Goulash is a hilarious novel about a man’s quest for a home in a place full of challenges and lots of beer—Prague, 1998. Wonderful dialogue, endearing characters, and a deep sense of the historical forces at work combine in all the best ways to make this story really delectable.

— Jessica Francis Kane, author of This Close and The Report

For the jacket design, Janet Hansen lets a gigantic beer tsunami wash away Prague’s Old Town Hall. The typography is positioned in this sea of orange. Hansen combines Las Vegas Fabulous, a nostalgic 1950s script from House Industries made in 2001, with caps from the whimsical Windsor Extrabold Condensed.

Beastly (OH no Type Co., 2018) with a rainbow-patterned long shade plus pixie dust, for How to Even, a satirical self help column.

Renald Louissaint is a Brooklyn-based designer and illustrator. In his current role as a brand designer at Medium, he created the covers for a series of collections with curated stories on specific trending topics and themes. This post presents nine covers that give a glimpse into Louissaint’s imaginativeness and versatility. His rich typographic palette includes many fresh faces that were issued in the past few years – and even some that haven’t been officially released yet.

Watch Renald Louissaint share “Insights Through Introspection” on June 14 at Typographics. Fonts In Use is proud to be a media partner of the conference. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

Sharp Grotesk Black 25 (Sharp Type, 2017) with glowing outline effect for The New New, the November 2018 issue of Medium’s monthly digital magazine.

Ogg Display Roman (Sharp Type, 2013) is used with a custom-made double s ligature. The e that connects to the following letter is the default form. Jessica Valenti is a weekly column on feminism, politics, and culture.

Man, Interrupted is a collection of stories on the meaning of masculinity today. Louissaint combined caps from Mandinor Modern FY (Julien Priez, 2014) and Domaine Display (Klim, 2013).

Glossy Display (Bold Decisions, 2018) in a number of variations – followed by asterisks, upside down, featuring superscript and overlapping letters, with an arrow and a circled 4 repurposed as l and A – and outlined Windsor for Please Advise, “notes on leveling up your professional life.” The monospaced text is in Aperçu Mono (Colophon, 2012), the grotesk is the upcoming Söhne (Klim Type Foundry).

Numerals from Sharp Grotesk Black 05, slightly modified and with a shiny bevel & chrome effect, for the cover of 2069, the January 2019 issue of Medium’s monthly digital magazine. The red type is from a lighter weight of Söhne. This cover was designed together with Ryan J. Hubbard.

Near-Death Experiences is a collection of stories on the topic curated by Mitch Albom, author of The Five People You Meet in Heaven. The pixelated caps are from History 06 (Typotheque, 2008). Aperçu Mono is used for the author line.

For the cover for Office Politics, Louissaint paired caps from Bitstream’s Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed with ASCII art made with the Text to ASCII Art Generator by Patrick Gillespie (aka Pat or JK). The selected FIGlet “fonts” are called Swamp Land by bpg and 3-D by Daniel Henninger. Their character patterns are here rendered in Aperçu Mono.

Pilat Extended (General Type Studio, 2018) and the yet unreleased Atlantic (Heavyweight), stacked and justified on the cover of For the Record with “stories that confront pervasive stigmas about physical and mental health.”

Displayed in 2014, Object Matter was the first retrospective of the work of American artist Robert Heinecken since his death in 2006. The exhibition emphasized “early experiments that investigated technique and materiality and sought to destabilize the very definition of photography”.

For the typographic identity, Elle Kim, currently Senior Art Director at The Museum of Modern Art, played with opacity, layers, and mirrored type, subtly referencing the work of Heinecken who, according to the MoMA, “always celebrated photography’s limitless permutations and possibilities.”

The font in use appears to be Matthew Carter’s MoMA Gothic. Commercial Type identified it as “a flawless digital recreation of Morris Fuller Benton’s 1902 Franklin Gothic, digitized from a tray of lead type in MoMA’s permanent collection”. It served as MoMA’s primary typeface from 2003 until 2017, when it was replaced by MoMA Sans, a custom typeface “drawn by Christian Schwartz under the direction of the MoMA in-house design team and London design consultancy Made Thought, with input from Matthew Carter.”

On June 14, Elle Kim will talk about “Physical, Intellectual and Emotional: The complete type experience at MoMA” at Typographics. Fonts In Use is proud to be a media partner of the conference. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

A show poster by Bráulio Amado for a concert at City Parks Foundation SummerStage in New York City’s Central Park. The poster features BD Geminis, a loose digital interpretation of the photo typeface Gemini (Computer), made by Büro Destruct in 2009.

