язык тишины (Yazyk Tishiny, English: “Language of Silence”) was made as a student project at HSE Art and Design School.

We are used to thinking of silence as a lack of sound or image, a kind of “pause” between important events. In my book, the opposite is true: silence is the main character and the active material. It is the moment when the visual noise subsides, and we finally begin to notice the very structure of things: the grain of the film, the rhythm of the grid, or the physics of the paper. It is not “nothing,” but “everything” that we usually don’t have enough time for.

I wanted to understand how silence in art goes from being just an empty space to becoming a powerful tool. In a world where everything is loud and fast-paced, I wanted to find ways to slow down the viewer. My goal was to create a system that would make people stop, look closer, and experience the pause as a full-fledged event.

Images About Images About Women is a project made by Clara Salmeron Badia for her Master’s degree in Applied Design Research at Elisava.

How can we design more inclusive visual futures if the images we carry in our visual memory still echo the roles we were once compelled to perform as women? This project explores how visual culture has shaped normative femininity and how design can become a tool to critically reimagine it.

This research emerges from a personal need: to examine the images that have shaped the category of “being a woman,” to trace their origins and uncover the powers they reproduce.

Through a visual archive structured in three sections: pictorial, media-based, and digital. This study analyzes the archetypes that have shaped our collective imaginary and explores how visual communication and graphic design can serve as tools for their critical re-signification.

Rather than offering definitive answers, this project proposes a tool: an open model to rethink, reclaim, and redesign alternative ways of imagining and representing femininity.

Graphic design in collaboration with Carles Álvarez.

Трендвотчинг: аналитика подиума (“Trendwatching: Runway Analytics”) is a practical guide to trend research, made as student project at HSE Art and Design School in Saint Petersburg. The scope of a trend analyst’s work involves studying societal changes and identifying emerging needs. The author of this educational guide is Rosemary Thurman, a specialist in trend analysis and forecasting.

The typography is handled by the antique-style typeface Wermut by Brownfox. It is paired with the monospaced IBM Plex Mono by Mike Abbink and Bold Monday to maintain the serious tone of the educational materials.

The Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Catalogue 2025 - designed by Philipp Doringer - contains the works of 216 graduates, 131 BA graduates and 85 MA graduates. It is described as follows:

The Design Academy Eindhoven’s Graduation Catalogue 2025 aims to move beyond a flat, one-dimensional representation of design by offering a dynamic and multifaceted view of designers and their work. It is a space where different voices, stories and layers meet, emphasising complexity, ambiguity and the human presence at the heart of design.

The concept of this graduation catalogue embraces the layered nature of both the graduating students’ personalities and their projects. Presenting not just polished outcomes, the catalogue also reveals personal perspectives and processes, giving graduating students an opportunity to address their positionality and the relational contexts of their work.

For their first collection at the creative helm of the renowned Venetian textile company Rubelli, Formafantasma tasked Apartamento Studios with designing the catalogue.

The publication is entirely typeset in ABC Marist, a warm take on a typographic genre with centuries-old origins leading back to Venice, mirroring Rubelli’s own history.

Rubelli’s logo appears to be the monumental Trajan.

Down Under: The Curious Fall of a Child Who Knew Nothing and Became Everything is a picture book by Formafantasma designed in response to a commission and residency program by C-Mine and published by Nero Editions. Blending fiction with scientific research, the publication explores the identity and ecological significance of Belgium’s post-industrial landscape, aiming to foster a new form of ecological literacy for both young readers and adults.

The book opens with a fable written by Formafantasma that challenges conventional narratives of human superiority, offering new perspectives on coexistence with other species. This first section is accompanied by illustrations by Clement Vuillier, which reinterpret and draw upon imagery used in scientific analysis, such as petrographic and scanning electron microscope (SEM) images.

It concludes with a more analytical section featuring critical text by Teresa Castro and a series of interviews with experts from the scientific field. Complementing this are two visual essays composed of microscopic images created using petrography and SEM techniques. This second part of the book delves into the scientific and conceptual foundations of the fable. Through this dual register, Down Under encourages reflection at different stages of life, aspiring to function both as a children’s book and a transgenerational educational tool.

