Justin Carder designed the cover for Joanna Howard’s novel Porthole, centered on a film director who may be responsible for an on-set death. Publisher McSweeney’s describes the book as “a portrait of an auteur at the peak of her powers and in the midst of an extravagant, albeit well-dressed, meltdown.”

Justin explained by email that he and co-art director Sunra Thompson paid oblique homage to film noir poster design, underscored by Sam Hadley’s atmospheric illustration. To simulate the angular hand lettering of the time period, Cortado’s curves are reduced to skittery straight lines, and Azo Sans takes on a rough finish.

Community Justice Exchange offers If They Build It: Organizing Lessons & Strategies Against Carceral Infrastructure as a free PDF download in English and Spanish, “for generating abolitionist struggles against the construction and expansion of cages.” With art direction by Mon M, designer Noah Jodice combined his own illustrations, angular shapes, and muted photographs in a simple color palette. The hand-cut and collaged aesthetic of the imagery pairs well with the angular outlines of Cedar for display settings. Extended body text is set in Palatino, with Halyard Micro used for emphasis and callouts, and Halyard Display for negative text.

Noah writes on his site:

As a prison abolitionist, I’m quite proud of this project, both for its scope and its content. The resource is dense with hard-earned lessons from the anti-carceral organizing work of the No New Jails Network. We designed the resource for a breadth of readers and experiences, whether you spend two minutes with the text, two hours, or two weeks.

Catherine Casalino’s cover design for Kristin Koval’s debut novel Penitence pairs the organic forms of Study with a stark wintry scene. As Catherine explains in a post:

For a novel centered around two Colorado families connected by tragedy and love, it was important to find imagery that captured the setting, but also evoked the mood of the book. When I came across the work of Nisha Ghela – who creates stunning landscape paintings of Colorado – I knew we had a perfect match for this beautiful novel.

The book was published by Celadon Books.

The Insectarium opened in 2023, a permanent installation in the American Museum of Natural History’s Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. The exhibition was art directed by Catharine Weese. Rayna Weingord served as the lead designer on the Gilder Center from 2021 until it opened in 2023. She worked with Eleanor Kung, Molly Magnell and the AMNH’s in-house team.

Rift and Aglet Slab, both monolinear with round stroke endings, support the approachably educational science center. The condensed proportions of Rift lend it toward titles, while Aglet Slab performs in exhibition-scale paragraphs. Atlas Grotesk is used for smaller-scale body copy, such as in the Insectarium Educator's Guide.

Skimpies – women who work as bartenders while wearing bikinis or lingerie – have been a big part of pub culture in Western Australia since the 1970s. Catering to a clientele of locals and itinerant mining industry workers, skimpies serve up entertainment, human connection, and drinks in some of the most geographically isolated communities in Australia.

Taken between 2021 and 2023 by M Ellen Burns in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, these photos portray these women both on and off duty, with candid images of skimpies at work paired with personal portraits and interviews. Burns collected the images of these women with their full consent and created space for them to speak about their own experiences, this project provides a glimpse of a world rarely visible to outsiders.

SPAN® worked closely with photographer, author and now publisher M Ellen Burns, gaining incredible insights into this fascinating culture across the border in Western Australia. These insights formed the creative framework for a multi-faceted design process.

SKIMPIES has been consciously edited into two parts based on the idea of “day and night”. It begins with white-wall portraits captured while the women are off duty, emphasising the importance of their personal stories. We then take the readers onto the low-light-environment at the bars and venues where skimpies are at work with outpouring energy and interacting with those who walk through the doors. To heighten both the quiet confidence and the intense dynamism captured by Burns, matte and gloss varnishes were applied throughout the publication to create visual contrast. At the midpoint – between “day and night” – a curated selection of archival newspapers was inserted to provide historical context to the subject matter.

