as contextual ligatures for ch and ck.

The main theater building’s neo-classical architecture with Jugendstil influences from around 1907 reflects a preservation of the traditional entertainment artforms whilst appealing to younger contemporary audiences. The brand's typographic style plays on a similar appeal with its modernity: Dunbar was inspired by Erbar-Grotesk, a typeface designed in Germany by Jakob Erbar who first started exploring sans serif design in the early 1900s, close in time to when the theater in Gießen was built.

The visual identity complements its clean geometric typography with organic interactive squiggle lines unique to each performance. This component was developed by Patrik Hübner as a fluid generative design system.

These dynamic patterns mirror the gestures, voices, and movements of the stage, evolving in real-time to reflect the collaborative and exploratory spirit of the Stadttheater.

In 2022 the theater celebrated its visual refresh with a launch event. Visitors could interact to generate their own personalized squiggles, which blurred the lines between audience and performative play.

The logo combines caps with a lowercase eszett. CJ Dunn decided not to include an uppercase eszett. The font is a static version in which the letters R S T look different from the variable font version.

TeamWBC is a Dutch architectural building firm whose brand presence and typography communicates a modern, reliable, practical and business confident attitude.

For titles and most headings CJ Type's Pennypacker Compressed is used in all-caps to maintain a heavily rectangular silhouette matching the imagery of TeamWBC’s portfolio. The title treatment of the two main pages on the website, “creatie” and “transformatie” use vertical stacking of the words “Creatie/Bouwen” and “Transformatie/verbouwen”, mirroring the idea of architectural elements such as pillars or tall apartment buildings, adding dynamism to the typography used in its clean rigid grid system.

TeamWBC utilises duotone coloring in their titles to highlight single words or distinguish the second part of the title as subheading – using black for the primary title and a secondary color such as white or blue for an expansion, explanation, or to add a punchline. For example, “Creatie/Bouwen” means “Create/Build” and “Transformatie/verbouwen” means “Transform/Rebuild”. Here, the first halves are shown in black, the second halves are added in the secondary color white. Another example can be seen in the TeamWBC process breakdown’s title treatment: “Zuiver gebouwd” (“Clean construction”) set in black and followed by “Zo doen we dat” (“This is how we do it”) set in their secondary color blue.

The body text, menu texts, buttons, and some headers are set in an open-source neo grotesque variable sans serif typeface: Inter by Rasmus Andersson.

TeamWBC’s logotype uses Inter Bold in negative tracking for “TEAMWBC” where the W is replaced by a vertically mirrored letter M, and Inter Regular for its subtitle “het zuivere bouwen”. The letter M is also used as a dynamic graphic web element on the landing page to highlight the main menu pages.

English version. Single page website with no menu items.

German version. Single page website with no menu items.

Book design from graphic design studios HyperPension and Golden Bell Temple for Seungwon Go, the developer, writer and investor. The book has 376 pages and measures 124×188 mm. Printed on E-light 80g/m² paper. This publication consists of two components: the slipcase and the book itself. Removing the gray slipcase reveals a lemon-yellow book cover, symbolizing a “transition into a new era.”

Both parts use BN Hightide in mixed case for English titles. BN Hightide, a heavy geometric sans serif with low contrast, conveys the stoic presence of a solopreneur—an individual whose output rivals that of a corporation. This robust typeface anchors the bottom of the cover, lending a sense of balance and stability to the layout. As a secondary typeface, Neue Haas Grotesk was used—one of my go-to choices for its refined construction and reliable tone. With its pronounced contrast in stroke weight, it stands out clearly from BN Hightide on the sleeve, creating a distinct typographic hierarchy.

I also wanted a sense of humanity to surface gently and naturally through the visuals in this book. To that end, I incorporated hand-drawn illustrations from early 20th-century encyclopedias across each chapter, including the cover. These images effectively “soften” the rigid tone created by the sans serif typefaces.

For the body text, I used Sandoll Gothic Neo1, while the navigational arrows throughout the book are set in the dingbat font Arrows TFB. Dunbar Tall, used for page numbers, adds a lively rhythm to the overall layout.

Oliver’s Custom Coffee is a specialty coffee brand from the folks at Olympia Coffee, featuring exclusive and high-end selections by Oliver Stormshak, a renowned coffee expert and roaster.

Needmore Designs was brought on board to help bring the brand to life, creating everything from the logo and brand, to the website, to the packaging. The design of the bags was based on vintage jazz records, particularly releases from the Blue Note label.

“On the packaging design, we were really inspired around the idea of the bags mimicking a 7″ single on vinyl,” Stormshak told Daily Coffee News. “We also took inspiration from both jazz albums and early new wave and punk designs. I love the idea [that] when we drop a coffee it’s like a single hitting the airwaves.”

