Gay Times is the magazine that amplifies the voices of the LGBTQ community. Each month, Gay Times magazine delivers you the latest celebrity interviews and high-quality photo shoots of the most influential figures of the moment. You’ll also find plenty of articles to keep you up-to-date on issues affecting the LGBTQ community with hard-hitting comment and opinion. — Gay Times

The cover for the 500th anniversary edition of the magzine comes in four different designs, each featuring a portrait by Ryan Pfluger, showing one of the main interviewees (Aaron Philip, Rickey Thompson, Blair Imani, Chella Man). The magazine logo is based on Neue Helvetica Extended Black; the names of the portrayed are set in GoliaGolia, designed by Alex Valentina and available from TDF.

Ouroboros in use for the album art of FDC (Filles Du Calvaire), a French rap album by Parisian rapper Rad Cartier. Album art designed by Soimadou Ibrahim-Aliamane. Ouroboros was designed by Ariel Martín Pérez, and is available from the open source foundry Velvetyne.

The current season of the Théâtre de Belleville in Paris runs from September 2018 to July 2019. The new visual identity was designed by Pierre Jeanneau and is built around five illustrations. Each visual is shown for a period of two months and comes with a typographic poster announcing the plays. The typefaces were chosen to create the best harmony with the respective illustrations. Each poster is printed in Pantone spot colors on 70×100 cm and 40×60 cm formats on matte offset paper. The program is designed as a concertina fold that can be divided into four different flyers, printed on both sides. The visual link between illustration and typography is strengthened by five unique color gradients for each period.

The five featured typefaces are Quick Marker (Out of the Dark) for September/October, Crack (Out of the Dark) for November/December, ABC Pareto Triangular (Dinamo) for January/February, Ohno Blazeface (OH no Type Co.) for March/April, and CoFo Chimera (Contrast Foundry) for May/June. They are paired with Sabre (Alias) for text. The logo of the Théâtre de Belleville uses Briem Script Ultra (Adobe).

The theater’s logo uses Briem Script Ultra.

Poster for the Atari Touch Me arcade game, a memory game similar to Simon. The display type is Lucia Shadow, made by Dutch designer Jan de Borst and issued by Mecanorma as a contest winner around 1972. The shaded lowercase letterforms are paired with ITC Souvenir for text.

Lucky was designed by André Pless and selected by Mecanorma for publication as a competition winner in c. 1972. The charmingly naïve face with the circular counters and the horizontal contrast made it all the way from France to Singapore, where it became the brand typeface of PingPong Foods Pte Ltd.:

The name PINGPONG is synonymous with Meatballs, and Ping Pong Beefball was established in 1977 manufacturing bouncy and springy beefballs supplying initially to food stalls, then restaurants, hotels and supermarkets.

I don’t know who designed the identity and when, but I can very well imagine that Lucky has been used by PingPong since the company’s beginnings. The shop sign above shows that a few modifications were made to the typeface: the i dot was enlarged, s is custom, and t got a bar. Yes, Lucky’s original t does without a bar. The PingPong Meatballs logo additionally has a custom narrow M. Don’t miss the mirrored l in “Meatballs”, which yields yet another circular interletter counter.

The logo variant on the packaging shown further below includes the Chinese characters for PingPong, 乒乓. They have been luckified, too – how cool is that?!

The Latin script used on the packaging is Forte. I’m grateful for any pointers regarding the Chinese typeface.

This paperback series of novels and stories by Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) was published by Volk und Welt in (East) Berlin between 1980 and 1982.

All titles as well as the author’s first name are set white on black in Data 70, Bob Newman’s typographic interpretation of the MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) aesthetic for Letraset. Such angular letterforms with abruptly thickened vertical elements emerged in the mid 1960s and early 1970s and quickly became a signifier for computers and futuristic technology in general.

For each volume, cover designer Klaus Krüger rendered the word “Lem” in another catchy display face. There’s Stop (customized with a stenciled L and a square-cut M), Black Line (tight-and-touching, with white lines), New Zelek (with an elongated bottom bar on E), Motter Ombra (in alternating glyph colors, with the L scaled to x-height), Countdown (with a custom L and counterspaces filled in blue), and Lucky.

The publisher’s zigzag logo (VUW for Volk und Welt) was designed by Klaus Wittkugel.

Sterntagebücher, 1980. 2nd edition 1982. First published as Dzienniki gwiazdowe (The Star Diaries) in 1957.

Eden / Die Maske, 1980. First published in 1959 as Eden / in 1976 as Maska.

