Weissenberger Planungs GmbH supports private companies and public institutions that are planning the construction or conversion of their commercial kitchen. The new website opens up with the slogan “Wir denken Küchen größer!” (“Thinking kitchens bigger!”). It was designed by Max Nehlich Studio, exclusively using two weights of Input Sans.

Front cover of the soundtrack album

Alexander of the Herb Lubalin Study Center showed a mostly typographic and entirely black-and-white “Style B” poster made for The Harder They Come. He points out that other promotional posters for the film were done in the blaxploitation style. This post is about the most striking design among those.

The soundtrack album to the Jamaican cult film was released in the United Kingdom in July 1972 by Island Records. A North American release followed in February 1973 on Mango Records. The sleeve design is credited to London-based CCS Associates, with cover art by John Bryant.

The title is rendered in Bottleneck. Tony Wenman’s design for Letraset was brand new at the time: it was issued earlier in 1972, likely inspired by the success of Seymour Chwast’s Art Tone, and most closely following its Boot Black style. The bottom-heavy letterforms were drawn by hand, arranged on an arch, contoured, extruded, and filled with color gradients. Jimmy Cliff’s name got a similarly colorful treatment, with shaded letterforms loosely based on Cooper Black Italic: the initial J obtained a large descending hook, C was streamlined, and the f’s elongated.

This artwork was also used for a poster issued by Island Records to promote the album, and later got adopted for posters made for various re-releases of the film.

[More info on Discogs]

Promotional poster for the soundtrack by Island Records, UK, 1973. The elements of Bryant’s artwork were rearranged for the taller format.

British Quad (30″×40″) poster for a 1977 re-release of the “original uncut version” by Lagoon Associates. Again, the elements of Bryant’s artwork were rearranged, now optimized for the landscape format. Additional text is set in all-caps Franklin Gothic.

German poster (24.25″×16.5″) for a 1980 re-release by Melody & Art Films, featuring a coarser copy of the original art, with a simpler color scheme – which extends to the lettering. The text added at the bottom uses the upright style of Cooper Black, apparently applied as rub-down type.

Back cover of the soundtrack album (Mango Records, 1973). Most text is produced on a typewriter, making use of double spacing and several ellipses to justify the last paragraph. “Original Soundtrack Recording” is in unmodified Bottleneck. Credits are set in Univers Condensed and Helvetica.

Front and back cover of the gatefold

Inner gatefold with a collage of photos and lyrics.

Cooper Black Italic in use for an animated logo made for Club of Love, an underground party loving collective. I combined the shape of a heart with the style of a lava lamp to bring back the vibes of the 70s.

The Hölderlinturm (“Hölderlin Tower”) in the picturesque city of Tübingen, Germany was recently renovated by Coast Office Architecture, Stuttgart. The landmark of the city was once the home of the famous poet Friedrich Hölderlin.

Coinciding with the 250th anniversary of his birth, the three-story house has been turned into a museum honouring the life and work of the poet who has been called “the poet of poets”.

Hölderlin’s use of meter (rhythmic structure in verse or line of a verse) plays an important role throughout the permanent exhibition. Visitors are able to use all of their senses while interacting with his poems. In the museum the typography is either silkscreened, stencilled, digital printed, CNC milled in plexiglass and wood, or presented as 3D lettering in brass.

The two typefaces Suisse Int’l (sans-serif) and Suisse Works (serif) harmonise with one another and maintain their integrity in very large und small sizes.

Museum architecture concept and implementation by Coast Office Architecture
Graphic concept and implementation by Toussaint x Teachout (Devin Teachout)
Interactive Media: 2AV
Curator: Dr. Thomas Schmidt (German Literature Archive, Marbach am Neckar)

Science Notes, published by the University Tübingen in Germany, is a magazine exploring “knowledge and society”. Dealing with a single subject, each issue gathers various members of the institution's diverse pool of researchers, designers, and artists, in order to highlight relevant studies and their potential impact on our society.

This third issue is examining the subject of “reality” and exploring the subjects of virtuality, simulation, and the “real world”. By asking questions such as ‘Can a man love an object?’, ‘How can a vegan burger bleed?’, and ‘Can our brains distinguish actuality from thought?’, its aim is ultimately to inspire a sense of questioning ‘what is real’ in the reader.

As a publication dealing with both retro and futuristic worlds, that’s trying to make the underlying science understandable and tangible, it was designed to feel pointed, dynamic, and surprising.

The magazine uses Primo Serif (Playtype, 2000) as their constant house typeface. In each issue, it is paired with a second one. For issue 1 “Optimal”, art director Sandra Teschow chose Code (Fontfabric, 2011). Issue 2 “Gefahr” (danger) introduced the Neue Plak series (Monotype, 2018). For the third issue shown in this post, Teschow combined Primo Serif with Neue Plak again and added VP Pixel (VP Type, 2017) to the mix. The pixel typeface is used for the magazine logo and for headlines. You can read more about the design process including aspects like paper stock, grids, and images in a report published by Wissenswerte Bremen.

