To mark the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship arriving in the United States, the New York Times Magazine ran a special issue in print and online. The design was managed by Deb Bishop, the Art Director of The New York Times Magazine Labs. The design takes advantage of two of the custom typefaces designed for the magazine by Henrik Kubel of A2-TYPE: NYT Mag Serif and NYT Mag Sans. The setting is also interesting for its unusual use of italic caps with the roman lowercase (the inverse of italics with roman caps).

The paper describes the project and how it came to be:

In August 1619, a ship carrying more than 20 enslaved Africans arrived at a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. The people on board were sold to colonists, marking the beginning of a more than two-century-long institution that would radically alter and continue to inform the identity of a young nation.

This month is the 400th anniversary of that ship’s arrival. To commemorate this historic moment and its legacy, The New York Times Magazine has dedicated an entire issue and special broadsheet section, out this Sunday, to exploring the history of slavery and mapping the ways in which it has touched nearly every aspect of contemporary life in the United States.

The 1619 Project began as an idea pitched by Nikole Hannah-Jones, one of the magazine’s staff writers, during a meeting in January. Her proposal was clear and ambitious: to dedicate an issue of the Sunday magazine to examining the ways the legacy of slavery continues to shape our country. Its implications, particularly for a newspaper that continues to face criticism for its past and present coverage of black Americans, were huge.

Article text is rendered in NYT Imperial, another custom typeface for the New York Times, designed by Matthew Carter based on Edwin W. Shaar’s Imperial (Intertype, 1954).

Identity for Cie Hippolyte a mal au cœur, the theater group of playwright and director Estelle Savasta. Designed by Brest Brest Brest, using bb-book A light for headlines and Stuart Text Regular for body copy.

Like most of Corita Kent’s work, this screenprint takes its type from a previously printed piece of packaging or advertisement. Kent manipulated her source material in front of the camera and cut up the enlarged result as a stencil. The rest of the text (which is typically religious, philosophical, and poetic all at once) is written by hand.

November 20, 2019 was officially deemed Corita Day in Los Angeles in honor of what would be Corita Kent’s 101st birthday.

Neon sign on the facade of a clothing store on Luitpoldstraße in Hof, Germany. Weber-Kleidung was known as the “house of a thousand coats”. It closed down in 2008. [Frankenpost]

The letterforms are closely modeled after Walter Wege’s Signal (1931), including its ‘W’ with crossing strokes, or the ducked-down ‘n’. The only major difference to Berthold’s digital version (shown below) is in the ‘r’. The metal original included both forms.

From Farmgroup:

Christmas & New Year decoration for Siam Center. We created hanging installation made by used drinking straws–these colourful plastic tubes act as the building blocks of larger shapes and words, which will bring the spirit of the Christmas season into this 3 dimensional installation. This installation tried to emphasize the idea that nearly anything has a second life and can be reused.