Watch Bráulio Amado talk about “BAD Typography” on June 15 at Typographics. Fonts In Use is happy to be a media partner of the conference. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

A moment from “Rewiring the Spy” by Lisa Strausfeld and James Nick Sears.

“‘For me,’” says Lisa Strausfeld in a profile by Fast Company, “‘[the screen] was always a space. It was a space you can enter.’”

For the lead story of the New York Times Magazine on December 3, 2006, Strausfeld (then a Pentagram partner) and James Nick Sears programmed an applet linking keywords (here, the names of terrorists and events associated with them) that become larger, bolder, and more animated the more frequently they connect in a database.

A C-print output from a screenshot taken while the program was running is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Watch Lisa Strausfeld talk about “Immersive Information” on June 15 at Typographics. Fonts In Use is proud to be a media partner of the conference. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

Peak infographics: Giorgia Lupi for Print, 2017.

You won’t find much type in data humanist Giorgia Lupi’s work. Instead, you’ll find her hand. The newly minted Pentagram partner is on a quest to make data more tactile, more approachable—more qual than quant. If type is industrial design, handwriting is resolutely unrepeatable and nonindustrial. Lupi’s project as a whole seems like an implicit repudiation of type. When it makes a rare appearance, as David Jonathan Ross’ Input Mono does in Lupi’s manifesto for Print, it’s crossed out in her neat red script.

Watch Giorgia Lupi talk about “Data to Design with” on June 15 at Typographics. Fonts In Use is proud to be a media partner of the conference. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

Guest edited and designed by Gail Swanlund, Emigre #28 includes interviews with Laurie Haycock Makela, Somi Kim, and Barbara Glauber who also designed the inside cover. Like most issues of Emigre the magazine was an opportunity to show off a new Emigre typeface. In this case it was the wild OutWest by Edward Fella, a designer best known for his lettering. An ad for the font is shown on the last page: “OutWest: On a fifteen degree ellipse”, as well as a preview of the upcoming Backspacer. OutWest is used throughout the issue – even for text – along with Citizen and Template Gothic.

Letterform Archive holds Emigre’s complete paper archive, including font catalogs and development files, and a complete run of Emigre magazine. Full issues (including this one) are available in the institution’s Online Archive.

See Ed Fella’s talk about Analog Letterforms to the Nth Degree on June 14 at Typographics. Fonts In Use is proud to be a media partner of the conference. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

Inside cover (left) designed by Barbara Glauber. The lettering is likely sourced from U.S. highway signs, not Interstate, though the typeface was released in the same year.

The cover of A Colorful Life: Gere Kavanaugh, Designer (Princeton Architectural Press, 2019).

In what could be viewed as a continuation of a project initiated in her 2014 book Earthquakes, Mudslides, Quakes & Riots: California and Graphic Design, 1936–1986, designer and educator Louise Sandhaus (along with fellow Southern California designer Kat Catmur) zooms in on the exuberant oeuvre of Gere Kavanaugh. A Cranbrook grad and omnivore generalist, Kavanaugh was hired by General Motors in the fifties to work on car interiors, showrooms, and appliances. In the sixties, she left Michigan for warmer, more colorful climes: architect (and father of the shopping mall) Victor Gruen tapped her to design interiors for his firm in Los Angeles, where she still lives. The circle of friends she soon gravitated toward in LA—Deborah Sussman, Corita Kent, Frank Gehry, Ruth Asawa—was as bold and colorful as her work. She established Gere Kavanaugh/Designs in 1964.

Sandhaus and Catmur’s lush, vivid design is an apt tribute to this unsung polymath. Helvetica may be overused, but the style feels utterly appropriate here. In an email, Sandhaus and Catmur admitted that they were “uncertain at moments about using Helvetica at all.” They chose it “because it had been Gere’s go-to font probably since her typographer, Vernon Simpson, acquired it.” But the designers “quickly discovered that the digital Helvetica options weren’t well considered when they were digitized. The spacing in these versions was a one-size-fits-all approach which made for a lot of awkward-looking type.” By contrast, Neue Haas Grotesk offered “beauty, legibility, and even color,” they said. “The result was a much more pleasant typesetting experience.”

Watch Louise Sandhaus talk about Type in Film on June 14 at Typographics. Fonts In Use is proud to be a media partner of the conference. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

Source: www.janet-hansen.com Janet Hansen. License: All Rights Reserved.

