In a world of perpetual movement and infinite possibilities, maintaining balance and fostering genuine relationships are essential for well-being. VBALANCE is a community that brings together individuals who strive for equilibrium and trustworthy connections.

The distinctive identity and clean, recognizable packaging for VBALANCE were crafted by the creative studio iseenow.co. The design incorporates the playful Stinger Wide alongside graphics with similar shapes and lines, and utilizes Milligram Text New for body text. These fonts were designed and published by the team of Francesco Canovaro, Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini, Andrea Tartarelli, and Maria Chiara Fantini at Zetafonts.

Packaging for three card games developed by Viktoriya “Vika” Dmitriyeva: Узнай себя! (“Get to know yourself!”), Вопросов про любовь (“Questions about Love”), and Вопрос дня ребёнку (“Question of the Day for a Child”)

This children's book was designed to accompany the Louvre exhibition Les Choses. Une histoire de la nature morte (“Things. A History of Still Life”) in 2022 and features Self Modern by Lucas Le Bihan for titles, text set in Fraunces from Undercase Type and highlights in Indian Type Foundry’s Quilon.

Showcasing a selection of works featured in the exhibition, it underlines art permanent inspiration in life and human preoccupations (such as life, death, beliefs, science, nature...).

Alongside each work are anecdotes, quotes or philosophical concepts putting it in perspective with the world we live in. Some pages even feature activities, playfully inviting readers to look more closely.

It was co-published by Éditions Courtes et Longues and Louvre éditions.

Berlin Letters is a festival for lettering, type design, calligraphy and related fields. First organized in May 2019 to great acclaim, the long-awaited second edition will take place from July 5 to 7, 2024, this time at silent green, a unique venue in Berlin-Wedding.

Ulrike Rausch and Chris Campe, who organize the festival together with Claudia Guminski and Nils Töpfer, have put together an enticing program that comprises 24 talks and 18 workshops, featuring many skilled speakers from a range of backgrounds.

If this sounds interesting to you, book your ticket right away: the early bird offer will end today (April 30).

The logotype was drawn by Chris Campe, a designer, author and educator living in Hamburg. She also created an animated version, using a technique she’ll share in one of the workshops. Chris subsequently extended the cheerful bold script letters into a full (lowercase) alphabet, plus basic punctuation. This custom font named Berlin Letters Script serves for headlines on the Berlin Letters website. It’s paired with TOS Sans, a low-contrast sans with vertically cut terminals, started by Bernd Volmer – Berlin-based type designer and speaker at the first edition – around 2020. Named after its original licensee, The Organic Store, TOS Sans is work in progress and yet unreleased.

Disclosure: while I’m not a member of the Berlin Letters team, I will offer a lettering walk as part of the festival’s supporting program, together with Fritz Grögel.

Poster made as a personal project to commemorate the release of Beyoncé’s album Act II: Cowboy Carter. The design is inspired by Chitlin’ Circuit posters. Printed copies are available from my print store.

Jubilat is the main brand typeface of Djaara.

The Dja Dja Wurrung are an Aboriginal Australian people who who have lived on their traditional lands, Djandak (“Country”), in the Bendigo region of central Victoria over many thousands of years.

Previously known as Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation (DDWCAC), the group partnered with Storyland to tell their stories through reimagined brand communications. This included a new name: Djaara means “People” in the Dja Dja Wurrung language. In a series of workshops, they developed an identity that maintained the essence of the old branding, with carefully reworked components such as the Bunjil (Wedge-Tailed Eagle) and the Campfire (Jupiter).

Storyland introduced Darden Studio’s Jubilat as the primary typeface for all communication. The low-contrast slab serif with high x-height serves in several of its twelve weights. It’s often set in lines or paragraphs of alternating colors, making good use of the extensive palette that draws inspiration from Djandak’s unique environment.

Jubilat can be seen in annual reports and other publications, on signs and maps, and on the various websites: in addition to Djaara’s main site, there are three specialized sites dedicated to the corporation’s areas of activity: Djandak (Land Management Services), Dumawul (Cultural Immersion Experiences), and Djakitj (Bush Foods). There, Jubilat is supported by the sans-serif Mulish, with Cheddar Gothic Rough used for the menu. The wordmark is custom lettering, with Sofia used for the slogan “Balaki Wuka” (“Giving to community”).