The choice of Dunbar throughout this project was a no-brainer for everyone involved. It worked great on the website and for copy at small sizes, as well as for large display use on the packaging and other print uses. It was also a delightful coincidence that Oliver’s is very focused on Hawaiian coffees, and CJ Dunn, the designer of Dunbar, hails from Hawaii.

Single cover for Pelican Club’s “Laura Call Me Up”, created in 2024 for the digital release. The title uses layered Mexcellent to create dimension. “Pelican Club” uses Dunbar.

KSP Productions is a full service production company that partners with brands and creative teams to produce photography and video content.

Their website uses Marlide Display for titles. It’s paired with Dunbar Text. The script used for the signature is Turbinado. The logotype appears to be custom.

Source: www.twd.sk License: All Rights Reserved.

twd is a hardware retailer based in Slovakia, supplying quality tools, furniture, windows and doors to both large and small craftsmen. twd uses Pennypacker Black for their largest headlines, Extra Bold for subheads, and Regular and Bold for body copy. Their main navigation makes good use of the narrower Pennypacker Condensed styles in Bold, as well and their buttons and in-page navigation to jump to lower sections.

Source: www.twd.sk License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.twd.sk License: All Rights Reserved.

Pennypacker is, at its core, a super utilitarian industrial grotesk, making it a perfect choice for twd, by creative studio Vizua. Pennypacker’s system of weights and widths was designed to have enough options, with enough contrast, so that this one typeface family could be used for an entire identity design. It’s wonderful to see a design system like twd’s which makes use of the range of weights and widths in Pennypacker. twd’s typography feels confident and strong through its use of Pennypacker’s Black weights in both large headlines and small subheads, contrasting them with the much lighter Regular weight body copy. A key factor that makes this work is the ample use of white space, leaving room for the Black weight text to breathe.

Photo taken by CJ Dunn at Letterform Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Page from Bruynzeel’s 1930s catalog designed by Piet Zwart, using Annonce and Kaart-Antieke

This design overall brings to mind one of my favorite references for Pennypacker, the carpentry factory catalog for Bruynzeel’s fabrieken Zaandam designed by Piet Zwart in the 1930s, shown to me by Stephen Coles at the Letterform Archive. Despite the catalog’s super utilitarian and potentially boring subject matter, selling items like doors and flooring, Zwart’s design is dynamic, strong, clearly understandable, and beautiful. The boldest text in the catalog uses Annonce, which comes from the same lineage as Pennypacker, contrasted with a much lighter body typeface, Kaart-Antieke. Again, a large part of what makes the super heavy type work at small sizes is the strategic use of ample whitespace. See Zwart’s design in this post about the Bruynzeel catalog. I liked this catalog so much that we were considering directly referencing it for the marketing materials of Pennypacker. But now I’m even happier that, instead of us making a fake use of Pennypacker selling industrial material, twd is using the range of Pennypacker styles to sell actual industrial materials and tools, in a strong design system that uses many things I love about Zwart’s design.

Source: www.twd.sk License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.twd.sk License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.twd.sk License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.twd.sk License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.twd.sk License: All Rights Reserved.

Many know of the legendary Bauhaus building Walter Gropius designed and the furnishings made by his students in collaboration for this purpose. But few know that when it came to choosing stools for the classrooms and workshops, Gropius deliberately chose the sturdy so called Rowac-Schemel stools from a small family-owned metal factory by the same name in the nearby town of Chemnitz, Germany. It’s exactly this stool that we’re bringing back to the market a century later, via Kickstarter.

We began this project by researching the brand’s nearly 60-year history, which began in 1888. Along the way, we came across various documents, including advertisements, brochures, and stationery. Along with various typography over the years, we noticed that Rowac had used an early sans serif font called Erbar-Grotesk. Coincidentally, this is the same font that is still used today for some street signs in East Berlin. The typeface has a minimalist character, while still retaining an approachable humanistic quality that other later sans serifs lost. We felt that this was the perfect match for Rowac, a brand known for its detailed yet simple industrial furniture.

But after finding out that the current offerings for Erbar Grotesk are extremely limited, we were thrilled to discover CJ Type's Dunbar, a modern reinterpretation of the classic. The different x-heights of the High, Low, and Text versions allowed us to tailor Dunbar to our specific needs.

Dutch financial institution SNS Bank makes extensive use of Dunbar Tall for the display typography in their 2022 rebrand, designed by advertising agency Alfred International. The brand design is full of color and large typography, which feels inviting and welcoming, perfectly aligning with their human first “it’s all about you” messaging.

Their type palette uses the Extra Bold weight of Dunbar Tall consistently for their largest headlines, with the Bold weight used for smaller headlines. For the smaller body copy they use Mulish. The rebrand was launched with a series of commercials, where the Extra Bold headlines are animated using motion graphics. The heavy type sits on top of solid color blocks which go in front of and behind people in these scenes, giving the words a physical presence in the story, rather than just superimposing type on top of the videos at the end.