The cover for Nico Walker’s debut novel Cherry was designed by Janet Hansen, senior designer at Alfred A. Knopf, with creative direction from Carol Devine Carson. It was chosen as one of the New York Times’ 12 Best Book Covers of 2018. To get to this superb result wasn’t exactly straightforward, though. Over on LitHub, Hansen recounts the process. “The Trouble With Designing a Book When Its Author is in Jail” is a fascinating and refreshingly candid story full of detours and dead ends, with a happy ending.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the type. Strictly speaking, it’s not even type. The title doesn’t use a font, and yet it’s written with prefabricated letters. Janet Hansen has tapped into an alternative format that used to be a common one from the 1950s to the 1970s: alphabet source books. The letters used for “CHERRY” stem from OP-Letter, a set of fat shaded capitals with a number of charmingly wonky details and inconsistencies. Walter Haettenschweiler, the Swiss letterform designer extraordinaire, drew them with a Rapidograph technical pen and named it after the OP Art movement [Swiss Type Design]. His piece of lettering was reproduced in the third volume of Lettera, published by Arthur Niggli in 1968.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

OP-Letter as shown in Lettera 3 by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler (ed.). Teufen AR: Arthur Niggli, 1968, 2nd edition 1970.

The Lettera series was started by Armin Haab and Alex Stocker in 1954. Following Stocker’s premature death in the same year, Haab continued it together with Haettenschweiler, adding three more volumes until 1972. In addition to dry transfer lettering and the more expensive phototypesetting, alphabet copybooks were an accessible, low-cost letterform source in the pre-digital era. While the usual techniques involved tracing or photocopying, chopped up copies of Lettera books are sad proof that some users chose a less sustainable approach. (Hansen resorted to a scanner, of course.) The editors were well aware that their compendium books effectively served as a fount of letters. The introduction mentions that “every purchaser of LETTERA 3 is entitled to form words or texts for any purpose from the alphabets it contains.”

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Fat Albert, a – probably unauthorized – phototype adaptation of OP-Letter, as shown in The Complete Lettergraphics Library. Culver City: Lettergraphics International Ltd., 1976.

Despite the fact that this “EULA” prohibited any unauthorized reproduction, OP-Letter was copied by Lettergraphics in the US almost instantly and made into a film typeface dubbed Fat Albert. This version is distinguished by harmonized letter heights and a more even H. Shadows in C, F, R are different, and the missing P as well as numerals etc. were added. This film face also appears as Googie aka Fat Albert Square in Castcraft’s Encyclopedia (1978) and as Albert in 1970s catalogs by Typeshop and Fürst. Moderne Alphabets (Dover, 1999) has it under the alias Zippy. In the preface to Lettera 4 (1972), Armin Haab comments on the radical changes in the industry since the mid 1950s:

… a new industry appeared on the scene and began to distribute typefaces, old and new, in vast quantities. Photocomposition had arrived. Firms in this line mushroomed overnight, stole from LETTERA even the types we had designed ourselves, and sold them to anyone interested at so much per word. (For good or ill I had to ask these gentry to pay up!) – But the new trend had been set. The graphic designer was neither willing nor able to draw letters in accordance with consistent artistic principles. More and more graphic designers, advertising agencies, display managers and publishers came to depend on the faces proviced by photocomposing firms. Today their number is legion. They supply the market with display faces while the typefoundries produce mainly body type.

While the phototype knockoffs are all long gone and forgotten, the Lettera books are still around and, as with this case, continue to provide inspiration and unique letterforms for contemporary applications. Justice will prevail!

Shown below are some of the preliminary versions for the Cherry cover where Janet Hansen also used OP-Letter. See more steps from the journey to an award-winning cover in her walkthrough on LitHub.

Source: lithub.com Janet Hansen. License: All Rights Reserved.

After the cover designer ran into another dead end and the creative director suggested the job be given to a freelancer, Hansen drew new hope with this idea: “I quite liked it, as did everyone here at Knopf—the dual suggestion of the cherry of a cigarette and also a gun.”

Source: lithub.com Janet Hansen. License: All Rights Reserved.

The breakthrough? Almost. “A skull is a good symbol for the book, but the first execution felt too predictable. This is when it dawned on me that there was an important aspect of the novel that I wasn’t including in any of these jackets: the fact that it is uniquely American. I tried adding an American element.”

Source: lithub.com Janet Hansen. License: All Rights Reserved.

“While the last one is too smiley, the surprise element of it being secondary to the stars felt appropriate. Almost like the skull (and all of the darkness in the novel) came about as some naïve mistake.” For the final version (shown at the top of this post), the death’s head was toned down even more. Once detected, the effect is all the more powerful.

