First edition, Flower Press, 1982

From Wikipedia:

Worms Eat My Garbage: How to Set Up & Maintain a Worm Composting System is a book by Mary Appelhof self-published in 1982 under the company name Flower Press. The book is still held as seminal reading in the field of vermicomposting.

The cover illustration and possibly also the cover design is by Mary Frances Fenton. Octopuss was apparently chosen for its vermicular qualities.

Worms Eat Our Garbage: Classroom Activities for a Better Environment is a sequel published in 1993. The cover art is largely the same, with adjusted colors. ITC Avant Garde Gothic was substituted by ITC Benguiat Gothic for secondary text.

The second, completely revised edition was published in 1997, “after 100,000 copies sold”.

Spot is a Detroit food pop-up serving down-to-earth eats and block party vibes. Designers Evan Gendell and Alyssa Arnesen were approached to design an identity that could travel from Spot to Spot and be employed at a moment’s notice. The logo needed to embrace ephemerality and flex to announce any event that Spot might cater while still being instantly recognizable in the Detroit food scene.

Inspired by vintage techno records and vernacular typography, Evan Gendell and Alyssa Arnesen designed a revolving logo “place setting” that serves up the location and date of the next Spot on a platter. A restrained typographic palette, based on Off Type’s Neue Montreal Squeezed, and the use of black and white ground a suite of playful social animations that announce the next pop-up. The modular menu design accommodates the wide range of dish names and ingredient lists that Spot cooks up.

Check out the series of animated vignettes.

Company record sleeve for Hot Wax. The soul label from Detroit, Michigan, was in operation from 1969 to 1977.

Micro Kickboard are renowned for producing high-quality scooters, kickboards, and other innovative personal transport solutions for both children and adults. They offer a range of products designed to promote a more eco-friendly lifestyle, with a variety of scooters tailored to different age groups and uses. The latest promotional graphics used on website and social channels combine Work Sans by Wei Huang and Spektra Tekst by Dotless Type.

Bonnie Nardi, scholar, ethnographer, human–computer-interaction researcher, and author of one of my favourite books, A Small Matter of Programming, also wrote this personal ethnographic account of her research into and explorations of World of Warcraft: My Life as a Night Elf Priest.

From Wikipedia:

World of Warcraft was a major critical and commercial success upon its original release in 2004 and quickly became the most popular MMORPG of all time, reaching a peak of 12 million subscribers in 2010.

2010 also being when this book was published.

Most text of the cover is in various sizes of ITC Goudy Sans and sadly not the more erratic Goudy Sans which might have made a better fit for the topic. Text in yellow—“My Life as a Night Elf Priest”, “World of WarCraft”, and “Bonnie A. Nardi”—has a 3D bevel effect applied, similar to World of Warcraft official art. While the word “WarCraft” tends to appear with an internal capital C in official art and similar, in running text it seems to consistently be spelled without the capital. Text in red is added in Clearface Gothic.

Also, elf on cover with facepaint, gigantic shoulder pads, and bearing behind their head some sort of antler-/tree-like structure festooned with polygonal gold leaves.

Front

From Our Minds to Yours Vol. 1 is a compilation of techno music by various artists, released as double LP by Plus 8 Records in June 1991. The design is credited to “Stereotype-G. Arnett”, i.e. Gary Arnett of Acme Digital Design Labs.

[More info on Discogs]

Back

From Wikipedia:

The Undisputed Truth was an American Motown recording act assembled by record producer Norman Whitfield to experiment with his psychedelic soul production techniques. Joe “Pep” Harris served as main lead singer, with Billie Rae Calvin and Brenda Joyce Evans on additional leads and background vocals.

Face to Face with the Truth is their second album. Originally released in January 1972 on Motown’s subsidiary Gordy, the image shows a French pressing on the Tamla Motown label.

Cover by Norman Whitfield, with art direction by Curtis McNair and photography by Jim Hendin and Weldon Arthur McDougal III.