Der Schnupfen / Test, 1980. First published in 1975 as Katar (The Chain of Chance) / in 1959 as Test (The Test).

Der Unbesiegbare / Die Jagd, 1980. 2nd edition 1982. First published as Niezwyciężony (The Invincible) in 1964 / as Polowanie (The Hunt) in 1965.

Der Planet des Todes, 1980. 2nd edition 1982. First published as Astronauci (The Astronauts) in 1951.

Gast im Weltraum, 1980. Translated by Rudolf Pabel. First published in ca. 1955 as Obłok Magellana (The Magellanic Cloud).

Allez! Prácticas ambulantes y museos dispersos (“Meeting on peripatetic practices and mobile museums”) is an international seminar on mobile artefacts. From the MACBA website:

Allez! Peripatetic Practices and Mobile Museums is a project by MACBA and The Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso designed to create a space for reflection and experimentation by using mobile educational resources to encourage arts in education. It features educational boxes, cases and kits, mobile museums, libraries and cinemas, activities following in the tradition of postal art and recording-studio caravans, among others.

The identity by Todojunto comprises posters, flyers invitation, signs, etcetera. Beatrice Display (in various partially stretched versions) and Traulha are used throughout.

Hardcover edition.

“Sharon Smith’s Women Who Make Movies is an important and timely reference book, the only one of its kind, and it is indispensable to anyone seriously interested in women in film, or in film itself.” — Molly Haskell, Film Critic

The cover uses a film typeface of unclear origin that closely resembles Dave West’s Behemoth Clarendon Italic Swash (PLINC, c. 1967), but is different in many details. It’s shown as Stymie Black Italic in a 1973 Typeshop catalog alongside a Drop Shadow variant, both with numerous swash, biform, and swash biform alternates (up to nine forms for a letter like M, three of which can be seen here). The same range is shown in a 1976 catalog by Lettergraphics as Stymie Black Flair. There’s no real connection to Stymie beyond the name. Tutti Paffuti NF (Nick’s Fonts, 2007) is a digital interpretation.

Paperback edition.

Glyph set from an undated (ca. 1977) Typeshop Selection catalog.

Established in 2018, Maepole is an Athens, Georgia restaurant specializing in quick counter service and vegetarian bowls. The bouncy typesetting delivers their youthful and casual attitude and the reversed-contrast Gothic Bold adds a dollop of quirk. In all, it’s a successful identity — cute and cohesive.

I only wish they’d simply written the “nice to see you again”, rather than using an amateur handwriting font.

Virid's primary wordmark set in each of the brand's color combinations.

Virid is a training, staffing, and consulting agency for Michigan’s growing cannabis industry. The company provides a wide range of HR related solutions and sets itself apart by the quality and education of its candidates.

While the cannabis industry is still very young, its presence in our culture is not. Traction’s strategy for Virid sought to take advantage of this sentiment. The agency's design approach focused on utilizing cues from an era that not only embodied the brand’s newly crafted tonality but celebrated the use of marijuana in all forms: the late 1960s and early 1970s.The design team collected a range of design instances from Woodstock tickets to cooking magazines as a source of inspiration.

The primary logo, based on Bookmania, is a custom wordmark featuring a “sprouting” V, symbolic of the growth of business and of cannabis. Bookmania is also used for headlines, supported by Centra No. 2 for all other text.

A single page website was developed, plus a set of brand collateral with center-focused design. Some of the brand pieces focus on a singular color approach, while other pieces are executed in each of the brand's color combinations.

Virid's letterhead design

Virid's business cards

Virid button design

We created Éditions Haut Bord. Our desire? Choose short texts, poetics, lists, haikus, thoughts, aphorisms, which move us and shake us. Make books where the scriptures intersect. This is the Mêmepapier collection.

The Mêmepapier collection, published by Éditions Haut Bord includes two authors per book.

The graphic principle developed for the book covers offers truncated images on the four edges of the front cover. Each work thus constitutes a piece of the whole, like a puzzle. Only the story titles are placed on the cover, linked by line to the authors’ on the back cover. These small objects are simple by their formats and their papers, but precious by their finishes. Inside, each text gives its voice by a singular typographic choice. Thus, the reading can be done in simultaneous echoes, or separately for one of the two texts.

The Mêmepapier collection is designed by Maud Guerche (Atelier bora-bord) using Minérale, designed by Thomas Huot-Marchand, available on 205.tf

Identity and leaflet for the fifth edition of jazz festival Sur le Grill. Design by Brest Brest Brest, using Laurenz Brunner’s Circular together with Standard and Pickle-Standard by Benoît Bodhuin.

