The visual identity for the 10th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR), designed by the Berlin based design practice Stahl R, makes prominent use of Eliza Mono, with Eliza serving as a companion for longer texts. From the IABR website:

Fifty years after the publication of the Club of Rome’s report, the jubilee Architecture Biennale Rotterdam […] combined historical research (as of 1972) with inspiring practical examples (in 2022) and future scenarios (towards 2072). The works exhibited by architects, urban designers, artists, scientists, and landscape designers depicted the causes and consequences of climate change, but also offered perspectives for action.

The 10th edition of the IABR was more than a wake-up call. Rather than simply outlining a bleak worldview, it presented hopeful possibilities for new, more radical courses towards a livable future, and introduced radical, feasible transitions leading to a just and ecologically healthy world.

The 10th IABR presented three architecture exhibitions with more than 150 projects and offered a program of guided tours, (children’s) workshops, field trips, lectures, and debates.

SPQR Now, Imaginarios contemporáneos en torno a la antigua Roma (“SPQR Now, Contemporary Imaginaries of Ancient Rome”) was written by Tono Vizcaíno Estevan and published by Sans Soleil Ediciones, in a design by Carles Rodrigo Monzó.

During his fellowship at the Real Academia de España en Roma (Spanish Academy in Rome), archaeologist Tono Vizcaíno Estevan conducted research on the contemporary reception of the classical past. Its aim is to analyze the new languages generated by the confluence of Archeology and mass culture in the 21st century Rome.

This intersection serves as the foundation of the book’s design concept, blending ancient with contemporary inspired elements to create this contrast that defines its identity.

The 16:9 book format, like the standard mobile proportions, reflects how we perceive the world today; the embossing of a marble jpg, distorted by an internet-sharing error, adds a feeling of pixelated rocky surface; a typeface that merges classical elegance with a contemporary edge evokes a grandiloquent yet unmistakably Roman aesthetic; and the inner page layouts draw inspiration from romantic old-fashioned designs with a brutalist twist.

The Ohio Penitentiary Fire of 1930 is a zine about a mass-casualty prison fire caused by one prison guard’s negligence. It is part of the series “Archival Activations” by Mariame Kaba, an organizer, educator, archivist and curator who largely focuses on dismantling the prison industrial complex.

Kaba first read about the fire in The Spotlight on Ohio’s Black Crime. Its cover, with a faceted “Spotlight” and grotesque-style subtitle, shares similarities to the font choices of the zine, designed and illustrated by Kruttika Susarla. The zine’s sculpturally-cut title font Cedar, seemingly hand-carved, complements the woodblock inspired illustration foldout. The rest of the type is set in Nitti Grotesk, with the Ultra weight holding up in low-contrast underlayed titles.

Fold-out illustration

How to Move a Mountain is Caleb Stein’s photographic essay of the Carrara marble quarry, a series of intimate portraits of robotic arms and raw marble that offer nuance to today’s debate around artistic authorship and AI and computer-augmented art.

Caleb Stein captures Robotor in Italy for Smithsonian Magazine, where robots sculpt marble under digital guidance, challenging traditional notions of artistic authorship. His black and white images intimately document this blend of ancient craft and modern technology. The artist book is accompanied by an essay by David Campany, which details the history between photography and sculpture and Stein’s place within this lineage.

The title on the book cover is set in Romie Regular (designed by Margot Lévêque).

The book’s interior combines headlines in Romie with body copy set in Niveau Grotesk.

On the cover, “ИЛИОН” is in Antonym, with the Latin “ILIOS” added in Bitum and the Greek “ΗΛΙΟΣ” in what appears to be a custom derivation thereof.

One of the most legendary archeological discoveries made by Heinrich Schliemann is described in this book titled Илион. Город и страна троянцев (Ilion. Gorod i strana troyantsev, English: Ilios. City and Country of the Trojans). It was made by Diana Zinchenko as a student project at Moscow Polytechnic University, using Antonym and Bitum. From Diana’s Behance page:

Excavations of Troy, its treasures and myths around this place even in 150 years are thrilling and famous among professional community and amateurs. The publication is supplemented by quotes from Homer's Ilias, which was a key source during Schliemann’s searchings. Different number of blue lines of poem with markers on the edge of page create a dynamic rhythm on every spread.

6,000 years ago, people in Europe started erecting large stone sculptures. These sculptures were in the shape of women and men with faces and arms, hairstyles and even tattoos. They also carried or wore highly desirable items such as weapons, jewellery or clothing that depicted the innovations of their time. But the stelae were also symbols of power and status, and were used for ancestor worship and rituals.

The book, authored by the Swiss National Museum and published by Christoph Merian Verlag, presents stelæ from a number of European countries and offers a unique insight into the world of people in the Neolithic period.