Connecting the personal stories to the intimate off duty portraiture, a bespoke display typeface – SKIMPIES – was drawn (by Wing Lau) with two main objectives. Firstly, to create a high contrast typographic interpretation with characteristics of the hi-vis-coloured lingerie, the tension and elasticity on the women’s bodies. Secondly, a display typeface that mirrors the studio portraits, typeset vertically, introducing the the women’s by their skimpy names.

To materialise the combined visual dynamics, we integrated a specific selection of coloured threads into an exposed spine with a hard-case Swiss-bound book construct. This subtle, tactile detail brings together colours distinctive to both the mining industry as well as this unique occupation called Skimpy.

Context Window takes a McLuhan-esque mosaic approach in the form of a visual essay on the ever-expanding role and effects of computers and digital technology on our lives. As our exposure to computers and digital technology has expanded, infiltrating nearly every aspect of human existence, their ability to change our behavior through subconscious cues and otherwise invisible environmental changes should prompt deeper consideration of who these changes ultimately benefit.

On the font choices throughout the book:

Like the books I've designed and produced, Context Window is a creative outlet to utilize a number of my favorite typefaces. Tiempos being an economic and reliable family for long-form text – and especially capable in print. And Nick Sherman's HEX Franklin has become a go-to workhorse but also fitting for its historical ties back to the writing of Marshall McLuhan.

The first printing, a limited edition of 100 copies was printed by Newspaper Club in the UK and includes additional related Risograph prints and other ephemera produced in the heart of Silicon Valley.

In The Power of Trees, author Peter Wohlleben traces how trees are adaptive enough to survive climate change while critiquing those who exploit planting trees for political and economic gain. The book cover features the distinguished Study, with a supplemental Calluna Sans Italic for the author’s previous book, The Hidden Life of Trees.

Confidence by Rafael Frumkin is a novel about “scams, schemes, and the absurdity of the American Dream,” hence the book cover’s shifted and shadowed treatment of the “con” in “confidence,” set in ITC Franklin Gothic. The author’s name is set in Cortado.

The historic Pier 57 in New York’s Hudson River Park was redeveloped into a mixed-use community destination featuring a rooftop park, Google office space, and Market 57 food hall.

Handel Architects led the core design. Jamestown designed both logos in-house and worked with Airspace on the signage. Pier 57’s nameplate and mega-scale wayfinding aptly features Export, a blocky yet approachable font based on hand-carved prints found on a shipping box in NYC. Pier 57 dons a range of materials and finishes, from neon signs to glossy paint. Some of the wayfinding is also set in Bodoni Egyptian.

The accompanying food hall Market 57 is branded with the inviting and slightly quirky Auster. Like the rest Pier 57’s wayfinding and graphics in the market are set in Bodoni Egyptian, with smaller signs and text in the humanist-style Source Sans.

Large window decals set in Export

The Ohio Penitentiary Fire of 1930 is a zine about a mass-casualty prison fire caused by one prison guard’s negligence. It is part of the series “Archival Activations” by Mariame Kaba, an organizer, educator, archivist and curator who largely focuses on dismantling the prison industrial complex.

Kaba first read about the fire in The Spotlight on Ohio’s Black Crime. Its cover, with a faceted “Spotlight” and grotesque-style subtitle, shares similarities to the font choices of the zine, designed and illustrated by Kruttika Susarla. The zine’s sculpturally-cut title font Cedar, seemingly hand-carved, complements the woodblock inspired illustration foldout. The rest of the type is set in Nitti Grotesk, with the Ultra weight holding up in low-contrast underlayed titles.

Fold-out illustration

Ichigo is a Japanese comfort foods cafe with a casual Americana atmosphere situated in Glasgow. Local design studio Everything Will Be Fine (EWBF), led by Kerr Vernon, configured a playful mix-and-match brand identity that ties the conceptual, visual, and experiential elements of the fusion concept together. As EWBF explains in their project overview,

Ichigo offer an expansive range of Japanese comfort foods. Sushi is made fresh daily in-house and can be ordered by the set or by the individual piece — allowing for creative mixing and matching to each individual’s taste. Our brand identity is inspired by the streets of Tokyo, Japanese minimalism and mid-century Americana. Mascots, Ichi and Igo play a central role in defining the visual language with hidden ingredients in their hairstyles.