For the past few years, the moody experiments of Turin, Italy-based producer Yves Tumor have evolved rapidly and plummeted deep into uncharted territory. – Tone Madison

Concert poster for Yves Tumor at the Play Circle in Madison. Serpents are a common theme in his music. I used Nostra Stream with its snake-like qualities, overlapping the bolder Nostra Sett underneath. This contrasting type is meant to mimic the main serpent compositional element of the poster. Risograph printed by Bad Press.

Props to Julia Warbanow for choosing contemporary fonts for postage stamps! This is Schick Toikka’s Chap (2016), used for a stamp to be issued on 7 February 2019, commemorating the 150th birthday of Jewish German poet and playwright Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945). From the Deutsche Post website:

As Germany’s most important expressionist poet and exponent of avant-garde literature, she is at the center of Berlin’s bohemia at the beginning of the 20th century. Her extravagant lifestyle also contributes to this: she rejects the traditional role of women in bourgeois society. At the same time she opposes abortion, advocates for contraceptives and free love, and advances as a symbolic figure for the liberation from conservative constraints. Not least because of her appearance – black pageboy cut, wide trousers, colorful robes and eye-catching jewelry – Else Lasker-Schüler is considered an eccentric bird of paradise, who likes to stroll through the streets of Berlin, disguised as her alter ego “Yusuf, Prince of Thebes”.

The image shows a detail from a drawing by Lasker-Schüler, titled Jussuf (© Sammlung Kamen, Insel Hombroich).

First Day of Issue postmarks for Bonn and Berlin.

Detail of a sheet with ten stamps.

Taking its cues from mid century references books, vintage field guides and contemporary still life photography, the guide was designed to be unlike any of its predecessors. Art directed and minimalist food photography combined with custom designed fonts brought a unique aesthetic to the book. A major design challenge was treating 100 portrait images supplied by producers that were of various styles and quality. A coloured screen was used to unify the images and bring consistency to each producer profile.—Australian Book Designers Association

The Field Guide to Australian Produce, like its predecessor The Field Guide to Tasmanian Produce (2015), was designed by Matthew Angel. Both guides use Alias Noah for headlines, mixing its three versions – Upper Lower, Text and Unicase. The typographic palette is completed with Nimbus Sans, Adobe Caslon and Pitch.

How to dress a new emerging brand at the crossroads of cosmetics, clothing and a rebellious and liberated mood, without making it a fabric of banalities? We have chosen the typographical path, working with unexpected associations around a typogram that encapsulates the character of L'Atelier Shelter.

The logo is a monospaced lettering, created for the occasion, endowed with a strong contrast: the design of the characters, structured and rational, asserts the seriousness of the brand. The E, with its free and frenetic layout, expresses the desire for liberty that is floating within the ‘bearded’ community.

This same contrast is reflected in the typographical guidelines implemented in the branding: we have associated the exacerbated casualness of Combat (Velvetyne) with the Swiss rigour of Simplon Norm (Swiss Typefaces). Packaging, stationery, posters, clothing and even skateboards: the graphic style of Atelier Shelter is deployed on different media, which we will develop over time.

The May 1, 1958 issue of the Oxnard Press-Courier includes these ads for four supermarkets in Ventura County, California. The ads use many of the same fonts, suggesting they were produced at the same printer, probably the newspaper itself. This was common practice in the pre-digital era, especially for small businesses in small towns.

I salute the anonymous typesetter(s) at work here. They employ a variety of low-fi methods for grabbing attention and organizing information. Note the liberal use of rules and squiggly borders, the giant ‘1’ for Big T and Asahi Markets, the huge size contrast between numbers and units (lbs, cans, bunches), and the bursts for the Oxnard Produce Market.

Some of the typefaces used throughout the newspaper (and these ads) are Franklin Gothic Condensed, Metro No. 2, and Erbar-Grotesk Bold Condensed. Tempo, a very common choice for mid-century American newspapers, appears in the La Perla ad (e.g. “EGGS”). The largest type, used for many of the figures, is likely wood type and difficult to identify. Hamilton’s Plain Gothic No. 6243 appears to be one of them.

Twelve information booklets designed by Studio Airport for the HKU Art Academy, each with a different cover set in the ever so playful bb-book type series by Benoît Bodhuin. Next to that, Studio Airport worked with 9 different colored papers from Fedrigoni Papers.