Brand Style Guide

Website detail

Website detail

Page from an annual report

Map with main labels in Jubilat

Page from an annual report

The nine Dja Dja Wurrung Community Goals

Cover of the Djaara Cultural Competency Program by Dumawul

Detail from the Djandak website

Menu on the Djakitj website

A 1973 poster for the reggae classic film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff. The title treatment is set in Zipper, a Letraset classic. The curved type with Jimmy Cliff’s name looks to be photographically adjusted to better conform to the curve. Note the slight trapezoidal tapering towards the bottom of the letters. Compare the C, M, and Y glyphs in the name and title. The top quote on the poster is set in Helvetica and Bookman Bold Italic Swash, with the credit line set in Stymie. The quote uses hanging punctuation well! Trade Gothic shows up in small print at the bottom. The film critic quotes are typed on a typewriter. The border is a scotch rule (thick-thin-thick style) that could have been made using a dry-transfer process (not the slight misalignment where the curved corner meets the straight line. Letraset catalogs don’t show this style of border.

This poster is the “Style B” of the poster and differs significantly from the other promotional posters for the film, which are done in the blaxploitation style. The bottom left corner of the poster is meant for the placement of the details of the local theater screening the film.

Detail of the main title’s type treatment. You can make out the faint sun shape made out of Ben Day dots (or done using a dry transfer tone) in the background. Trade Gothic is used for the “Roger Corman presents...” credit line.

Studio Claus Due designed the catalog Mr. Remember using KF Zuka (Kanon Foundry) and Bogart (Zetafonts). The catalog was published by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in connection with their large, in-depth exhibition of works by American artist Alex Da Corte (b. 1980) in the summer of 2022.

From Louisiana:

The exhibition catalog contains both an overview of Da Corte's work and exhibitions up to the present day and is rich in photos from the large staged and all-encompassing exhibition with Da Corte throughout Louisiana's west wing.

Alex Da Corte, despite his young age, has long been well known in Louisiana, which first exhibited a work by the artist in 2003.

Da Corte works across many forms of expression with an emphasis on sculpture, video and installation. He uses a wide range of materials and references: from cheap, mass-produced objects to exclusive design, from children's television to the masters of art history, and from French poetry to American pop music. He often appears himself in disguise in his films – such as everything from Skipper Skrek to Eminem and the Statue of Liberty.

Some of the references are easily recognisable, but in Da Corte's processing there is an alienation or a displacement of the familiar. His art constantly moves back and forth between the cheerful and funny and the dark and melancholic, which gives the works a deep emotional resonance.

See more images on the website of Studio Claus Due.

Hijas del Campo is a non-profit organization based in Contra Costa County, California. It was founded by four daughters of immigrant farmworkers. Their main goal is to help migrant and seasonal farmworkers and their families improve their working conditions, health, and safety.

Founded by Corinne Gisone in 2022, Clos Gisone is a small winery producing organic and natural wines (vins nature) on 4.5 hectares in the commune of Montblanc in the Hérault region of France.

The specificity of these wines lies in the fact that they are vinified without the use of inputs, in line with a return to traditional oenological methods.

The visual identity created by Studio Asensò reflects the distinctive personality of these wines and their creator. The logo is in Gopher (from Adam Ladd) and the labels in Baste (from Lift Type) and are printed on Fedrigoni paper. The third typeface used in the identity – for example on business cards – is Swear Cilati (from OH no Type Co.).

Concert poster for Barcelona-based band The Bird Yellow using a picture taken by Maria Jou Sol at a local bus station.

Transeunte – from Alaska to Brazil by Bike is a book about André Fatini’s journey along the American continent. For three years, he traveled from Anchorage, in the US, to his home in São Paulo, in Brazil. It is a delightful tale of his experiences, enriched by his passion for life and for photography. The pictures he took during this crossing were key for us to define the visuals for the project, that incorporated them into collages used for the chapter openings, the cover and the map of the trip.

Design, layout and collages by Estúdio Drama. Printed by BMF Gráfica e Editora in
Osasco, São Paulo, October 2023.

This zine was made for a trip to Bolivia in May 2023. Besides being a special memento of the trip itinerary, we wanted the zine to be a practical item that would facilitate access to information (such as phone numbers, addresses, and reservation numbers) in remote places during the trip, where we might not have internet signal to look them up online (which indeed happened frequently).

Singing to Liberation is about Indian students’ resistance to the wave of nationalism in their country.

Published by Daraja Press, Wakefield, Quebec.

Our friends at Letterform Archive will hold their next Rare Book Sale on December 9, 2023. Typophiles eager to get their hands on some delightful duplicates can drop by on-site in San Francisco or online at the website. Hint, hint: members get early access to the sale.

We’re clearing out a treasure trove of rare duplicates from the collection, from 19th–20th-century type specimens and hard-to-find design books and periodicals, to ephemera and other design collectibles. This is the perfect place to discover something special for your own collection or to snag a few unique holiday gifts, whether you attend the local sale or browse our special online selection from wherever you are.

