Enough is Enough, the campaign to fight the cost-of-living crisis in the UK, produced these posters that could be downloaded, printed and displayed in support of strikes by NHS and postal workers. Elephant was also used for banners and ‘Frontline Workers From Clapped To Sacked’ posters, used at rallies and picket lines.

Alias Elephant is used for slogan type, with Public Notice JNL used for the EIE logotype.

The Macao Design Week is a yearly event held in Macao, China. It is organized by the Macau Designers Association (MDA) which was founded in 1986, while the city was still under Portuguese rule and spelled according to Portuguese orthography. Sparked by the felt need to propagate design as a discipline, to further its public awareness and to improve on the local designer’s education, MDA, over a period of more than 30 years, unfolded an incredible range of activities.

What started as the Macau Design Biennial in 1994 meanwhile turned into the Macau Design Award, and other, theme-based competitions and exhibitions were initiated starting in 2004. In 2015 MDA even managed to open the Macau Design Centre. That same year the Macao Design Week was organized for the first time.

In sum, the association worked hard to turn Macao into a regional hub for interchange and networking in the field of design, reaching out today to the wider Asian area and an international public.

The 2019 edition of the Design Week invited Portuguese designers to exhibit their work alongside that of participants from Macao. The visuals promoting the event were designed by Untitled Macao, a local design agency founded in 2017. Their concept is based on four 3D-generated shapes and radiant colors, orange and green, exactly those that can give headaches in print. But they excelled at it!

The impact of the posters is further boosted by the typeface used: it is Minotaur Beef, designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée and available from Production Type. It is characterized by straight lines in places where you wait for curves, expressive ink traps and unexpected, bold solutions. The graphic designers at Untitled Macao took special care and developed a custom lettering style for the Chinese text that picks up on these devilish features in order to bring heavenly harmony to the typography.

Design: Untitled Macao
Video production: Mirage Visuals 蜃海視覺
Director: Puzzle Lai 賴明德
3D animation: Pancy Ng 吳穎儀

Slow & Low co-founders and co-curators Lauren M. Pacheco and Peter Kepha brought design studio Span in to build upon their history and vision by designing the event’s visual identity, promotion materials, and supergraphic environmental signage. More than a car show, Slow & Low is a celebration of identity grounded in self-expression, social-change, master-craftsmanship and machinery. The opportunity to take over Chicago’s largest tourist destination came with a responsibility of placemaking. Together, we did so by celebrating the individuals of a community that mainstream cultures often overlook.

Typographically, the design system employs a highly expressive, showroom approach. Span assembled a suite of typefaces mirroring letterforms found on the eye-catching cars, the chromed plaques of the car clubs, and masthead of the classic Teen Angels publication. The star of the showroom is the swash capitals of Frida Medrano’s Jabin – a contemporary evolution of the Gutenberg bible’s blackletter. Jabin’s curves and contrast are paired with Sharp Type’s dramatic Respira Black, a reprisal of 15th century Spanish blackletter. The supportive type is Archivio Tipografico’s version of Aldo Novarese’s Nova Augustea. This over-the-top, eclectic range of type is united in flamboyant beauty and in holding key roles in history. These qualities – beauty and history – are principles in the artistry and aesthetic of Lowrider culture.

Beyond letterforms, symbolically, the design system embraces an omnipresence of arches, marigolds, and praying hands – religious iconography important to Pacheco and Kepha given their prominence throughout Chicano and lowrider culture symbolizing a celebration of faith, life, and death. The visual identity comes to life with purpose by featuring Slow & Low’s world-renowned and emerging photographers. The photography gave the design system power, by going beyond showing the stunning, lowrider cars and spotlighting the individuals in Chicago’s lowrider community.

Yapari in early use for the Metaverse Music Festival 2022, a project by Decentraland, a 3D virtual world browser-based platform.

The 2022 edition took place November 10–13 and featured over 100 artists. This year’s MVMF showcase performances were created with the latest motion capture technology from Move.ai which enables motion capture with no suits and Kinetix.tech that aims to empower creators to make Emotes using only a phone camera as well as video performances.

The festival featured 15 completely different and unique stages set against a cyberpunk landscape being overgrown by nature. A mystical Tower of Babel stood over everything, filling the ears of anyone who approaches with languages from around the world, symbolizing the unifying power of music. The event also included the deployment of numerous new experiences to explore, such as Follow the Rabbit, Take the Blue Pill, Portaloo, The Backstage Pass Quest, and more.

From Alexis Orloff’s Flickr photostream.

This “guide to masterpieces at risk” accompanied the French TV series of the same title, which dealt with safeguarding endangered cultural heritage sites in France. Chefs d’œuvre en péril was created and presented by Pierre de Lagarde and broadcast from 1962 to 1993.

The delicate fraktur letterforms on the cover are from Cölnisch Current Fraktur (also: Coellnisch-Current-Fraktur). Note the ligatures – not only the squiggly ‘ch’, but also the ‘de’. The apostrophe and the acute are too light and don’t quite fit the style.

Cölnisch Current Fraktur is a 16th century typeface by the Luthersche Gießerei in Frankfurt/Main. According to Albert Kapr, Christian Egenolff cast this font from borrowed matrices as early as in 1524. J.G.I. Breitkopf mentions that Egenolph [sic] possessed a typeface cut in brass, known as ‘Cöllnisch Current’ or ‘Deytsch Fractur’ – denoting its place of birth [Cologne] – which was recut for casting by his son-in-law, Jacob [Jacques] Sabon. See Johann Erasmus Luther’s 1678 specimen in Dan Reynolds’ article about the library of the Gutenberg Museum for ILT. A complete alphabet showing was first included in Jan Tschichold’s Meisterbuch der Schrift (1952). The punches then were in possession of the D. Stempel AG typefoundry.

Dieter Steffmann made a digital revival in 2000 (revised in 2008) and released the freebie as ‘Coelnische Current Fraktur’. The Walden Font Co. offers a ‘Coelnisch Current Fraktur WF’. This version is different, most notably in the dots on ‘i’ and ‘j’, and in that it has the ‘long s’ (ſ) as default.