Watch Janet Hansen talk at the Typographics conference on June 14 about the power of simplicity in contemporary book cover design. Fonts In Use is a media partner of Typographics. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

Source: www.youtube.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Gay IPA is a 6.7% DDH Hazy IPA with Lactose, loaded with Simcoe and Amarillo cryo powder and fresh Chinook. Smooth mouthfeel with notes of pineapple, grapefruit, papaya, and oranges. We asked four artists to make labels for this year’s edition (...) Proceeds from the sales of Gay IPA will be donated to Chicago organizations whose mission is to support LGBTQ communities. — Marz Community Brewing

Marz Community Brewing paired the four different artworks with their brand typeface Calibre (Klim Type Foundry). Designer/art director/illustrator/animator Zipeng Zhu submitted a penis rainbow which is used on the label in two versions – on a white and on a black background. On his Instagram channel, Zhu shared a few animated rainbows.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.facebook.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.reddit.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Watch Zipeng Zhu talk at the Typographics conference on June 14 about animating type. Fonts In Use is a media partner of Typographics. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

Brand New Conference is a two-day event on the development of corporate and brand identity projects by some of today’s most active and influential practitioners from around the world.

This year’s identity is based on a cliché but we liked where that cliché took us so we went with it: New York is a “Concrete Jungle”, ergo we are going to use concrete. This wasn’t conceived as a metaphor but as the literal, core ingredient through which we would standardize all the materials.

One style that we thought we could expand on is the high-contrast sans serif with its calligraphic/chiseled structure. As a way to further channel the cacophony that New York can be we decided that instead of choosing just one font or type family we would use a bunch of high-contrast sans serifs together. We chose Chap (Black to be specific) from Schick Toikka as the primary font and we added Hoefler & Co.’s Peristyle, Typotheque’s Valter, Fatype’s Beausite, and Frere-Jones Type’s Bosca and Bosca Compressed — that are not yet available but we got to take out for a trial spin.

The “Gates of the Arctic National Park” poster was designed by Pouya Ahmadi for an exhibition titled Type Hike to celebrate the centennial of America’s National Parks. While the large words are in a custom typeface, Ahmadi used Suisse Int'l for all smaller type.

The exhibition was curated by Type Hike team and National Park Service. Gates of the Arctic National Park is one of the best places to observe the Northern Lights (Aurora), which became the main concept for this poster. The curtain-like super-form in the poster is a visual translation of the Northern Lights. The custom typeface used for this poster was an interpretation of same forms in a typographic manner.

Suisse Int’l is part of the Suisse typeface available from Swiss Typefaces.

Amalgam:

Edited and designed by ​graphic designer and educator, Pouya Ahmadi, Amalgam is an ad hoc transdisciplinary journal that works at the intersection of typography, language, and the visual arts. Amalgam Op. I brings together a selection of writings, transcribed performances, and interviews with a diverse group of designers, linguists, and visual artists including: Alexandru Balgiu, Philip Burton, Dinamo (Johannes Breyer & Fabian Harb), Meghan Ferrill, Devin King, Alice J. Lee, Gerry Leonidas, Paul McNeil, Peter O’Leary, Rouzbeh Rashidi, David Jonathan Ross, and Gregory Vines. The highlights from this issue include: Paul McNeil's note on the evolution of typography, text, and language; Typographische Monatsblätter cover design process by Gregory Vines; an extended interview with Dinamo discussing the thought process behind their work; and Norfolk typeface original drawings by Philip Burton and Armin Hofmann.

For the journal’s typography, Ahmadi combines the enigmatic Nemesis by Baptiste Bernazeau with two reinterpretations of lesser known faces inspired by historical sources by Dinamo, the sans serif Diatype and the seriffed Pegasus (originally by Berthold Wolpe).

Table of contents on the inner flap, mixing caps from Dinamo’s Pegasus Italic and Diatype Programm.

Contribution by Paul McNeil

Feature about Dinamo

Interview with Gerry Leonidas, with caps from Baptiste Bernazeau’s Nemesis (“EDITOR: / GERRY:”) featuring its alternate (?) E.

Pouya Ahmadi worked on the identity of New Age Now exhibition. The typographic identity for this exhibition merges Modern and contemporary type design as well as 1700 Transitional genre in order to produce an edgy identity that reflects the work exhibited throughout the year by Sector 2337 as well as the featured work at the fundraiser event.

Suisse Int’l is part of Suisse typeface, available from Swiss Typefaces.

Poster for Good Room featuring Cheee by OH no Type Co.

On March 22, Good Room presents Resom and Rachel Noon, plus Top Notch Vibes Funky Seshwa with Jitwam, Seth Magoon, Willy Soul.

D — The Rodina, March 15, 2018, featuring Arges (Blaze Type) and Shakotan (Benoît Brun).

