Seance Graphic is featured in the visual identity for a public art commission inspired by bell hooks' influential 1999 book, All About Love: New Visions. Initiated by agency BUILDHOLLYWOOD, the campaign consisted of a series of billboard takeovers by six artists across England and Scotland in 2023. The identity was created by Fraser Muggeridge Studio, which designed a website for the project and a series of posters introducing the campaign. Seance is paired with Maxima as a text typeface.

From the project website:

All About Love is BUILDHOLLYWOOD’s first major curatorial and artist commission that took over large-format billboards across Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester between April – December 2023. Curated by Zarina Rossheart, the project invited artists Helen Cammock, Asmaa Jama, Jasleen Kaur, Grace Ndiritu, Eve Stainton and Alberta Whittle to respond to the bell hooks’ seminal text through the lens of their artistic practices.

The point of departure for the commission was the quote from All About Love:

‘Whether it is the ongoing worldwide presence of violence expressed by the persistence of the man-made war, hunger and starvation, the day-to-day reality of violence, the presence of life-threatening diseases that cause the unexpected deaths of friends, comrades, and loved ones, there is much that brings everyone to the brink of despair. Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into the sea of despair.’

In All About Love bell hooks offers us radical new ways to think about love. While considering our polarised, loveless and hyper consumerist society, hooks urges us to bring a new love ethic to every dimension of our lives. From politics, religion, the workplace, domestic households, to intimate relationships hooks offers us a bold new perspective. This project looks at hooks’ legacy and invites audiences to collectively reimagine our future.

The exhibition Have You Checked the Children by Diego Marcon was presented at the Kunsthalle Basel from the 27th of October 2023 to the 21st of January, 2024.

The Kunsthalle Basel was founded in 1872 and is Switzerland’s oldest art museum. It is one of Europe’s leading institutions for contemporary art and is committed to bringing emerging artists to the attention of the public.

The exhibition text presented here is based on the exhibition poster by Sina Gerschwiler, a graphic designer based in Basel. While the exhibition texts were put together by the museum’s own communications team, they were designed using the same fonts as the exhibition poster. The fonts used for both the poster and the exhibition text are AC Modern Gothic and Big Caslon Italic. However, it is important to note that significant modifications were made to the title lettering, altering the typeface’s overall appearance. The text typeface is Practice.

Designed by Matthew Carter, Big Caslon is a high-contrast serif typeface for display applications, published by Carter & Cone. It is a digital reinterpretation of the “eccentric” display typefaces made by the original 18th-century Caslon foundry for large-scale applications, offering new uses for the typeface. These display typefaces have a distinctive design with striking stroke contrast, complementing but contrasting with the original Caslon text typefaces.

AC Modern Gothic is a sans serif belonging to the American Gothic style. It is considered a digital revival of the historical typeface Modern Gothic, a design made by the Chicago foundry Barnhart Brothers & Spindler around 1895. The digital version was created by the foundry AllCaps. The design was modernised, with optical corrections to avoid the classically heavy caps look, while maintaining the wide-set frame inherited from the Gothic style to preserve its character.

Practice is a serif typeface “anchored in the research of typographic paradigms” and “introduces a new perspective with an unprecedented sharpness”. It was designed by François Rappo and released with Optimo in 2016.

Experiti was made as a student project at École Estienne, Paris. It’s a kit composed of a binder and a set of three drawing templates, designed to map any kind of visiting experience: museum visits, forest walks, visits to a family member’s home, and more. The binder notably includes an instruction manual and a detailed legend, providing users with precise guidelines to help them create their own maps. The kit also contains various sheets for drawing, as well as a label to be filled in.

Its first section allows users to record essential personal data such as age or disabilities. The second section is used to indicate climatic and geographical information that enables a detailed description of the location of the experience. This information is crucial, as it may influence the representation of the visit. Animals, architecture, natural elements, individuals, transport, and furniture are among the many categories of elements available on the templates. This mapping process allows for a detailed and complex exploration of our visiting experiences. Users can precisely express certain tastes, smells, or sounds. For instance, a sound might be music or noise, long or short, high-pitched or low-pitched. These sensory elements can also be connected to our emotions, allowing us to understand their origins.

As a long-awaited rematch to their July 2024 clash, former champion Kazuto Ioka once again stepped into the ring with Fernando Martínez, fighting for the WBA Super Flyweight title. After twelve hard-fought rounds, Ioka fell short, with Martinez securing a unanimous victory and the belt.