The band’s name is shown in a two-color setting of Gonzales Flair. The bold condensed display typeface with flaring stems and built-in long shade was drawn by Francisco Gonzales. It was issued by Photo-Lettering sometime between 1965 and 1971, in open and solid variants. Gonzales Flair has several extending swash letters (for A K W Y) that break up the band, but as far as I can tell from the limited specimens, there are no alternate glyphs.

The open typeface used for the title is also from Photo-Lettering, and likewise wasn’t featured on Fonts In Use before: it’s Lamkay Classic Shaded, one of two all-caps romans drawn by Victor Lamkay, here set on a curve, with fanned letterforms. It is older than Flair, and already appeared in PLINC’s 1950 catalog.

[More info on Discogs]

Gonzales Flair B and A as shown in Photo-Lettering’s Alphabet Thesaurus, vol. 3 from 1971. The first line shows style B with extended proportions, as indicated by the letter e behind the catalog number.

“Eivets Rednow”, the anadrome of Stevie Wonder, released his self-titled easy listening album specifically on November 20, 1968, on the Gordy record label. An early display of Pinto Flare is used for the artist name, while Helvetica is used for the tracklist. An inclined Benguiat Caslon is shown for “Alfie”. The font used for the word “featuring” above is Bodoni 175 Italic.

[More info on Discogs]

tilde.team is a shared system that provides an inclusive, non-commercial space for teaching, learning, practicing and enjoying the social medium of unix. The default styles for this public access unix system set the fonts to IBM Plex Mono.

Title page

One day, reading a tiny Bible, which contained only a few books of the New Testament, I noticed this funny typeface, all squeezed together, which, even at a considerable body size, seemed to join the letters almost without spacing. However, I found it quite legible. Another day, with another Bible in hand, I recognized the same typeface. Shown here is the New International Version as published by Zondervan in 1996.

In my country, which is neither English-speaking nor German-speaking, I noticed that there was a notable emphasis on the use of this typeface, which seemed to be restricted to the biblical text. And indeed, in most bibles whose design is “traditional” (and which therefore seem to give the characteristic tone of an ancient text), ITC Weidemann was used frequently.

Only later did I discover that its author was also the designer of the trio of Corporate typefaces; but the point is that, to my delight, Kurt Weidemann had written an article for the amazing design magazine Visible Language.

The typeface started out as a custom design for the German Bible Society in 1979, under the working title Biblica. It was commissioned for a new edition of the Holy Bible, to be published in 1982 as the first Bible translation mutually sponsored by the German Catholic and Protestant Church authorities. The key challenge was to save space without sacrificing legibility. According to Weidemann, his Biblica is 20 percent more efficient than normal book types, and thus could bring down the number of pages from 1,000 to 800. He demonstrated this by visually comparing sample pages set in Times New Roman and Biblica, with identical sizes and similar layouts. The typeface was released in 1983, now renamed to ITC Weidemann. Make sure to read the full article – “Biblica: Designing a New Typeface for the Bible” can be found in Visible Language, vol. 16, 1 (Winter 1982), pp 49–62.

My intention is to show the work of this author, and the typeface, in which I recognize a strange beauty, as well as its extreme efficiency.

Genesis

Gospel of Mark

Page from Mark, printed in two colors

Double page spread from Mark

Lookbook design for Michigan-based furniture manufacturer Enwork.

Swiss Typefaces’ Euclid Square is at the center of Enwork’s Signatures + Standouts. The piece highlights Enwork's most notable products with subtlety. Floods of color, paired with photography and unobtrusive type create establishing spreads for each product category: Private Office, Conference, Occasional, Training, and Benching. Sparse whitesweeps are used to showcase each product. With 100% cotton Crane’s Lettra paper and debossed clear foil for the cover, this piece is a pleasure to flip through.

