Photo: Stephen Coles. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

This letterhead accompanied a paper sample from Fleischer, a papermaker in Eislingen, Württemberg, Germany. I was delighted to find it in Jack Stauffacher’s collection, not just because it’s a lovely example of mid-1950s German design, but because it features two underappreciated — and contrasting — typefaces in use.

Source: www.flickr.com Photo: Peter Glaab. License: CC BY-ND.

Source: www.flickr.com Photo: Peter Glaab. License: CC BY-ND.

Source: www.flickr.com Photo: Peter Glaab. License: CC BY-ND.

D. Stempel AG specimen for Montan, ca. 1955.

Montan was designed by Anna Maria Schildbach in 1954 at a time when very few women were credited as type designers. I enjoy its strength and heft, dispelling the common assumption — especially at the time — that feminine letters are delicate and florid. Montan didn’t survive the transition to phototype and was quickly forgotten. Fortunately, the face was digitized by Carmen Mauerer in 2012. Unfortunately, Mauerer’s site is no longer operable. She is occupied with more important things, such as speaking up for refugee rights as a member of Mainz’s city council.

Source: www.flickr.com Image: Peter Glaab. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.flickr.com Image: Peter Glaab. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.flickr.com Image: Peter Glaab. License: All Rights Reserved.

D. Stempel AG specimen for Virtuosa I and II, ca. 1955.

The overlaying script is Virtuosa, a lesser-known product of Hermann Zapf. Its unusual upright nature is possibly a design compromise to help it work as metal type, and it was “corrected” in the digital version (Virtuosa Classic) which has the more conventional slant of a formal script. I admire the look of the original Virtuosa, however. Even its disconnected forms have a certain charm.

A new identity system for the Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF) and ShortFest as a hypothetical brand identity project at ArtCenter College of Design.

PSIFF is one of the largest festivals in North America, welcoming over 135,000 attendees each year for its lineup of new and celebrated international features and documentaries. ShortFest is the largest short film event in North America, and operates under the Palm Springs International Film Festival as a platform to feature emerging talent.

As a rebranding, I proposed a modern visual identity system that draws from the local vernacular of Palm Springs. The PSIFF identity, and its sister micro-identity ShortFest, use mid-century modern aesthetics paired with bright colors and wood type influences from the same time period. The multi-colored confetti graphic element celebrates the diversity of voices that are showcased at the festival.

A series of three posters for the PSIFF announce “Palm” “Springs” “2019” with big type, mixing layers and shapes of Bixa, a design that started out as an exploration of wood type by Mark van Wageningen in 2015. The concept – reconstructing lettershapes by printing their deconstructed parts in four print runs / four colors – was published as a (color) webfont in 2016, and as a digital typeface family in thirteen styles in 2017.

The Tankturm is a special venue in Heidelberg. Once this tower was used to fill steam locomotives with water. In 2014, AAg Architekten acquired the heritage-protected building and converted it into a venue for business, social and private events.

The identity was designed by Kontext Kommunikation, using LL Replica Mono as the brand typeface. The logo echoes the shape of the building.

Painted logo and house number.

Homepage of the Tankturm website (photo © Thomas Ott).

Web posters announcing a series of double concerts in 2019.

Early appearance of the logo in 2015, before the tenants moved in.

Album artworks, scarf and logo-mark sticker for the Edits series by Columbia Records artist Cadenza. The typography pairs Druk Condensed (Commercial Type) with Choc (Fonderie Olive) and 911 Porscha (Iconian).

Poster for Wiley’s concert at Het Bos in Antwerp, designed in 2018 by Ward Heirwegh, with the typefaces Brutal, Suisse Int’l, and Siren Script II and IV.

From Atelier Carvalho Bernau:

The idea of fiction plays a central role in the work of Agnieszka Kurant, and here is a little booklet with an essay by Diedrich Diederichsen that talks about fiction, the fabrication of ghosts. In it, Diederichsen describes the relation of fiction and reality in Kurant’s work like this: “it is a second creator of reality, an illegitimate or repudiated sister of the demiurge, not grounded in reality but capable of influencing and altering it. For Agnieszka Kurant, fiction always has reality effects.”

When we first read that text, it was still in the original German that Diedrich wrote, and finally realising that the publication would of course only be in English, we felt that the German text, while not fictional, was such a repudiated sister of the later de-facto reality as well. In conversation with curator Maaike Lauwaert, we decided to resurrect it, and to place it back into reality.

Initially we considered different types of ghosting (in short, it’s a class of printing mistakes where a ghost image of another part of the printed paper appears in the wrong place), but taking into account the writer’ process of re-formulating and re-reformulating an idea, we found the palimpsest a more convincing image:

We imagined a book where the previous German text had been printed and then erased – but not 100% erased – before overprinted with the English translation.

Because of this whole concept of de- and re-materialisation, we hid a pair of Google Books hands on the covers of the book, under the dust jacket: The scanner operators’ hands are the true ghosts in the massive dematerialised book machine. (Credit goes to the wonderful blog The Art of Google Books for introducing us to these images).

For Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, 2013.
32pp., 11×17 cm.

Photos: Nadine Stijns