Elise Carlton’s design for the announcement indulges in a 19th-century aesthetic, and specifically references chromatic wood type like that shown by William H. Page in 1874. The star of the show is HWT Etta. Designed by Lynne Yun and Maxime Gau, it consists of two styles, East and West, and was released in 2021 with the Hamilton Wood Type Foundry. Established in 2012, that’s a joint venture between P22 Type Foundry and the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum.

The word “AND” on the right is a so-called catchword. Such decorative whole-word sorts were common in American wood type and are also known as logotypes, or logograms. This specific glyph is included in Miranda Roth’s HWT Catchwords. Other digital fonts with similar vintage catchwords include Brothers, Adobe Wood Type Ornaments, and Catch Words JNL.

The festive setting is crowned by Crayonette DJR, David Jonathan Ross’s digital revival of an italic design with horizontal contrast that was originally dreamt up by Henry Brehmer in 1889.

Addendum: I learned that for the 2023 announcement, Carlton reused her design from the previous year, with new colors.

Born from the belief that nourishing, high quality, planet-friendly products should be available to everyone, Wholesome is the online eco-health pantry and membership that makes a difference at every step. They tasked Universal Favourite with an end-to-end brand overhaul that would reflect the innovation of their DTC offering, looking, feeling and sounding as good as the brands and products they stock.

The logo is set in Gooper, a typeface that embodies the communal spirit of its heritage (the ever-ubiquitous, retro Cooper) while bringing its own goopy, playful flair. Slight customisations were made to the w allowing it to tuck neatly under the h ascender and also to shine as a standalone icon. With its soft edges and winding curves, the mark is distinctively warm and inviting.

The typography intertwines practicality and expression. Gooper SemiCondensed is disarmingly personable with just enough charm for headers and large-scale use. Maison Neue takes out the role of best supporting typeface, providing a clean but friendly sans serif that’s ideal for smaller pops of copy. And then there’s Kale Sans Mono – the informative, matter-of-fact, typewriter-esque workhorse. Together they make for a type system that’s as rich in quality and variety as the brand they represent.

BirdyBird is a self-balancing interactive ceramic bird produced by VetJale, a brand by interior designer Sophie Anderson.

New Kansas is used for representing BirdyBird's bold and playful design.

Birdy Bird packaging

Packing has a continuous design on all sides of the box.

VetJale’s website using New Kansas Black and Light

Website text is rendered in Montserrat.

Climbing instructor and sports masseur Benno Hinrichsmeyer searched for a long time for a natural care product for his hard-working hands. One without chemicals, palm oil, mineral oil and allergens. In the fall of 2019, he mixed beeswax, olive oil, St. John’s wort and aloe vera in his shared kitchen in Cologne. And so Daumenschmaus (German for “thumb feast”) was born – the first solid, vegan hand cream made from organic raw materials.

A few months later, he founded the cosmetics brand 4 People Who Care with his brother and two friends. 4 People Who Care is a name that holds both the founders and its customers accountable. Its mission is to develop sustainable products using only the most necessary and useful ingredients while protecting biological diversity on our doorstep. With every product sold, 4 People Who Care reinvests in the nature from which it sources its raw materials, through flowering meadow sponsorships, collaborations with organic farmers and by supporting biodiversity projects.

The Hamburg-based cosmetics company is currently preparing for internationalization – beginning with the renaming of its products so that they are understood globally. For example “Lip Balm” instead of “Lippenpflege Aufs Mäulchen”, “Solid Sunscreen” instead of “Feste Sonnencreme Naseweiß,” or “Face Oil” instead of “Gesichtsöl Goldgrübchen”. The packaging design of the product portfolio was also completely redeveloped in a harmonious and authentic way under the direction of Hamburg-based designer Kathrin Burschyk. The brand’s distinctive typeface is now Nice Headline from Fontwerk. On the website 4peoplewhocare.com, which has also been revamped, the product range can already be admired in the new design.

“We chose Nice because the typeface commands a great presence both at the POS and in the webstore … just the right warmth and emotionality.” Burschyk explains the choice of the typeface. “It also has beautiful numerals that are used prominently on the packs of the ranges.” For the small print, Sofia from Mostardesign is used. Marc Seipel, Key Account Manager and Product Developer at 4 People Who Care, adds: “We deliberately chose Nice Headline for the global design to showcase our brand message in a visible and modern way.” Co-founder Fritz Hinrichsmeyer admits on LinkedIn: “We worked on it for a really long time and turned a few loops. Now we’re done.” and asks: “Opinions on the Design?” Answer: 100 percent agreement in the comments.