Direction/Design by Connor Stratton, image visualization by Chip Matthews, copy by Josh Buck, printing by Holland Litho.

Photo via Urban Remains

The cover page of a catalogue booklet for Stow & Haight Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The company was active from 1880 to 1885 and tables were their primary product. After 1885, Haight was bought out by George Davis and the company reorganized as Stow & Davis.

“Tables” is in (a) Celtic (c.1867), “Catalogue and Price List” is set in Attic (1879), and “Of” might be in (an) Antique Extended (c.1858). The numerals for “1884” are from Oxonian (1881) and “Grand Rapids, Michigan” uses Old Style Extended (1880s?). The condensed roman for the company name and the sans serifs are yet unidentified.

Mucky Duck is a Michigan based mustard brand that's been around for over 40 years. Though once available in 500 stores across 15 states, its distribution and availability had slowly waned. In an effort to breath new life into the brand, Traction was enlisted to completely overhaul the visual identity.

The Mucky Duck's logotype is set in a slightly modified version of Central Type's Zonk. The terminals of the C’s have been sheared vertically in order to create an more uniform space between C and K. The brand's headlines use the standard, unmodified Zonk Regular.

The secondary type is New Spirit, which contrasts nicely with the extra-bold, sans serif headlines. Labil Grotesk is used for the website's body type.

Branding, identity and website design for Midwest's premier non-alcoholic bottle and beer shop, More or Less, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The brand identity was developed around a playful duality, leading the designers David Ruggeri and Gabrielle Podkul to develop an identity full of playful riffs on contrasting design elements. CA Negroni takes the center stage, full and approachable with its weight and balance, while the legible and practical Rubik is purely informative on the website and printed matter.

After completing the website, Gabrielle created a friendly character out of the 'OR' in the logo for use in shirts, stickers and tote bags. There is an undeniable charm to the branding, and this duo's first collaborative branding project has been well received by the client and the community.

Poster design for Major Murphy at Bell’s Eccentric Cafe with Phabies and Crooked Spires in Kalamazoo, Michigan on September 7, 2023. All thanks to Baby Teeth Dotted by the great Milton Glaser, this poster echos the charming tones of Major Murphy.

Poster design for Choral Reef (now half day), Bronze Wolf, WLDFLWR, and Frankie Valet in Grand Rapids, Michigan on August 3rd, 2019. IvyMode is used in a figure-8 knot for the artists’ names. Neue Helvetica is plainly used to present the important details of the event.

Landing page for email marketing and newsletter platform Audienceful.com. The typography uses Centra No. 2 for headlines, all smaller text set in Inter.

All-lowercase Optex (Letraset, 1970), reversed and with black and white lines, for the cover of Cooking with Microwave Magic.

The spiral-bound cookbook was authored by Joan Toole, “a leading authority and pioneer in the field of microwave cooking” and also “president of her own firm, Microwave Magic Co.” [Morton Grove Public Library]. It was published around 1975 – in that year, the sales volume of microwave ovens for the U.S. industry had grown to one million, compared to 40,000 units in 1970. A third edition came out in 1977 (see below), and a sixth edition in 1983.

Revised enlarged third edition, 1977

A groovy use of Al Elliott’s Charade with close shade and internal shading, for a plastic model kit produced by AMT in 1977.

“Chevy Custom Van” is in caps from Grotesque No. 9 Italic.

Side of the box with description in Univers Condensed

Side of the box with upright Grotesque No. 9 and labels in Univers

Decals

The instructions use Othello (ATF) and Futura.

From 1947 until 1992, the Heath Company from Michigan manufactured electronic kits and marketeted them under the brand name Heathkit. One category in which Heathkit enjoyed great popularity was amateur radio.

The display typeface used on the cover of the Heathkit Mail Order Catalog No. 848 is Dimensia, with a snowflake added as i dot. “Winter Kitbuilding Fun–1980” uses the small caps included in this font by Alphabet Innovations.