The typography is neatly composed with moments of verve, putting it in play with the minimalist yet fun illustrations and colors. The wordmark is set in Borough Grotesk Regular, a revival of a 19th-century grot that also recalls the bold sans serif typography of Tokyo signage. The sturdiness of Borough Grotesk contrasts with a dynamically set Cortado, a brush script with mid-century flavor. Monotalic Medium, used for smaller copy, complements the blocky rhythm of Borough Grotesk while incorporating beats of cursive flair. The Japanese typeface used for “美味い” is Hiragino Kaku Gothic W8.

Learn more about the design at Creative Boom.

The Other Merlin (Emry Merlin Book 1)

Robyn Schneider’s young adult series Emry Merlin is a humorous, fantastical, and romantic take on the myth of King Arthur.

The first book in the series, The Other Merlin, originally launched with a different cover. With the launch of the second book, The Future King, designer Tony Sahara created a cohesive visual system for the series and redesigned the first book’s cover. The covers feature Cortado set at angle for the titles and Zen Kurenaido for the supporting text. The lighter color palette of the new covers and illustrated characters combined with the free spirit of the title font better reflects the series’ jovial and imaginative content and establishes a uniquely identifiable look.

The Future King (Emry Merlin Book 2)

Original cover and redesigned cover

CXHAIRS Media, a cyclocross news and commentary company, debuted a new logo and branding in 2022. Designed by Goldenrod Studio in New Jersey, the branding features Elevator.

CXHAIRS owner Bill Schieken via email:

Elevator is clean and bold. It gives our brand the energy we wanted—a great complement to our new design.

Learn more about the new logo on the CXHAIRS blog.

Lockup for the CXHAIRS Bulletin Substack list

Christopher Brian King designed a comical cover, with illustration by Andrew Rae, for Thank You for Your Servitude. In this journalistic account, Mark Leibovich follows the Republican Party’s culture of submission, sycophancy, and degradation of integrity surrounding Donald Trump’s presidency.

The cover depicts a cast of Republicans such as Mike Pence, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mitch McConnell, Ben Carson, and Sean Hannity bestowing Trump with their infamous expressions and the classic American offerings of ice cream and burgers. The on-the-nose ridicule compounds with Ivanka Trump shilling to the viewer a can of beans, crisis vacationers Chris Christie and Ted Cruz donning souvenir headgear, Lindsey Graham lap dogging, Rudy Giuliani demon-eyed and wined, and Jeff Sessions suited up as an elf.

Fist pumping Capitol insurrectionists riot in the distance, with QAnon Shaman Jake Angeli in the foreground wielding a flag of the subtitle, set in an orderly Gotham Condensed and free-flowing Cortado. The title on the large flag is also set in Cortado; the personality of the font paired with the language of the title reiterate the unironic and unsettling reality of this era of U.S. politics. “This Town” is added in House Slant, visually quoting the cover of that book from 2014.

This One’s for You is a young adult novel by Kate Sweeney, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The book follows the relationship and personal development of two ex-best friends as they embark on a road trip after their high school graduation.

Theresa Evangelista designed the book jacket by creating a narrative interplay with the composition of the illustration (by Nicole Rifkin) and text. On the left side of the cover, the character’s upward line of sight follows the angle of the title, set in Cortado (with an apostrophe customized by Evangelista). The italic movement of the title flows with the right side character’s wind blown hair and leads to her downward stare. The author’s name is set in caps from Trend Rough Sans One.

Designers John Gall and Madeline Partner designed the cover for the paperback edition of The Fortune Men, by Nadifa Mohamed. They evoked the novel’s early 1950s setting with the pairing of Cortado and Volta.