In October 2024, MAXXI L’Aquila organized a workshop with visual artist Claudia Pajewski in the village of Scanno, Italy, a destination for great photographers of the twentieth century, to investigate the concept of margin through photography. Over twenty participants of all ages signed up from all over Abruzzo – students, pensioners, photographers, butchers, prison inspectors, psychotherapists, employees and entrepreneurs. Together, they created a collective story from which specific sensitivities and unusual geographies of the territory emerge.

The fanzine was curated by Claudia Pajewski and designed by Lola Giffard-Bouvier. It gathers contributions by Valentina Amenta, Salime Cure, Barbara Leda Kenny, Massimo Prosperococco, and Anna Rizzo. The photographs and texts were created by Ezio Bianchi, Claudio D’Alessandro, Alessia D’Epiro, Paolo Di Menna, Laura Frascarelli, Matilde Landriscina, Cristiano Maraschio, Anita Martinelli, Concezio Presutto, Ernesto Pugliese, Clarice Saraceni, Federico Sevi, Danilo Susi, Ersilia Tarullo, Pamela Testa, Silvano Tortorella, Venezio Venditti, and Roberto Visciano.

The edition was printed in 50 copies in February 2025, on coated (115 g/m²) and uncoated paper (100 g/m²). It has 148 pages measuring 148×210 mm and is wrapped in food gauze, tied together with string. The publication is part of a public program project curated by Chiara Bertini, Fanny Borel and Donatella Saroli – MAXXI L’Aquila Curatorial Office. The technical sponsor is La Volta delle Idee – Il Palazzo, Scanno, with backstage support by Filippo Zoccoli.

Rock, Paper, Scissors is the book designed for Kiasma, the Finnish Museum of Contemporary Art, for their yearly collection exhibition. The exhibition of the same title focuses on the materiality in contemporary art. The theme revolves around the question: why does contemporary art look the way it does? The material used and how it’s worked often plays a central role in the meaning of the artwork. The exhibition offers insights into the diverse meanings of materials, questions of authorship and technique, and ways of perception. There’s always more to a material than meets the eye.

The task was to embody the theme of materiality into the exhibition publication. The theme was approached both concretely and conceptually. Concretely, materiality is reflected in the tactility of the print and finishing techniques. Conceptually, stylistic choices related to the preservation, archiving, and conservation of artworks were used.

The idea of archiving is reflected in the typography, layout, and print finishing. For the paper selection, materials were chosen to reflect the participatory nature of the works, which require the viewer’s active involvement or even physical touch. The materials are fragile and deteriorate over time, just like any object in our physical environment. In the museum’s collection, efforts are made to control the aging of materials by preserving artworks in optimal conditions and conserving them. This concept was integrated into the design.

In terms of typography, the use of lists, numbering, and a typewriter-like font style were central to the design. The variation in paper choices further emphasizes the materiality theme of the exhibition. The treatment of paper as a material itself was key – embossing, matte finishes, and transparency were used to highlight the theme. The publication invites the reader to explore it physically, offering a sensory experience beyond the visual.

Description of the book by Farmacy Kitchen:

Farmacy’s new book is an insurgent manifesto for a radically different way of eating and farming. It traces a path from the health of the soil to the health of human beings, with food as the connecting agent between our mental, physical and planetary wellbeing. A collaboration between researchers, artists and writers, the Farmacy Manifesto on the Future of Food is a handsomely produced pocket-sized tour de force through the interconnected topics of soil ecology, industrial agriculture, the medicinal qualities of food, the gut-brain axis and regeneration, charting a bold path towards the renewal of our civilization. The book is authored by Aurora Solá and art directed by Carol Montpart. It features botanical image sequences by Batia Suter.