We created the key visual and poster design for ABEMA, the major Japanese streaming platform that broadcasted this event. The campaign title, “The Great Revenge,” captured the intensity and anticipation surrounding the showdown between these two world-class fighters.

The poster design leaned heavily on Big Caslon but also incorporates STIX for the date (12.31) as deliberate cohesive accent . A customized Sloop Script for “The” introduces contrast while simultaneously tying the composition together, giving our work a distinct and artistic, yet unified, design.

Source: www.abebooks.com Between the Covers (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

One advantage that lettering has over typeset text is that the artist can always alter letterforms ad hoc, depending on the context. This allows her to make the most of the available space, to dissolve awkward pairs into pleasing combinations, or simply to enliven a design by means of variegation.

Ursula Suess was a graphic artist who designed numerous book jackets in her career. For the majority of them, she’d come up with her own letterforms. I’m adding a selection of designs that hints at her stylistic range in the comments to this article.

Source: www.abebooks.com Between the Covers. License: All Rights Reserved.

An early jacket with italic lettering, designed by Suess for Sean O’Casey’s Sunset and Evening Star, Macmillan, 1955

Source: www.abebooks.com Between the Covers. License: All Rights Reserved.

Suess designed the jacket for The Confrontation by Lenore Marshall (W.W. Norton) in 1972, the year her Book Jacket typeface was released. The lettering could pass as an extrabold variation.

Source: www.klingspor-museum.de Photographer unknown. License: All Rights Reserved.

An undated portrait of Ursula Suess

In the early 1970s, Suess set about designing a typeface. According to a 2014 article by Ellen Sussman, she was in part motivated by the fact that “most type styles at the time were too wide and didn’t fit on a jacket.” Her typeface indeed is compact, both horizontally and vertically, with condensed, tight-setting letterforms and a large x-height with short extenders. Suess didn’t want to forgo all the flexibility she was familiar with from lettering, so she drew a large set of alternates. A TGC specimen sums it up: “She used lettering similar to this in her book cover designs, where space limitations called for lettering with many swash characters that was strong and condensed, yet rich and sensuous.” The calligraphic design was released by VGC as a stand-alone italic in 1972, named Book Jacket. Whether you find the name boring or brilliant, it did clarify the intended application area.

And Book Jacket indeed was used for designing book jackets. One example by Suess herself is shown here. (See Robert Halsband’s biography of Lord Hervey for a second one.) As We Are Now is a novel by Belgian-American writer May Sarton (1912–1995), published by W.W. Norton & Company in 1973. Suess used her typeface in two sizes, with the alternate swash caps for the big initials, a wider terminal form in “We”, and hardly any space between the last two words of the title. For the subline, she opted for more restrained forms overall, but inserted a descending h, a sweeping f that embraces the preceding o, and a single swash cap L in “LOVE”. The a in “author” is the double-story alternate. May Sarton’s name is set in Richard Isbell’s wide Americana.

Source: canadatype.com Canada Type. License: All Rights Reserved.

Partial glyph set of Book Jacket Pro, the digitization drawn by Patrick Griffin and released by Canada Type in 2010

Ursula Suess was born August 13, 1924 – which means it’s her 100th birthday today. Canada Type, who released a digital version of Book Jacket in 2010, provided a biographical outline:

Ursula Suess was born in 1924 to German parents in Camden, NJ, and grew up in Munich, Germany, where she attended two semesters of design school at the Academy of Fine Art before it burned down during the war [in July 1944]. She then studied calligraphy with Anna Simons for two years. She returned to America in 1946 and established herself as a graphic designer working for Oxford University Press, Macmillan Co., Harper, and other publishers. She also taught calligraphy for 20 years at the Westchester Art Workshop, and at the Cooper Union in New York City. In her 50s she learned to cut gems and eventually became an accomplished gem carver. She moved to Green Valley, AZ, in 1998, and has been applying her artistic versatility with clay, water-color and acrylics.

In Arizona, Suess became a long-time member and supporter of the Tubac Center of the Arts. Ellen Sussman mentions paper sculpture, pottery, and collage as additional techniques she engaged in. Apart from Book Jacket, she is credited with at least one more typeface: Rotalic is a low-contrast italic sans featuring swash caps with ball terminals. It was also released with VGC. One of its four styles was recently digitized as BN Rascal.

Suess passed away in May 2020, at the age of 95. She left us a large number of beautiful works, including many pieces of lettering and two unique typefaces that have stood the test of time.