Thomas Brussig’s 2001 German-language novel Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee is described as “a moving and miraculously comic story of life in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall.” For the first English translation, published by Picador as The Short End of the Sonnenallee, Cecilia Zhang designed a cover she describes as being influenced by the work of Paul Bacon. The strikingly sparse cover pairs strong use of Ballast with Zhang’s hand-drawn illustration and handwritten treatment for “A Novel.” Art direction by Alex Merto.

Scott Boms published a second expanded edition of I Take Full Responsibility, a small book produced and assembled by hand. From his description of the project:

I Take Full Responsibility collects fourteen of the most significant communications from technology company CEOs since November 2022, who, during that time, have reduced their employee bases by huge swathes. Accompanied by a personal introduction, photos, and artwork from more than ten years in tech, it’s intended to be a time capsule circumventing Silicon Valley’s short-term memory and a clear statement of fact that work will not love you back.

Risograph printed in black, bright red, sunflower, and metallic gold inks on 5 different paper stocks, its urgent message arrives enclosed within a redesigned and screen-printed closed-spine format along with laser-cut accessory prints delivered in a personalized Inter-office envelope.

Scott shared also some notes about the typography by email:

I chose Bennet Text 2 as the main typeface used throughout the book for practical reasons, such as its character set, which includes small caps and a solid range of figures. It’s also one I’ve used before with the Riso and has proven to work well with that process. As I started setting the text, I experimented with other options but kept coming back to Bennet because of its solid, authoritative feel and consistently even color. It’s made for editorial uses like this but also works well at larger sizes where its subtle details become more apparent.

Gridlite PE was originally only going to be used for the “Approved” stamp on the pink slip card because it could look authoritative while also solving a practical need when run on the laser cutter. As the design of the cover evolved and I added the original acetate layer in the first edition, it became an obvious choice as it worked really well against the other imagery and helped then connect the various pieces together.

When I was designing the pink slip and Tech CEO Bingo cards, Aglet Mono just felt right. I was going for something that wouldn't feel out of place on a business form but could also hold its own visually and pair well with type used elsewhere in the book.

The monospace form of both Gridlite PE and Aglet just seemed to make sense. I believe an early version of the cover was set in Aglet which led to me to try Gridlite PE, which ultimately stuck in the end.

The book also includes appearances by Knockout, Champion Gothic, Fern Micro, Rhody, and San Francisco. The accompanying prints add to the eclectic mix with Displace Cut and an early use of Regrets.

Cover detail

The title page, set in Bennet Text.

Pink slip and Tech CEO Bingo card, primarily set in Aglet Mono, with die cut in Gridlite, small text in Fern Micro, and heading in Champion Gothic.

Pink slip detail

An interior spread (with the first edition’s staple binding)

Interior excerpts (San Francisco used for the email text)

Interior excerpts (Rhody featured on the first page)

Bonus print, featuring Regrets and Displace Cut

Bonus print, featuring Champion Gothic. (The Risolute Press logo is Banque Gothique.)

Poem by Wiradjuri writer Dr Jeanine Leane

Melbourne Connect is a mixed-use innovation precinct for researchers, industry, government, students, and artists. The complex, designed by architecture studio Woods Bagot, is constructed of interconnected buildings encompassing an open air oculus. In collaboration with the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation and Wurundjeri Elders, the central courtyard was named Womin-Djerring, meaning “come together”.

ASPECT Studios designed the public spaces and green areas, with landscaping by Ace Contractors and public space furniture manufacturing by SPARK. A key feature of Womin-Djerring are the Memory Trees accompanied with wooden slat benches. The benches prompt reflection with moments of engraved poetry, set in Aglet Slab.

Bench slats (before installation)

Bench slats (before installation)

Some engraved lettering can be seen on the bench in the foreground

The Fairytale Life of Dorothy Gale by Virginia Kantra is a novel about personal and independent growth after heartbreak and humiliation, to be published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The yellow road, blue dress, and red shoes on the cover nod to the book’s inspiration, The Wizard of Oz. To match the illustrated background, the title is rendered in a painterly version of Cortado. The supporting text and author name are set in Brandon Grotesque.