Through a Glass Darkly was a series of four public seminars at UIC School of Design in 2017/2018:

This series of seminars aims to investigate the parameters of design as a practice. Rather than showcasing “best practices”—optimal ways for designers to take on predetermined roles—it looks at alternative models for the profession in which designers develop their own agendas and territories.

As a field, design has changed dramatically over the past few decades. While Modernist designers worked to rationalize their output in the 1950s and 60s, Postmodernism shattered that seemingly objective (yet authoritative) Modernist world view in the 1980s and 90s. Postmodernism’s lack of agenda, alongside the democratization of production tools and the World Wide Web, allowed for the nostalgic return of Modernism as a so-called “Global Style”/”Zombie Modernism” in the early 2000s, but without early Modernism’s sense of public mission and service. Now the question is: where do we stand as design practitioners, writers, and educators in the post-digital and post-internet era? How do we redefine the role of the contemporary designer?

Through a Glass Darkly questions notions of design practice today by considering alternative agendas for design. It showcases practices that go beyond surface, image, and form and utilize design as a tool capable of generating references and agendas outside predetermined boundaries. It introduces designers that elevate design discourse by repurposing design in the form of writing, producing, and publishing. It brings together designers who reject the status quo and seek to create their own alternative realities; designers who endeavor to remain relevant by redefining their practice and adopting positions outside traditionally defined domains.

The poster series was designed by Pouya Ahmadi.

C – Andrew Blauvelt, February 1, 2018, featuring Kraft (Jacob Wise) and Suisse Int’l (Swiss Typefaces).

B – Till Wittwer, November 9, 2017, featuring Nemesis (Baptiste Bernazeau) and Asfalt (Dinamo).

A – Mark Owens, October 27, 2017, featuring Knif mono (A is for …) and Pano (Heavyweight).

The three-dimensional glass letters are based on a version of Engravers Old English. The text typeface used on all posters is LL Brown (Lineto).

Cover of Group Efforts. This volume uses Concrete Roman.

From Neil Donnelly:

Published by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, GSAPP Transcripts puts lectures and events into print, paired with texts by faculty. The series design is an exercise in stability and variation. Consistency across volumes is reinforced through page size, body type, and layout. Colors, display type, sequence of papers, and the embossing texture on the cover change in response to the content of each volume. Cross references connect transcript and response, linking passages in each section.

Series format and Preservation Is Overtaking Us with Stefan Thorsteinsson; 2000+ and Group Efforts with Sean Yendrys.

I had a hard time identifying the typeface used for the body of the books, and so Donnelly was nice enough to do the work for me, providing some great insight in the process:

The proportional serif in the GSAPP Transcripts series is Matthew Carter's Olympian, and the mono is a custom face we drew for these books (it's essentially Olympian Mono).

The display face in the Grafton Architects volume is a digital version of this that I drew, based on lettering called Modern Sans Skeleton by John Vinycomb. He was a printer in Belfast and probably drew this in the late 19th or early 20th century. I was after something with an Irish lineage, and I was drawn both to the simplicity and eccentricity of this.

The Group Efforts cover is Concrete Roman, based on one possible outcome of Donald Knuth's Metafont.

See more images on neildonnelly.net.

Grafton Architects features Donnelly’s version of Modern Sans Skeleton.

For Preservation Is Overtaking Us, Albertus is used as supporting typeface.

2000+ is distinguished by the use of Antique Olive Black in red, with some custom backward and forward slanting.

From Neil Donnelly:

A collection of texts about architecture in the Arab world, The Arab City refutes stereotypes and complicates facile interpretations of Middle-Eastern architecture. The design is confident and blunt while remaining refined and academic, using tropes of both classical typesetting and crude sans-serif typography. The cover references Arab architecture and ornamentation while suggesting reinterpretation and reconsideration of tradition. Published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. With Sean Yendrys.

From Neil Donnelly:

Slipcase, cover, and interior design for Capital by Kenneth Goldsmith. A 1,000+ page tome composed entirely of writings by other authors about 20th century New York, the book is Goldsmith’s answer to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Typography with a distinctly 20th-century New York flavor meets a gleaming gold exterior, bolstering Goldsmith’s assertion that the city is “all surface.” Published by Verso, art direction by Andy Pressman.

Condensed weights of Franklin Gothic makes the tome aggressively American, complemented by Century Old Style for the interior.

From Neil Donnelly:

A book commemorating the life and work of design writer Phil Patton. Modest in size and printed in black ink on standard trade paperback stock, this unassuming volume collects three decades’ worth of essential contributions to design criticism, with a range and depth that goes far beyond design orthodoxy. Published by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

The book is set in an unassuming but very well executed combination of Century Schoolbook with its monospaced companion.