Kräuter der Provinz gatefold LP, front cover

The herbs of the province, “Ahh, the great outdoors!”, eighty fingers playing improvised music: Kräuter der Provinz is the latest installment among about 30 releases of Datashock, a music project based in Saarlouis (Saarland, Germany).

Kräuter der Provinz was released on May 25th of 2018 via Bureau B, who are also the home label of Krautrock legends like Conrad Schnitzler, (Q-)Cluster, Moebius, H. J. Roedelius or Peter Baumann. It is Datashock’s thirtieth release since the collective founded in 2003 (depending on the source, the numbering may vary).

In December 2014, eight friends and collaborators met at Oettinger Villa:
“Pizza delivery number dialled, bottles opened, lights, camera, action. Machines bleep, a violin cries out, a clarinet howls, guitar and bass weave their way around the drums. The spell lasts for several days, then the postmagic goes back in the box, the recording is done.” (press release by Salvador am Ei)

The gatefold double LP is printed in three colors (PMS Gold, Pastel Rose and Hunter Green) on glossy cardboard. The front cover shows a golden Messiah-like figure (a Datashock guitar hero at age 19). The typography uses Lÿno Jean throughout. This typeface, designed by Karl Nawrot and Radim Peško between 2009 and 2012, is set in various colors, sizes and interlocking grids for all media. The Lÿno typeface family was introduced in the booklet Newer alphabets: Another introduction for a programmed typography, itself a supplement of Korean magazine Graphic #16, “Type Archive Issue” (Winter 2010). James Langdon wrote:

Digital production permits us to exploit the mutable and the itinerant. These are the characteristics of a maturing digital language. We can build unstable alphabets. […]
These characters negotiate the digital freedoms of their production through playful typologies of form. They are open and various, and their spirit is this: to resist normative tendencies and to reject the idea of definitive form.

The black album labels indicate the sides 1, 2, 3 and 4 with huge numerals. These numerals, derived from Lÿno, also appear on the insides of the gatefold cover where they form two mystic symbols.

Since the LP has two bonus tracks, the CD and promotional CD-packaging have a slightly differenty layout on the back cover. We simply striked through the tracks that did not make it onto the CD.

To promote the release party at Sparte 4, Saarbrücken’s finest theatre, we designed a three-color, A3 Risograph poster with the magnificent graffiti help of our colleague and buddy ConeTheWeird.

In the meantime, friends of Datashock produced two video clips. One of them provided inspiration for the cover of the digital single “Langustenclown (am Atlantik)”. The other one (“Hullu Gullu, wir liefern Shizz”), recorded during the aforementioned release party, features cameo appearances of all Datashock family members, including us designers Cone (right) and Manu (left) — check out the GIF!

June 2018: The first pre-orders were sent out with a surprise gift: We asked Knust (Nijmegen, the Netherlands) to print a limited edition poster on their infamous Risograph A2. An auto-translated poem and a family picture (out of the “Hullu Gullu…” music clip) come together in overprinting fluorescent pink and grass green colors.

Further design work for the Kräuter release includes a tour shirt, printed in 2 silkscreen colors, and numerous digital flyer or banner files for social media usage and their bandcamp page. All of them derived — some more, some less — from the original LP artwork and all of them, of course, use Lÿno Jean only.

Kräuter der Provinz gatefold LP, inside

Kräuter der Provinz gatefold LP, front and back cover

Kräuter der Provinz digipack CD, front cover

“Langustenclown (am Atlantik)”, digital single release, cover

MM, Manu and ConeTheWeird in the “Hullu Gullu, wir liefern Shizz!” video clip

Various banners for social media and YouTube videos

Merch: the Tour T-Shirt, back print (not shown: small pocket print of pink dog)

The two posters. On the left: release party DIN A3 poster, on the right: limited edition DIN A2 surprise present.

Kräuter der Provinz gatefold LP front and back, details of bottom left corners. The type frame on the front cover is set in 5pt Lÿno Jean. The type grid on the back cover uses alternative glyphs.

Kräuter der Provinz gatefold LP, front cover full view.

Planners find insights when they research and demystify consumers. Miami Ad School Account Planning Bootcamp is one of the greatest classes in Brazil to learn how to be a logical, creative and a intuitive account planner.

To get the attention of the upcoming planners, we based the campaign on their greatest skill: finding insights. We developed eye-catching social media posts and graphic posters inside the school during classes, inspired by the brain sinapses when people came up with ideas.

For typography, we picked Brrr and Suisse Int'l, both available through Swiss Typefaces, and paired them with MD Maya by Moby Digg.