Oblio is a magazine that describes the world of visual design from an unusual point of view: the projects that were never realized due to failure, rejection, lack of time or money. We interviewed seven studios and three designers, asking them about the meaning of visual design, their vision related to failure and the future evolution of visual designers. During the meetings, each of them showed us projects that were never completed or realized. In conclusion they provided us useful advice aimed at those who, like us, have yet to take their first steps in this world.

The two main typefaces used in this edition are Spectral (Production Type) and TWK Everett (Type.weltkern). Selected headlines use Ortica Bold (Colllettivo).

A poster for WHAP! Fall 2016: the West Hollywood Aesthetics and Politics lecture and event series featuring political debates, film screenings, performances, as well as conversations about art, architecture, and philosophy. The series is co-hosted by the City of West Hollywood and the CalArts MA Aesthetics and Politics program.

Monica Magsanoc is a fresh graduate from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. She currently works as a graphic designer and fine artist in her hometown, Manila, Philippines, handling projects of various creative disciplines for established and emerging local brands.

Her portfolio website solely utilizes Sporting Grotesque by Lucas Le Bihan, distributed via Velvetyne Type Foundry.

Soft is a “collective event for makers, crafters, and artists”, organised by Chingkeetea. Its first issue took place in August 2018 in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines, and featured many local visual artists and musicians for two days of shopping, concerts and the launch of a new local fanzine, Indigo.

Taking care of the identity and branding, local studio Uncurated went for a “straightforward yet flexible” solution, using Bonjour Monde’s open-source Syne family, in most of its styles. Accompanying the logotype, with its custom softened t, are a few simple animated rounded shapes, a very calm colour palette and occasional rasterised pictures of the guest artists.

La Montgolfière is a majestic and hidden place of nearly 2000m², located near the Saint Martin canal in Paris: more than a simple sports hall, this social sports club will be a fusion between several atmospheres (music, art, sport, food). This Parisian address will become the new meeting point for a heterogeneous neighbourhood. Scheduled to open in September 2018.

This place, full of history, is an old hot-air balloon canvas factory built in the 1850s without a building permit. Originally the building did not have a roof allowing, exceptionally, hot-air balloons to take off directly from the factory. Its wooden structure and glazed corridors were later reinforced by Eiffel-type metal frames that covered the atrium with an imposing glass roof 18 metres high.

We worked with the founders of the place, Basile and Ruben, to develop the visual identity. The logo, a typogram entirely designed for La Montgolfière, is a statutory lettering including subtle graphic accidents, revealing a bold state of mind. The O’s are transformed into monograms, revealing the simplified design of a hot-air balloon. Supported by a simple graphic system, based on a fir green (the initial hue of the beams forming the framework of the facade) and the Panamera typeface, we have developed for pre-opening a visual language based on multiple typographical and photographic compositions and the production of strong verbal hooks. Posters, postcards, socks, tote bags, T-shirts, flags, but above all a monumental tulle flag (6 meters high) welcomed a few hundred curious people last June. See you in September.

Raoul Reynolds: a retrospective is dedicated to a set of works attributed to Raoul Reynolds (1882-1969), an artist that embraces and combines references to the art movements of the past, while bringing them into a field of experimentation which can lead to the re-elaboration and reinterpretation of both history and art history.

A project of Amandine Guruceaga and Francesca Zappia, published by Poursuite and designed by Asia Trianda, the publication follows the exhibition Raoul Reynolds: a retrospective, shown in 2016 at the Glasgow International Festival in Scotland and at the Friche la Belle de Mai on the occasion of the Rentrée de l’Art Contemporain in Marseille.

Our friend Paulette Penje asked us to design a small website and matching business cards for her artistic practice. Her briefing was very specific: The website should display a video artwork, but as in a physical gallery or museum, the viewer should enter at a random timestamp. The business cards should be lickable.

Sporting Grotesque by Lucas Le Bihan, distributed via Velvetyne Type Foundry, is used for both the website and the business card candy wraps.

Updats:
In September 2019, the website was updated with a new version of the “lickpiece” video as well as with a new logotype, this time set in Grow by Dinamo.
The used version of Grow depends on the viewport width: narrow devices use Grow ACDEF, wider devices use Grow ABCDEF with more line details.

In April 2021, the site was updated once more with a new version of the “lickpiece” and new typography: Lyno by Radim Peško. We also added a dynamic speech bubble to display Paulette’s latest news.

frontpage from 09/2019

frontpage from 09/2021

second screen from 09/2019

Heard at Work is a collection of overheard exclamations that aims to capture what it’s like to work in a New York design studio. Created by Justine Braisted in 2018. Site development by Syllable.

In December 2016, German graphic designer Matthias Hübner pitched for the new visual identity of the IKOB, a museum of contemporary art located in Eupen, Belgium. Part of the pitch was the commissioning of a custom typeface, which was planned to be released as an open source license, once it was finished and in use. I was asked to design this typeface as a contemporary rendition of Times New Roman in two cuts: Regular and Italic. Since the typeface couldn’t be ready for the relaunch of the new design, Matthias decided to do a typographical restart: all communications (Posters, Flyers, Letters) were set in Times New Roman, and this typeface would be replaced gradually with new sets of characters as they were produced. At the end of 2017, the whole set was finally developed and in use ever since. With some minor tweaks and corrections, the typeface will be released as of now under the title: Happy Times at the IKOB.

candychiu.com is a personal design portfolio of Candy Chiu to record her 2014–2018 design works.

Candy Chiu is a multidisciplinary designer and front-end developer. Specialised in interaction design and various visual communication design together, also creating immersive user experience journey and deliver design-driven solutions. She believes that a good design has its own unique personality, high flexibility and the design system for well understanding.