“What is honoured in a country is cultivated there.” —Plato, The Republic, Book VIII

Designed by the Berlin-based agency Neue Gestaltung, the exhibition catalog for Sehnsucht und Fall (“Longing and Fall”), curated by Philipp Bollmann, shows video works from the Wemhöner Collection. At Kunstsaele Berlin, in rooms specially modified for the show, videos by Isaac Julien, Bianca Kennedy, Masbedo, Hans Op de Beeck, Alexandra Ranner, and Erik Schmidt were presented in one to three-channel installations. The book is set with the serif typeface Kalice (designed by Margot Lévêque Studio).

See more images on the website of Neue Gestaltung.

Cthulhu Books is an editorial platform by the Institute for Postnatural Studies. They bring together reflections and worlds that derive from distinct perspectives, emerging new ways of talking about nature and suggesting malleable relationships between words and what they describe.

Quoted from IPS:

From Cthulhu Books, we think of the world to come as a great Compost. Composting as our new relational ontology, as our earthly condition. Composting makes us a single planetary material (humans, beings, objects, technologies). It is the past and it is the future. It is space, place and it is matter. It is a world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, where there are rituals of celebration, entanglements, and interrelationships. To institute means to begin – cultivating consciousness from questions rather than from answers, from uncertainty and doubt. This book speaks about beginnings, about new relationships, about unstable modes of doing, thinking, and being, letting questions spawn new questions.

Tongues as long as branches, cockroaches in a ‘hot-history’, the revival of extinct plants, pre-patriarchal paranthropology, thinking with toxic plants in contemporary art, digestive ontologies in a spiral, capitalist bruxism, a business school run by eukaryotes, a society where we pay to eat celebrities, a chumbo, and 800g of bonisto tuna fish are some of the matters fermenting in this COMPOST READER.

Extracts from Volume 01 of Dataland Publications. Designer Mina Maurice comments:

Dataland is a bilingual publication aiming to shed light on the vast existing building stock within the city of Cairo and therefore showing its potential to be maintained and reused through an attempt at archiving data of the city’s built environment within curated categories of building typologies. Additionally providing a platform for visual and literary contributions by local researchers and visual practitioners.

Maurice is using 

TWK Lausanne (designed by Nizar Kazan and published by WELTKERN®) and ABC Favorit عربي Arabic (designed by Khajag Apelian and Wael Morcos and published by Dinamo). Art direction by Ahmed Morsi.

Source: www.theideaofthebook.com The Idea of the Book. License: All Rights Reserved.

Book jacket (second edition by Niggli, Teufen, 1964)

Dan Reynolds, esteemed friend of the site, writes on Mastodon:

125 years ago today – at exactly 12:05 in the afternoon, Berlin time – H. Berthold AG filed prints of 13 sizes of Akzidenz-Grotesk’s regular weight with the Berlin Muster-Register. That means that it is the typeface’s “birthday” right now.

You can read more on his Typeoff blog and see internal Berthold documents from the Historical Archive at the Deutsches Technikmuseum.

Source: www.ebay.co.uk skylonabooks. License: All Rights Reserved.

Book jacket (second edition by Alec Tiranti, London, 1964)

We celebrate Akzidenz-Grotesk’s big day by posting one of its most iconic uses, by a die-hard fan of the typeface.

Gestaltungsprobleme des Grafikers (English: The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems, French: Les problèmes d’un artiste graphique) was written, compiled and designed by Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–1996). He worked on the book while serving as professor of graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich, or School of Applied Arts, a position he held from 1957 to 1960. It was first published in 1961 by Verlag Arthur Niggli, Teufen AR, Switzerland. Alec Tiranti published it in the United Kingdom. A second edition followed in 1964, a third in 1968.

Source: www.theprintarkive.co.uk The Print Arkive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Book cover (first UK edition by Alec Tiranti, London, 1961). According to Felix Wiedler, this is 48pt Akzidenz-Grotesk halbfett. It’s used with very small word spaces.

Source: www.theprintarkive.co.uk The Print Arkive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Title page (third edition, 1968)

On 188 pages organized in eighteen chapters and a grid-based layout with four columns, Müller-Brockmann outlines his approach to solving visual design problems. As the subtitle hints at (“Design and Training in Commercial Art”), the book is directed at beginners and students. At the same time, it serves as a personal monograph: most of the shown works are by Müller-Brockmann himself. He does include works of others, too, for example by Ursula Keller, Nicoletta Baroni, Ruedi Rüegg, and Christof Gassner – who were among his students at the Kunstgewerbeschule.