Source: tubacarts.org DeDe Isaacson / Tubac Center of the Arts. License: All Rights Reserved.

Ursula Suess at the Tubac Center of the Arts. The Center has a number of her donated works and continues to honor her with the URSUS award for abstract work in their annual members’ exhibitions.

Source: www.abebooks.com Rare Book Cellar. License: All Rights Reserved.

For this summer, Arde Arte, a creative space based in San Pedro Garza García, Mexico, organized a series of graphic design and visual arts workshops, inviting different designers and artists to share their passion and knowledge with the creative community.

Mario Julián Gutierrez and Edu Contreras were in charge of the identity and graphics for these workshops.

The workshops range from branding with typography, graphic design, illustration with Indian ink, cyanotype, linoleum engraving, acrylic painting to ceramics.

The typefaces used for the Graphic Summer Camp project were Stamp RSPK Regular by Carl Seal, Jane Austen by Pia Frauss as a base and for the word “Art”, and Serial E by Mario Julián Gutierrez in different weights for the texts.

For the graphic identity, we wanted something raw with a lot of texture and personality since most of the workshops are meant to be analogue, involving scanning, collage, etc. For the art identity, we wanted something more playful but still elegant. In both cases, we used an offset effect and bled the visuals.

Brass and Labil Grotesk are combined for the titles and credits of the “Así bailaba” music video directed by Celia Giraldo.

Kao Street is a Chinese food restaurant based in the center of Barcelona, Spain. Founded by Meilan Kao (part of the Kao family, one of the pioneers of Asian street food in Europe), Kao Street (“High Street”) serves high quality Chinese cuisine, and has nothing to do with street sellers you find in China. The restaurant’s interior design was made by renowned designer Pilar Libano, who created an industrial atmosphere, inspired by the New York street food scene. Besides, not only can you eat and take away from the restaurant, you can also buy books, magazines and clothes, which makes it a hybrid concept store.

The visual identity plays on the diversity of patterns we usually associate with Chinese street food: a calligraphed ideogram, a traditional dragon drawing, the stars from the Chinese flag… This association of typical images is printed onto wrapping paper, and is used for diverse goodies, such as lighters or T-shirts. Nevertheless, the restaurant has a signature logotype, composed of the two Chinese ideograms “高街” enclosed by the English words “Kao” and “Street”, set in Cardinal Fruit from Production Type. The Chinese glyphs appear to be from Hiragino Mincho, slanted. The calligraphic structure of Cardinal Fruit’s italics and its nervous rhythm evoke the rapidity of the way street food is prepared and served. In this context, it fits into the street style that the brand wanted to explore: superimposed with images of Chinese cooks, the typeface gives its credentials to street food.

The logo is used as a pattern for different supports: we can see it on noodle boxes, paper bags, and also on the duct tape that is used as much to wrap plastic boxes as a decorative item in the restaurant. We find it set in this typical linear composition on communication for the restaurant’s Instagram and as a header for the website (designed by Mediatics). Throughout the brand, Cardinal Fruit is paired with GT Pressura Mono by Grilli Type, which is mostly used in all caps.

Some merchandise items like this T-shirt additionally use other typefaces, including a shaded version of Dom Casual, an unidentified bold Chinese gothic, Helvetica, and all-caps Brush Script. These are apparently intended as a tongue-in-cheek reference to designs like the iconic Sriracha hot sauce bottle, mimicking its eclectic amateur typography.

Artificio’s Mix Tape Vol 01, ft. PT Mono.

Artificio is an independent electronic music record label, established in Antioquia, Colombia, using vinyl records for its mixes.

Being a label that was born during the pandemic, Artificio chooses to express the idea of ​​sound as a detonation that transmutes the body and allows to reconstruct a devastated world. It sought to communicate this concept of transmutation in the logo, through the superposition of two typefaces, Elastik and Sword.

Album cover ft. TWK Everett.

With Louize Display (designed by Matthieu Cortat) Atelier AAAAA designed the layout and illustrated the cover of the poem “Un monde en fragments” by Pierre Barré, the first publication of the young publisher L’Atteinte in Metz. The publisher’s logo uses Totentanz by Yoann Minet.

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.

Fashion Portfolio Lookbook for Esther Luz, a recent graduate of the RISD Apparel Design program. The strange energy and beauty of Ogg Italic and Sporting Grotesque compliment a portfolio that deals with duality in the complex and organic forms of nature.

Photography by Franco Schicke, Modeling by Karina Zabirova, Styling by Esther Luz.