Candy had been invited to the Chinese Characters Design Biennale, the International Poster Triennial and won an Outstanding Award in the Kan-Tai Keung World Wide Chinese Design Competition Awards.

‘Filtered water and loose-leaf tea. Nothing else.’ An ethos that deserves a clean, considered and paired back identity. Cold brew tea aficionados Twig Teas needed a design system to reflect the purity of the product and subtlety of it’s taste.

The brand mark reflects its Japanese beginnings, with an honesty and purity that is also reflected through the unique label shape.

Berlin, Details is a fanzine, within the “Details” series of publications that I make when I travel, for the inspiration of the little things that make a place to be special.

The font used in the whole fanzine is Sporting Grotesque by Lucas Le Bihan.

This pocketbook demonstrates schematically the art forms and the main ages of ancient Greek art. The book makes the old age exciting with new composition shapes and geometrical components. The black and white color highlights the contrast. The main artistic disciplines like architecture, sculpture, and arts and crafts are told apart and shown from a modern perspective.

Graphic design: Balla Kristóf. Photography: Varga Domonkos

Extratone’s frontpage is designed to be modular enough so as to remain unpredictable, and it changes often. Here, for May 2018, it uses Playfair Display for its secondary byline, Cormorant for its primary byline and its excerpt, Playfair Display SC for titles, and Quattrocentro Sans for a large numeral.

Extratone is an independent online magazine created and maintained by volunteer contributors, so we needed to minimize the overhead of our platform both financially and architecturally as much as possible while still allowing it room to be visually compelling and typographically adaptive. In the pursuit of frugality and ease-of-use, we managed to build The Extranet using exclusively open-source type properties into a platform that satisfactorily manifests the principle design philosophy which we agreed would best compliment our editorial mission.

Specifically, we wanted to avoid black text on white background in unilateral typefaces across a single page and agreed early on that a diverse palette of tried-and-true serifs would be fundamental to the design’s identity instead of a few more attention seeking or radical types. We also knew that the ideal readability as it is quantified in digital media was an unimportant metric for us, and we were willing to sacrifice it to achieve a busier, more vain reading experience that would require visitors to slow down and have a look at the design instead of forcing it stylistically to be nothing more than a tool of delivery. (So far, our exceptionally low bounce rate would suggest that our product works as designed.)

Because we chose to experiment and build the look ourselves from a position of relative inexperience with web design instead of seeking out a professional solution, The Extranet as it exists now represents more than two years of exhaustive trial and error that was a significant learning experience for myself, especially. It has been tinkered with, poured over, and broken exponentially more than if we'd chosen to turn its creation over to third-party hands. As a result, our team's become bizarrely sentimental and proud of it as a part of our organization's identity.

Body and meta text both use Christian Thalmann’s versatile Cormorant family, which also often function in larger roles (e.g. on the About page shown).

Frontpage titles, bylines, and all main navigation use Claus Eggers Sørensen’s open-source Playfair Display of varying weights.

Headings, section titles, and the header’s oversized central mast use two variations of Fabian De Smet’s Butler – Regular weight and Stencil, respectively.

Impallari Type’s Quattrocento Sans is used for the footer’s links to legal documentation and occasionally for pull-quotes, where appropriate.

Cormorant is occasionally called upon for larger text.

The use of Adobe's Source Code Pro for the Best of the Open Web list is an example of our occasional bespoke single-use cases.

Merriweather was used extensively by Together For Yes, the successful campaign for a Yes vote in the May 2018 referendum, removing the Eighth Amendment’s constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland.

Fivo Sans and Lato in use for (partly fictional?) stationery and promotion items by and for designer & photographer Patrycja Michno.

Vert is a high quality cannabis brand from Québec. Bluu Next is used for the identity, packaging and stationery.

Vert, a Quebec company producing high-end pure cannabis, commissioned GRDN and L’ÉLOI to design their visual identity. ‘To meet the challenge of referring to cannabis without ever actually showing it, we have developed an evocative universe resulting from a collective interpretation of the product. The result: A poetic, new look, segmented into 3 fables. — mindsparklemag.com

Lydia Pyne looks at the story and impact of the unique body of images by photographer Yvette Borup Andrews (1891–1959).

Abaco is a savings and credit cooperative, leader in the Peruvian market. It was founded in 1981, initially for a Nikkei community settled in Peru. That’s why Abaco’s roots stretch back to the Japanese immigration to Peru in 1899. The company strengthened an old Japanese tradition called “Tanomoshi”, a kind of association that promotes savings and generates credits on a rotating and communal basis. Abaco conceived a new final concept based on cooperativism, community values and trust. In order to make the firm more attractive,

Brandlab organized and revitalized each graphic element of the brand. A new logotype, simpler and more functional, capable of being reproduced on different formats where the brand lives, was generated. Their corporative colors were modified and some others took the main place: ‘green pine’, the worldwide cooperative’s iconic color and cyan to create a contrast of contemporaneous fresh color.

The symposium “either or. as well as. in between. — thesis about new exhibition design.” allows an insight into the current exhibition scene. with lectures from curators, architects, designers and scientists, the edi — Exhibition Design Institute of the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf and the NRW Forum invites you to discuss the status quo of exhibiting.

With lectures by
Matěj Činčera, Jan Kloss and Adam Štěch (Okolo, Prague)
Barbara Holzer (Holzer Kobler, Zürich/Berlin)
Tom Ising (Herburg Weiland, München)
Luise Reitstätter (Universität für angewandte Kunst, Wien)
Herman Verkerk (EventArchitectuur, Amsterdam)