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

There are several interesting typographic details to discover in this old business letter, like the top-connecting ‘ch’ ligature in Koralle that almost looks like an upside down psi (ψ). Or the fact that Koralle, like many of Schelter & Giesecke’s typefaces, came with an uppercase eszett (ẞ), which apparently was so ahead of the times that it got confused with a lowercase one here and ended up in the middle of a mixed-case word (see “Katharinenstraße”). Or the way how medium-wide Koralle and wide Aurora-Grotesk (VII) take turns in the list of products, despite the fact that both series were available in a range of styles and widths. Or the inconsistent spelling of the name “Geßwein” — with ‘ß’ in the letterhead, with ‘ſſ’ in the rubberstamp, with ‘ss’ in the signature …

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

The logo with the big red ‘G’ is not from a font, but was custom drawn. This kind of three-dimensional treatment was very much in vogue in type, too. For comparison: Arno Drescher’s Helion (Schriftguss, top) and Willy Schaefer’s Neon (C.E. Weber, bottom), two related typefaces that were both released in 1935.

There’s more to it, though — something eerie, which is not obvious at first sight. The company name is set in Tannenberg schmal, one of the first “jackboot grotesks”, or “New German typefaces”, as they were referred to in Klimsch’s Jahrbuch, released in 1933, months after Hitler seized power. It is named after the Battle of Tannenberg, a symbol of Teutonic nationalism and militarism, and was advertised as “truly German, […] a sign of the times” and an “expression of new German desire”. The letter was sent by the owner of a furniture store in Tübingen, five years into Nazi Germany, and is signed “Mit deutschem Gruss!” (literally “with German salute”), the written equivalent of the Nazi salute. Unlike raising one’s right arm, such a letter ending was never mandatory, and although the phrase can occasionally be found in business communication (alongside the more common and more explicit “Heil Hitler!”), its use was the exception rather than the rule. This circumstance — more so than the use of Tannenberg — suggests that the sender was not exactly opposed to the regime.

The bottom half of the letter holds a carbon copy of the reply by the addressed furniture agent in Stuttgart-Weil im Dorf, confirming the order. He, by contrast, used an innocuous salutation (“hochachtungsvoll grüssend” ≈ “Yours respectfully”). His name is Ludwig Steinthal, and he was Jewish. With the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, German Jews had been stripped of their citizenship and civil rights. Having been a target of discrimination and persecution including occupational bans before, they were now officially excluded from many public events and places — simply because of their religious affiliation. As of May 1937, Steinthal apparently was still able to somehow pursue his business, but not for long. One year later, he was imprisoned in the infamous Dachau concentration camp. It didn’t help him that he was married to a non-Jewish woman, nor that he fought for Germany in World War I. Until 1945, Ludwig Steinthal was detained in several Nazi concentration camps, but miraculously managed to survive in Theresienstadt. We know this today because his son Hermann shared his memoirs in a book published in 2008.

Ludwig Steinthal didn’t specify gotisch letterforms for his rubberstamp. His name is set in Bravour-Kursiv, a charming advertising face designed by commercial artist, graphic designer and film architect Martin Jacoby-Boy. Like Steinthal, Jacoby-Boy was persecuted for nothing else but being Jewish. After being banned from his profession, he fled Germany in 1933.

Let’s not forget about this history, especially not these days.

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

Tube cap

Established in 1948, the Pustefix bubbles brand with the yellow teddy bear is known by every kid in Germany — and beyond: 700,000 liters of the soapy liquid are filled annually, 50% of it being exported to the US, Russia, Japan, China, and Korea.

The wordmark with the bouncing baseline is in Tip-Top, an old German advertising typeface first cast by Julius Klinkhardt in 1902. Some corners in P, s and e have been rounded off. Judging from the images shown in the history section of the company’s website, it was introduced sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, when Tip-Top was available from Berthold Fototype, among others. The shown tube and bottle are contemporary, i.e. from 2015.

For comparison: Tip-Top as digitized by URW++ (2008).

Refill bottle

Pustefix tube

Hin und wieder aber dennoch – now and then but nonetheless.

Large-scale, luminous words accompany the students at the Morgenstelle Cafeteria of Tübingen University not – as we might expect – while they are studying but while they are eating. Suspended from the ceiling in the cafeteria where the food is served, the words and their possible meanings add an element of interest and diversion to the time spent in this functional space. They are a playful adaptation of words by the philosopher hannes böhringer selected specifically for this location. Light sequences of different colours create an ever-changing atmosphere, bringing the whole cafeteria to life. — Büro Uebele