Nice Headline numerals play an important role in the packaging design of 4 People Who Care product lines

These 'record covers' for each training course are designed to encourage organisations to build a 'playlist' of the training courses their employees need.

In 2023, we were asked to create a new visual brand for training company BiteSize Learning, to replace the existing materials that were heavily built around ‘default’ document settings such as black, white and the Calibri typeface.

In particular, as the company ramped up its digital marketing, we wanted to create a more distinctive look and feel that would be recognizable across the website, social media, advertising and client communications, while corresponding to their internal training course materials.

For the new typography we selected two contrasting fonts: Fraunces by Undercase Type for display and headlines, and Overpass by Delve Fonts for body copy.

Fraunces is a juicy font full of personality. She’s available in a range of weights, optical sizes, and levels of softnesses and “wonk”. We use it throughout the identity in the Extra Bold weight, and set in the small optical size (even when displayed at a large size), with medium softness, no wonk. Generally, we tighten up the leading and the tracking so the characters and lines are almost (but not quite!) touching. This evokes the core purpose of BiteSize Learning, which is all about training teams to collaborate closely together, without crashing into one another.

We also created a new wordmark logo set in Fraunces, combining the Extra Bold and Light weights, with italicised i’s to give it a sense of forward momentum.

Overpass is an extremely legible body font, based on the US Highways sign alphabet. As a lot of the company’s training takes place remotely over Zoom, we wanted something that could remain readable in PowerPoint even when video quality is low, so a font designed to be read at night while travelling at 80mph seemed like a good fit. We use Overpass in its most vanilla form (Regular weight without any adjustment to spacing or line height.)

Other design elements include:

? Employing off-white and off-black tones (oatmilk and midnight) instead of pure black and white, to create a softer look for simple documents and slides

? A rainbow palette of seven key hues in three different tints, which correspond to the seven key training categories (e.g: management training content uses blue, while training in wellbeing uses coral)

?️ Using duotone treatments (based around the brand palette) to make stock photography a little less ‘stock photography-ish’

? Using outline icons and circles as waypoint markers throughout training attendees’ learning journey

One learning point: Fraunces is a variable font, and we found different platforms (e.g: Canva, Photoshop, Pitch, PowerPoint, Squarespace) handle the various possible font files differently, allowing different settings take precedence. Decoding these differing default treatments and controlling the end result to ensure a consistent appearance took some extra work.

With over 70 training courses on offer, there were over 1,500 PowerPoint slides to redesign.

Each course has a hero banner, duotoned in their category colour – for example the project management training course is in lagoon / sea-green, as it's part of the effectiveness category.

We also moved the website from Wordpress to Squarespace, to make it easier for everyone to manage, maintain and expand.

We created hundreds of templates for training course materials, to represent a wide variety of different concepts, models, exercises and frameworks.

Casava is a new insurance company that’s attempting to change the experience of insurance in Nigeria. The brand identity for Casava builds on the concept of enjoyable insurance.

Leveraging an underexplored approach to brand identity design that de-prioritises illustrations and doubles down on owning and communicating effectively with simple elements like characterful typography, vibrant colours and a relatable photography style.

Casava’s evolution started with the wordmark. Drawing inspiration from the typography of lifestyle brands, it is drawn to be as smooth as a gentle wave with ease in mind. The wordmark reflects the enjoyable feeling that comes with being insured by Casava. The animation sets the tone for what the entire Casava experience for a user should be, easy, calm and enjoyable.

The chosen typeface, Gooper, with its swashy, tight, and touching old-style serifs, harkens back to the phototypesetting era of the 1960s and 70s. Used in Semi Condensed styles, Gooper is supported by Fellix.

Taking an editorial approach in key communication moments, the new identity puts customers front and centre with a fresh library of brand photography that illuminates the people at the heart of the platform.

Studio MPLS designed the logo and packaging for Strange Lands, a (now defunct) distillery that was based in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. The identity uses an elegantly-customized Crayonette DJR for the logo, monogram and perhaps, most importantly, the word “GIN”). Other display text is set vertically in Corfe, and supporting text is set in an all-caps combination of LHF Egyptian and Series A Signage JNL. The identity uses a variety of colors to distinguish the different gin varieties, all set on a label with distinctive stepped corners.

Studio MPLS senior designer Brent Schoepf spoke to The Dieline about the typographic palette:

[Crayonette] DJR all day! Dolly Parton’s album Home for Christmas made us do it. We’re just imitators in this case. All other typography is either from Letter Head Fonts or Jeff Levine, always and forever our default font makers. And a special shoutout to Beasts of England for the embossed type on the side of the bottle, done in ‘Corfe’.