I love to see this kind of bold typography used to great effect for the brand identity of a bank. It is effective in making SNS stand out from the typically reserved typography of banks and financial institutions in general. SNS Bank’s typographic voice is personable and forward-looking, rather than boring and stuck in the past, which is a welcome change here.

Opened in 1910, Nashville’s first “million-dollar” hotel has undergone a brand overhaul with today’s traveler in mind. Its opulent rooms famously hosted campaigners for (and against) women’s right to vote, with the yellow-rose-wearing Suffrage supporters winning by a hair.

In honor of this pivotal event, Mucca's rebrand leans into a bold signature yellow, paired with custom typeface, Suffragette, inspired by the hotel’s Beaux Arts interiors. A contemporary tone of voice redefines this heritage brand for a new era of modern Southern hospitality.

Louvette in use for Komorní Filharmonie Pardubice, the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice. The accompanying sans serif is Silka.

Queensboro FC is a new professional soccer team based in Queens, NY. The team made their debut in the USL Championship League in 2023, along with a Women’s in the USL W League in 2022 and QBFC II Academy Team in the USL-A League in 2021. David Decepida, of Carbone Smolan Agency, lead the team designing the QBFC identity, and commissioned me to design the QBFC custom typeface.

One reference for the proportions and weight of the typeface was a sign for the Queens Plaza subway station from the IRT line in the 1930s. The strong, industrial, “working class” letters made sense as a reference for a new soccer team in Queens. Blackletter signage and architectural façade lettering in Queens were also a references we looked at, with a focus on the broad-edged pen angularity of these forms. The broad-edged pen style letters became a through-line as a reference to the many languages and cultures represented in Queens, from Latin American Blackletter to Korean Hangul, Hebrew to Hindi. This all came together in a sketch I made with a broad-edged pen, while referencing the sturdy, narrow proportioned letters of the Queens Plaza sign.

Sharp terminals, along with the bold condensed type, became the defining feature of the logomark, logotype and the custom typeface. An alternate number set with cut-ins was also added to the typeface for usage on the jerseys to add more character and personality at larger sizes.

Originally known as QBFC Plaza, the custom typeface is currently being expanded into a larger retail family named Counterpress, to be released with CJ Type.

Dinnerly is an affordable, healthy subscription-based meal kit service by Berlin-based Marley Spoon. The site uses Dunbar Tall for headlines along with Galano Grotesque for supporting text and a lively color palette to create a friendly and inviting overall design.

An die Musik NYC is a concert series bringing the people of New York City high-quality classical music at affordable prices. It presents internationally renowned performers alongside rising talents from the NYC community.

The 2018–2019 season makes use of Louvette’s optical sizes and weights, with the Italic Banner and Display used for the composer names and dates, down to the Text styles used for performer names, bios, and supplemental information. The concert program use of Louvette Deck for composer name, with song titles and movements set in Louvette Text. The opening concert poster, which features works by Huang Ruo, makes use of Source Han Serif for Huang’s name in Chinese, scaled to a smaller point size to harmonize with Louvette.

Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist and composer who creates immersive public rituals with sculpture, video, costume, and collective performance. The core theme of her practice is the conviction that the creation of new mythologies can lead to the deconstruction/devastation of real-life hierarchical structures. These performances often take place at museums and performance spaces including The Broad Contemporary Art Museum, House of the Book, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), and The Triforium in Downtown Los Angeles.

The programs for Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs’ performances were designed to serve as a poster on one side, announcing the performance, and a program on the reverse side, listing information such as the names and order of pieces performed, words and lyrics from selected pieces, and credits for performers, costumes, etc. The typesetting of the lyrics follows their performance, for example call and response pieces such as Who Do U Want 2 Love use different widths of text to indicate individual vs chorus lyrics. There in the Inbetween and A Journey That Wasn’t have songs which are sung in a loop so the words are typeset in an oval shape with no beginning and no end. And A Journey That Wasn’t additionally includes backwards text for lyrics which are sung backwards. The programs also include photography from the artist which relate to the specific, such as costumes, masks and sculptures used in the performances.

Hiday is a magazine about branding and digitization by Bloom Identity, based in Bern, Switzerland. I love the way they use Dunbar Tall, Low and Text all together in an editorial context. They make use of the full range of weights available in Dunbar, using a range of sizes from large pull-quotes and headline to smaller credits and site navigation. Note that, while all text is German, the hashtags and menu are in English.

Identity design for Jonah Raydio, the music and comedy podcast of Jonah Ray and friends. Jonah wanted to use this illustation by artist Matt Cunningham, and came to me to work on the typography. I created a simple system to support this comedic artwork in a variety of layout configurations.

Remember when you used to hang out with your friends, get drunk and listen to new music? Yeah, then you went and became an adult with responsibilities and don't have the time to do that anymore. Well, Jonah Ray (MST3k, Nerdist, The Meltdown) along with his buds Cash Hartzell & Neil Mahoney are here to do all those things with their showbiz friends SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO!