Zett, the biannual magazine of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), explores how artists, designers, and thinkers perceive and shape the world around them. It brings together a wide range of stories from the ZHdK cosmos – all beautifully designed and thoughtfully curated.

The magazine’s visual design is by Samuel Marty, who has given Zett its distinctive and contemporary appearance. In the latest issue, he uses Daisy by LudwigType for the title and headlines, and Brenner Sans with Brenner Slab by Typotheque for the text.

Schuhhaus Kahr is a footwear store in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany. The name on the façade is hand-painted in a cursive with distinct vertical contrast and only moderate slant. This style is not an invention of the sign painter: it’s clearly modeled after Daphne (hat tip to Fontastique Fonts).

Shoes are not hats, of course, but in way, Daphne came full circle, being used for a fashion retailer again: Georg Salden based his typeface design on a calligraphic advert that he had written with a broad nib pen for a hat store in Dusseldorf in the 1960s. It was produced as a font for phototypesetting and released with Berthold in 1970. A digital version is available from TypeManufactur and Ludwig Type.

For comparison: a resetting in the digital Daphne, produced with the help of Ludwig Übele

The nameplate in squooshed Daphne on issue 1, 1995

Valstiečių laikraštis (English: “The Peasants’ Newspaper”) is a Lithuanian-language newspaper targeting farmers. First issued on August 27, 1940, by the newly established Lithuanian SSR, it has survived into the post-Soviet era, making it the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper.

The newspaper initially used different nameplates with custom lettering, see the images at the end of this post. The current logo was introduced in the early 1990s, after Lithuania regained independence. Chances are it debuted in 1992, when the newspaper was privatized after being briefly published by the Ministry of Agriculture. It’s definitely in use since 1995.

The typeface is Daphne, designed by Georg Salden (b. 1930) and released for photo­type­setting with Berthold in 1970. You can read more about the typeface and how it led to the formation of the GST-Kreis in a previous post. I don’t think Daphne existed in digital form in the 1990s. It’s possible that the unknown logo designer used the phototype version, or worked from a printed sample found in a type catalog. Three decades later, the newspaper logo in green Daphne is still going strong and has been adapted to signs of various sizes, with varying amounts of stretching.

Since 2012, an official digital version of Daphne is available from TypeManufactur – with the correct proportions as intended by Salden.

The newspaper nameplate on an issue from 2010

Even more squooshed than usual: the logo in Daphne in extra-large use on top of a building close to Vilnius International Airport, spotted in 2015

Newspaper stand on Gedimino g. 27 in Kaunas

Office building in Vilnius, documented in 2022

The first issue of Valstiečių laikraštis had a nameplate composed of bold blocky sans-serif letters with a characteristic angular S (compare to Koloss). Shown here is a red version from no. 33, December 1940.

Already in 1941, the nameplate was redesigned to feature a free-wheeling bold italic didone. Like the precursor, it’s a custom logo and not based on a typeface. The shown issue is from 1946.

Sometime between 1948 and 1957, the nameplate was redrawn to feature connected letterforms. This issue with a particularly clumsy rendition dates from August 1970. Variants of this logo were still in use in 1990.

May I take a photo of the back of your head?

This catalog features the works of artist Jub Mönster. Published by Göttinger Verlag der Kunst, the book shows snapshots of well-known personalities from the art and culture scene, whom the artist has photographed for decades at cultural events or in private settings. This resulted in an impressive archive of images that served as a basis for many of his works. The almost plain-looking black and white photographs stand in stark contrast to the often colorful paintings or Mönster’s highly detailed ballpoint pen drawings. Embellished with one or the other anecdote, the artist outlines his working methods, offers insights into his creative process, and provides different as well as new perspectives on familiar faces.

The book uses the Godfrey typeface by Ludwig Übele.

BRZO Chrome Away in early use on the label for Sticky Sticky, a double dry hopped wheat IPA with 6.2% ABV, brewed by Five Boroughs Brewing Co. in collaboration with Twin Elephant Brewing. A beta of the shiny display italic was made available on Future Fonts in February 2021. Nuform released the final version of the family this month, in November 2022.

On the seemingly sticker-covered label, The Collected Works paired Brzo with a number of other typefaces, including PDU Stencil and Helsinki, the brewery’s standard typefaces.

The visual identity and graphic design for the Musée de l'École de Nancy, the Art Nouveau museum in France, was designed by Lab.Leblond.Tytgat in 2018. Their custom typeface, Nouveau, was designed by Jérôme Knebusch with Philippe Tytgat. The typeface family was published as a retail typeface in six styles (Nouveau Crocus, Dahlia, Gingko, Nenuphar, Rose, Thistle) and five weights (Hair to Medium) by Poem in May 2022. A variable font assembles all styles in one. In the communication of the museum, Nouveau is paired with Marat by Ludwig Übele.

Brand identity, product packaging design and illustration for popular YouTube influencer Hyram Yarbro’s skincare line Selfless by Hyram presented by the established brand The Inkey List. Every Selfless product purchase supports providing clean drinking water or protects tropical forests and is available in 29 countries at Sephora.

The brand identity’s combination of a slight medicinal feel with playful imagery portray what Hyram is representing – trusted information about skincare and having fun with it. The logo design was created in collaboration with Heather Brown (Head of Design at the Inkey List).

All packaging illustrations form one continuous landscape when lined up next to each other. They also perpetually wrap around each carton. The lush jungle landscapes hint at Selfless’ contribution to the Rainforest Trust. They show the natural diversity of tropical forests on the products that help prevent deforestation. Some of the products have a water-focused theme. They are supporting the Thirst Project, an organisation that helps solving the global water crisis.

The typeface Aspen by LudwigType is used in a straightforward way that provides a clean feel underlining the products' science backed formulation.

Design & Illustration: Philipp Zurmöhle at Transatlantika
Head of Design at The Inkey List: Heather Brown

What does Europe stand for? Where does it begin, where does it end? What do we love, what do we fear? 60 questions from young people, 60 answers from experts, translated into memorable graphics.

Fragen an Europa (“Questions for Europe”) was designed by Gesine Grotrian. She used her own handwriting and Kakadu by LudwigType.

Book designer and author Gesine Grotrian and a team of experts from the Heinrich Böll Foundation together with an advisory board of young people from all over the world have created this non-fiction book for young people aged 12 and over. The book Pack aus! Plastik, Müll & Ich (“Unpacked! Plastic, Waste, & Me”) describes the history, production and risks of our plastic consumption in a straightforward, colorful and clearly understandable way.

Gesine Grotrian used her own handwriting and Godfrey.

Samuel Marty designed a beautiful annual report for the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), one of the major universities of the arts in Europe. The study and research programme covers the areas of design, film, fine arts, music, dance, theatre, transdisciplinary studies, and the teaching of arts and design.

The annual report is printed in UV offset on black paper. By means of photography, it shows that many disciplines of art (e.g. dance, theater, film, music, design, art) are staging themselves more and more (mostly in dark surroundings). LudwigType’s Godfrey is used throughout.

The Nitsch Foundation is the official representative of Austrian avant-garde artist Hermann Nitsch (b. 1938). Nitsch’s abstract “splatter” paintings, like his performance pieces, are inspired by his neutral perspective on humanity and being human. In the 1950s, Nitsch conceived of the Orgien Mysterien Theater (which roughly translates as Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries, or The Orgiastic Mystery Theater), staging more then 100 performances.

The Nitsch Foundation uses the Helsinki typeface for its identity.

Ramiro Espinoza. License: All Rights Reserved.

Logo and shop sign for Miss Tique, a ladieswear boutique with stores in The Hague and Voorburg, South Holland, spotted by Ramiro Espinoza of the local Retype Foundry foundry.

The typeface is Daphne. This bold cursive was designed by Georg Salden, derived from a calligraphic ad he had made for a hat shop in Dusseldorf in the 1960s. The Miss Tique wordmark features a terminal form for the e – one of many expressive swashes included in Salden’s design. These swashes played a key role in the advancement of independent font publishing. Salden recollects:

It was all about the bold italic line with large swashes. This font was accepted by Berthold for its Staromat [a photographic typesetting system for titles]. The various swashes could be copied onto other letters, depending on taste. This provided hundreds of possibilities. Although I gave exact instructions as to how these swashes were to be used, the production placed them wrong, some even upside down. This was one of the reasons why I decided to publish my fonts independently.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Daphne with its swashes as shown in the E1 catalog by Berthold Fototypes from 1974.

The rest is history. In 1972, Salden started the GST-Kreis, and directly provided its members – a number of typesetting studios – with his own typeface designs, bypassing the established font manufacturers and publishers, and pioneering a business model that has numerous followers today. Many of Salden’s phototype designs – including Daphne – have since been digitized, with the help of Ludwig Übele. They are available from TypeManufactur and LudwigType.

Today, Georg Salden turns 90. Happy birthday! See more of his multifaceted body of work in the congratulatory blog posts on LudwigType.de and PAGE online.

Source: goo.gl Google Street View. License: All Rights Reserved.

The Miss Tique store on Van Schagenstraat 1, Voorburg …

Source: goo.gl Google Street View. License: All Rights Reserved.

… and the one at Theresiatraat 154, Den Haag. Both shop signs predate the first captures by Google Street View from 2008.

“Symbioses – The amazing coexistence in nature” is a beautiful book designed by Tomas Mrazauskas, with illustrations by Johann Brandstetter. The book has has been selected in 2017 as the most beautiful German scientific book. It was edited by Josef H. Reichholf and published in the Naturkunden series by Matthes & Seitz.

From the birds that free buffalo from annoying insects in the African savannah, to dogs that have formed an inseparable partnership with man for life, to cell bodies and blue-green algae that once came together and now colour the world of flora green and provide the basis for life on our planet: symbioses, the networks of life, are among the most amazing phenomena of nature.

63 Questions and answers for all who want to know what eating meat has to do with us and with the world.

The beautiful book Iss was?! Tiere, Fleisch & Ich (“Eat What!? Animals, Meat & Me”) designed by Gesine Grotrian, is set entirely in Helsinki by LudwigType. It was nominated for the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis and the non-fiction award EMYS Sachenbuchpreis.

Korpus (Binnenland, 2009) and Helsinki (Ludwig Type, 2013) are paired in this book on movies from Lower Austria, and a price winner of “Die schönsten Bücher Österreichs 2016”. From the website of Austrian design agency Lichtwitz-Leinfellner:

The volume documents the activities of the Province of Lower Austria in the field of film promotion since 1996, and presents and reflects on numerous film projects that were shot in this state.

A book about a time-based medium with a short film on the cover: a lenticular image depicts a short sequence of a tracking shot through the landscape of Lower Austria. There are also analogies to the medium of film in the table of contents: as in a fictitious film editing program, the individual “scenes” of the book are arranged here as color-coded blocks along a timeline. The pages are numbered in minutes, seconds and frames.

(...) From the jury's reasoning to the selection as one of the “most beautiful books in Austria” 2016: "[...] In the implementation, the change between text and image part is designed to be reader-friendly and always surprises again. This is underlined by the special envelope that immediately catches your eye [...] "

“Listy” means “letters” and refers to the long-term correspondence of Polish writers and activists Jerzy Giedroyc and Zdzisław Najder. The design of the book reflects how the relationship between the two men changed over time. Initally intense, it cooled down and then became conflicting. A characteristic motif of the layout of both the cover and the inserts is broken typography. The title of the cover is partly hidden. Navigating the letters is facilitated by numbering and marking them with the initials of the sender and recipient. The only decorative element, including a fairly minimalist design, is the repeating motif of delicate lines and rectangular boxes with letters of letters.

The book is designed by Polish design office Podpunkt and set entirely in Diogenes by LudwigType. It won the silver medal in the European Design Awards 2015 and got distinction in the competition for the Most Beautiful Book of the Year 2015 in Poland.

Road Grays is a new independent print magazine about baseball, focused on the human stories behind the game. We aim to publish a fresh magazine twice a year.

We’ll be telling original nonfiction stories from the world of baseball — from the sandlot to the majors, from the game’s early history to the present day. There are plenty of other places to turn for the latest news on stars, stats, and up-to-the-minute analysis. Instead, we focus on the human stories behind the game, what it means to us as fans, and how it intersects with society and culture. – Roadgraysmag.com

The nameplate is set in DJR's Roslindale Condensed. The typographic palette is meant to provide a subtle, almost subliminal reference to American print from the era of the game’s early heyday — while staying far away from the faux-vintage pastiche common to baseball-related design. Throughout the magazine, Anchor and Damien Display are used for headlines, paired with Malabar and Aspen for all other typography.

Science Busters is an Austrian science cabaret, and their humorous book Gedankenlesen durch Schneckenstreicheln (“Mind reading by caressing snails”) is full of fascinating scientific insights. Designed by Büro Alba, published by Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG.

Did you know that pigs can glow in the dark or why jewel beetles always lose the spin-the-bottle game? The Science Busters - the physicists Heinz Oberhummer and Werner Gruber and the comedian Martin Puntigam - embark on a turbulent journey into the animal kingdom. They encounter astonishing and fascinating physical and physiological phenomena, from mirror neurons to the explanation of how salt got into the sea, to the calculation of the penguin throwing competition and what that has to do with space travel. In short: science for everyone, spectacular, instructive and very funny.

This book about inclusion makes full and detailed use of the Aspen typeface. Designed by Eike Dingler and Ethel Strugalla. Published by Deutscher Verein für öffentliche und private Fürsorge e. V. Berlin and Montag Stiftung.

Numerous examples and projects from more than 30 municipalities and regions show how the human right “inclusion” can be implemented. A source of ideas and suggestions for your own local processes, which invites you to browse, and which inspires and encourages!

The Cold War ended in 1991, but its echoes can still be heard today. One example of Cold War remains are “numbers stations”: short wave radio broadcasts of coded messages, believed to be intended for undercover agents in enemy states. Despite its origins in the darkest days of the last century, these transmissions continue today with broadcasts occurring daily from countries including Russia, Cuba, and North Korea.

Shadows of the State is a photographic project by Lewis Bush which investigates these mysterious broadcasts and attempts to locate the likely transmitter sites of thirty of these stations. These sites are then mapped using high resolution satellite imagery, and displayed alongside radio spectrograms, audio recordings, and extensive information about each station.

Book designer Tom Mrazauskas used Kakadu, a squarish sans serif designed by Ludwig Übele.