Akzidenz-Grotesk is not only used throughout the book, from the cover to the captions. It’s also featured in numerous of the depicted examples, some of which were covered in previous posts on Fonts In Use.

In his book (design) story #89, Felix Wiedler points out that Gestaltungsprobleme des Grafikers was issued two years after Gerstner+Kutter’s Die neue Graphik and one year after Hans Neuburg’s Moderne Werbe- und Gebrauchs-Graphik, and that “the cover is very similar, too, with its asymmetric title in large Akzidenz-Grotesk letters. The brownish-grey jacket with black and white type is actually quite ‘Gerstner’)”.

Fun fact: when this book came out sixty-two years ago, Akzidenz-Grotesk was about sixty-two years old.

Source: www.theprintarkive.co.uk The Print Arkive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Colophon (third edition, 1968)

Source: www.theprintarkive.co.uk The Print Arkive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Preface and start of first chapter about “the graphic artist and his task”

Source: www.theprintarkive.co.uk The Print Arkive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Typography in advertising

Source: www.theideaofthebook.com The Idea of the Book. License: All Rights Reserved.

Photography in advertising: two posters from a campaign for more road safety

Source: www.theprintarkive.co.uk The Print Arkive. License: All Rights Reserved.

The drawing in advertising

Source: www.theideaofthebook.com The Idea of the Book. License: All Rights Reserved.

Colour in advertising.
Left: even JMB got his stuff rejected: the poster for OLMA 1959 remained unrealized.
Right: Der Film was an exhibition shown at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich in 1960.

Source: www.theprintarkive.co.uk The Print Arkive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Colour in advertising

Source: www.theideaofthebook.com The Idea of the Book. License: All Rights Reserved.

Concert posters for the Tonhalle Gesellschaft Zurich

Source: www.theideaofthebook.com The Idea of the Book. License: All Rights Reserved.

A training system for the graphic designer

Most things that are commonly described with good, beautiful and touching are not formally perfect. The book studies the topics of photography, painting, architecture, sound and (a personal one) stutter to develop a book layout concept based on imperfection. In the book, those imperfections are referred to as Rauschen (grain). The layout shall not only inform the viewer/reader but rather move them, too.

The authors own imperfection – a stutter – motivated him to explore this topic. After many years of therapy the question comes up if “perfect speech” should be the goal or if there is more potential in not striving for perfection but for authenticity.

Each chapter describes a different topic and specific imperfections which are visually translated into the layout. Bastardo Grotesk as well as GT Alpina and Covik Sans Mono have imperfect, grainy aspects in their visual appearance that fit well for the overall idea of the book. The fonts of the intertitles vary for each chapter based on the characteristics of the topics imperfection.

Das Rauschen der Dinge (The Grain of Things) was made as a bachelor project in the Mediendesign program at DHBW Ravensburg.

The phenomenon of the Kazakh new wave (Казахская Новая Волна) is a not yet unraveled phenomenon. It appeared on the border of the eras when the Soviet Union existed, and continued into the era of independence. Perhaps it was the films of the Kazakh “wave” that formed a sense of freedom in our minds. Novovolnovtsy came to the cinema and, as it is sung in the song of Viktor Tsoi, they said: “We will continue to act!”

This book is not only a story about how the “Kazakh new wave” was formed and strengthened, how it conquered the world, surprising the audience with its European style of writing and Asian temperament. Six interviews with directors, graduates of the workshop of Sergei Solovyov, are master classes in creating world-class cinema. Reviews from film critics from New York to Singapore are an indication that our “wave” has never been a local phenomenon, but had a global reach.

Gulnara Abikeeva (Гульнара Абикеева) is a film critic, professor at ALMAU, and the author of eleven books on cinema.