Lyon (designed by Kai Bernau) has been chosen for legibility and elegance. The seriffed typeface with its contemporary feel works for all sorts and sizes of text in the book.
Four styles are used: Text Regular, Regular No. 2, Regular Italic, and Semibold.

Tuman Studio created the identity and membership kit for regular guests of the Manezh Association:

Typography brings architectural rhythm and historical heritage while staying contemporary. Illustrations indicate unique architectural and archaeological exhibits found during large-scale excavations of the surrounding areas, as well as the reconstruction of the Gostiny Dvor in the 1990s. They are kept in the permanent exhibition of the museum.

The cold silver-blue color palette rhymes with the colors of the facades of the museum association. The lighter version of Apoc fits perfectly in this universe.

Design by Ksenia Kotlyarovskaya, with art direction from Ira Kosheleva. The Манеж logo appears to be set in Gill Sans.

The exhibition scenography for Celtes: un millénaire d’images (“Celts, a thousand years of images”) was pretty minimalist. In a sober and warmly coloured layout, the light was focused on the objects displayed and some text captions printed on the walls. Texts were designed with underlined TheW Clan GZA for titles and its less quirky counterpart TheW NYC for paragraph of text. These two fonts were also used for the design of the exhibition poster, and material such as educational videos produced in the exhibition.

From Laténium:

Celtic motifs reveal a universe of metamorphoses defying the laws of nature, where the boundaries between animal, plant and human are blurred, while the sky and earth seem to communicate with the underworld. Jewelry, weapons, figurines, ritual instruments, statuary, coins and crockery: the extraordinary variety of Celtic arts shows that the imaginary, the supernatural and the marvelous impregnated all the activity spheres of these populations. As presented in “A Millennium of Images”, Celtic art manifests an enchantment of everyday life.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the opening of the exhibition happened on May 12th instead of March 29th, as initially planned. For the same reason, it was unfortunately closed to the public for most of its duration.

TheW Clan GZA & TheW NYC are part of TheW family and are available from Swiss Typefaces.

Ancient Hyper Present is a Graphic Design MFA thesis of Sophie Loloi at the Rhode Island School of Design. This book is a collection of two-years of research, influence and experimentation towards a transmedial practice consisting of media, images, and virtual space across different eras and time signatures.

Graphic design can exist in a gallery, on the screen, inside headsets or in the streets. Like a lucid dream, it can be disorienting as it opens up to a more-than physical ground of experience; within the virtual, within shared memory. This book documents a reflective practice that considers experiences of exile and diaspora, and grapples with a singular question: what does it mean to visualize and materialize nostalgia for a distant world? Ancient Hyper Present gathers an array of forms: editorial, kinetic, typographic, spatial, and experiential. Calling forth a practice of reflection, to go through the process of seeing the unseeable or the unacknowledged.

The title and display typeface is Apoc by Blaze Type foundry, tightly spaced and used in all caps. It is paired with SangBleu Kingdom for text. Captions use GT America Mono.

The entire thesis can be accessed online.

Clay: Themes and Variations from Ancient Mesopotamia imaginatively reworks sixty ancient texts in a multiplicity of styles, reflecting the marvelous variety of the source materials and their inextinguishable relevance in the modern world. The first part of Clay includes tales that have become familiar from other sources: two creation narratives, the Mesopotamian flood story and Gilgamesh. The second part explores themes of sexual love, marriage, birth, death and atonement.

The book was written by Paul Williamson and includes 129 original images by artist Debbie Loftus. The design was provided by Simon Esterson and Leo Field at Esterson Associates. Domaine Text Regular is used across the whole publication. Grey board cover, five stocks across two sections, digitally printed at Pureprint, 340×260mm, 210 pages. Published by Festival O/Modernt.

Monograph about Swiss painter Francine Schwarzbourg (1927–2016), edited by Nathalie Dufour and Bettina Tschumi. The book was designed by Balmer Hählen using Grafier and Suisse Int’l. Bilingual hardcover edition, 152 pages, 185×225 mm.

Front Cover

The Stone Circles of the British Isles is the first major publication by Aubrey Burl (b. 1926), a British archaeologist best known for his studies into megalithic monuments. The image shows the jacket of the hardcover edition published in 1977 by Yale University Press, New Haven and London. The typography pairs Times New Roman and Helvetica in white caps against an aerial photograph of the Callanish Stones in Lewis, Scotland. The book interior (not pictured, see images on this auction page) was designed by John Nicoll and is set in Monophoto Times. Filmset and printed by BAS Printers Limited, Wallop, Hampshire.

The author provides a hypothetical chronological framework for the circles and considers their origins and purpose, examining in particular their possible astronomical function. He then discusses each regional grouping of circles, describing their architectural types and the finds from excavations. Special attention is paid to Stonehenge and Avebury, the two best known and most spectacular rings.