Tselinny Publishing. Almaty, 2021
ISBN 978–601–06–7425–7
200×260 mm, 400 p., 1,200 copies
Paper: Stora Enso 65 g/m²

Using humor, sensitivity, and precise interventions, the American artist Brad Downey investigates the underlying structure of our cities, our landscapes, our sacred sites, as well as the forgotten peripheries and contested borders. In the process he weaves entirely new narratives with their chaotic patterns, obscuring the separation between art and everyday life. Slapstick Formalism presents a synopsis of his overall multifaceted oeuvre: sculptures, architecture, performances, installations, films, drawings, collages, and activism, each of which is inspired by the objects and activities of daily life.

Brad Downey (*1980, Louisville) is a Berlin-based artist from Kentucky. He studied at the Pratt Institute in New York City, and the Slade School of Art in London. His radical, inspiring works of art, which he creates around the world, generally in the public space, are of a strongly socio-critical, performative character.

Artist’s monograph about Brad Downey co-published by Hatje Cantz and Possible Books, designed by Matthias Hübner with Everett and Suisse Works. First edition published in September 2018 (sold out) and second expanded edition published in July 2020.

In 2020, I worked on a major book for École nationale supérieure d’art et de design de Nancy. The topic is more than current in 2021 since it tackles temporary habitats and emergency systems. It gathers texts from the symposium “Identités du transitoire”, held by ENSAD Nancy back in 2015, but also new ones intended for the publication.

The slightly grainy paper used for the cover has an earthy orange tone that echoes red stone, a central element in permanent habitats, as a way to include this publication in a series of theoretical and practical works that contribute to a permanent evolution of the practice.

This catalogue is published on the occasion of Formafantasma: Cambio (4 March – 17 May 2020) at the Serpentine Galleries. Cambio (from the medieval Latin “cambium”: change, exchange) is an ongoing investigation conducted by Formafantasma into the extraction, production and distribution of wood products.

For this project, Formafantasma collaborated with experts from the fields of science, conservation, engineering, policymaking and philosophy. They have gathered a range of texts, interviews and visual materials for the publication that pose questions about the role that design can play in translating emerging environmental awareness into informed, collaborative responses.

The catalogue includes texts by: Jennifer L. Anderson, Paola Antonelli, Emanuele Coccia, Formafantasma, Lesley Green, Rebecca Lewin, Vanessa Richardson, Paulo Tavares. Additionally, the catalogue includes interviews with: Faustino Londoño & Nelson Ortiz, Frederic Lens, Mark Nesbitt & Caroline Cornish, Philipp Pattberg and Pieter Baas. It is designed by SJG/Studio Joost Grootens and Dimitri Jeannottat.

Extending the principals of this project to the catalogue, the paper used in the book has been microscopically investigated to confirm it doesn’t contain cells from endangered species.

Edited by Riccardo Badano, Rebecca Lewin, Natalia Grabowska. The forewords are by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Bettina Korek, with an Introduction by Formafantasma.

Or Lemmen is used throughout in a single weight and style.

Kägi kocht (”Kägi cooks”), designed by Role Studio (Lea Romana Fischlin and Romy Strasser). Originally conceived and designed for Globus and now independently published with and for AT Verlag. They took the journey with chief buyer and food scout Richi Kägi to design his first book about food, recipes and everything else that matters in the kitchen.

Designed with Lausanne Family by Nizar Kazan

24.2×32.6 cm hardcover with and without dust jacket

When we think of masks, we think of carnival, African tribal rites or death masks, theatre and fashion, but also role-playing, wrapping and protection. Masks are among the oldest and most controversial objects in human cultural history. Contemporary artists are not only interested in the mask as an object, but also in its social, cultural and political significance and this book traces the mask in contemporary art.

Atelier Pol designed the exhibition catalogue in close collaboration with the Aargauer Kunsthaus. With rich visual material and short texts on the exhibited works, the volume shows the artists' respective approaches to the broad thematic field of the mask. Two introductory essays additionally shed light on the topicality of the mask and its prehistory in art.

Headlines use Founders Grotesk, all other text is set in Inter and Messina Serif.

Transparent dust jacket

Artists index

Essay by Madeleine Schuppli