Aprender Design is an education platform for people in the design & tech industry, and my latest project. Synt (to be released with Dinamo) is used as the primary typeface of the identity. Combined with the restrained Neue Haas Grotesk, its pronounced curves stand out even more prominent to the visitor.

Dramaturgias #1 is a publication about contemporary Brazilian theatre, a record of several activities held at Sesc Ipiranga throughout 2019.

Sesc is a non-profit institution that has 43 units in São Paulo alone, and around 600 across all 27 Brazilian states. Providing health assistance, leisure, sports, culture and education services for all age groups and social strata, that are often free or inexpensive.

While artists in Brazil are under severe attack by the current right-wing government, it was both a big responsibility and a privilege to work on such a project. The main attraction of the publication would be the exposed binding, matching the cover's bright-red 032 U Pantone. Everything was printed in CMYK + one spot color.

Type-wise, we went with Druk for all titles, Lyon Text for running-text and Graphik for dialogues, all available from Commercial Type. Maison Mono appears on page numbers and running titles.

Open to the world through closeness. We developed the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin brand further with this in mind. We were fascinated by the close bond between the orchestra and its charismatic principal conductor Robin Ticciati. But also how strongly the musicians’ creativity is influenced by Berlin and how they leave their mark on the city. They are as awake and alive as the metropolis and the people they play for.

We have simplified the logo. It is more robust, more compact, and therefore more legible and modern. We do not use it as a sender, but as an information carrier that accentuates the DSO’s strong and independent personality. Fitting for an orchestra that mixes up the highly ritualised concert business with casual concerts, flash mobs, unusual venues and formats.

With the 2020/21 season design we show the DSO as it is: eager to experiment, committed, curious. It is “present” and takes a stance. Musically, but also as part of the urban society.

The season brochure, subscription and concert communication are characterised by the Whyte font, which is so strong that it confidently gives the DSO red colour enough freedom. We do without decorations as often as possible. All the important information has the same visual relevance.

About the brand typeface, ABC Whyte, designer Kathleen Rasch says:

Whyte from Dinamo takes up space. It is strong, loud and present. Despite this, it has details that appear very sensitive and gentle. It is a font for “now”. All of this fits extremely well with the DSO and its understanding of music as something that has an obligation to surprise and move.

L’ADN Tendances (“Trends”) is an annual magazine that reports on innovation, trends and anticipations. Art direction and editorial design of L’ADN Tendances and N°21 by Violaine & Jérémy. Cover artwork by Daniel Schweizer, set design by Jonathan Bréchignac.

The L'ADN logotype is set in Cako Black. The magazine layout uses Cako, (modified) Druk Condensed, ABC Ginto Nord Black, and GT Pressura Mono for headlines. Body text is set in Stanley and Kobe, with highlights in Canela.

For TekstLab’s tenth anniversary (2018), design studio Forest provided a design for a festival – Glokale Stemmer (“glocal voices”) – and the anniversary magazine (pdf) with four different covers. The magazine layout uses Form (Bizarre Bizarre) for headlines. The anniversary logo and the body text are set in Cerebri Sans, with Bluu Next for pull quotes and secondary headings, and Aperçu Mono for page numbers and running titles. The opening of the festival took place at Sentralen in Oslo.

TekstLab aims to increase artistic and cultural diversity within new performing arts and performative expressions in Norway. The goal is that as many as possible – regardless of social, linguistic and cultural background – must have the opportunity to participate in creative artistic processes, get tools to develop new texts, stories and scenic expressions, show the stories for the audience – and thus become voices in art and social life.

Type Life #1 was the first edition in a series of printed publications about design, typography and lifestyle, presented by Swiss Typefaces. Published in June 2017, it was soon sold out. Letter lovers who missed out on securing a copy can now rejoice: Type Life #1 is available again. The new edition is not just a reprint, but an enhanced update. It boosts four more pages and a revised design with new colors. The content was extended, too. In addition to new images, version 2 features several new typefaces that were created in the past months.

Type Life is packed to the brim with letterforms, and yet it is not a specimen. It’s a celebration of style and a wellspring of inspiration. Instead of long texts, there are lots of images, including photography, illustration, lettering, and exclusive previews of upcoming typefaces, forming a highly visual experience. Each issue is devoted to one chosen theme, and is made in collaboration with guest artists, illustrators, and designers. The printing process along with the use of metallic and neon colors is a key aspect. Apart from the format of a newspaper magazine, the identity of Type Life changes with every issue, depending on the topics and the guests.

The inaugural issue is about the Lab. In this Research & Development department, the designers of Swiss Typefaces explore new ideas for future fonts. Two of the Lab fonts are showcased in detail: BRRR is a playful wide Grotesk with a great deal of disruptive details. A spin-off from Simplon Mono, it was initially created to design a poster series for Swiss artist Simon Paccaud. KRSNA started out as a custom version of NewPanam Skyline, made for two vinyl record sleeves by Geneva-based musician Grace Core. This experimental typeface abandons the convention of a continuous baseline and introduces a three-storey space where the letters can sit at the top, center or bottom, with the remaining space filled by bars and spikes. The resulting word images are captivating patterns with logo-like qualities. Type Life reveals how BRRR and KRSNA came into being by depicting preliminary sketches, evolutionary steps, and photos of experiments made during trips. Reproductions of the very first applications show the fonts in context.

The updated edition also provides a glimpse into two upcoming Lab releases. KOPYME is a brutalist typeface with monospaced characters of extra wide proportions. Its horizontal nature is offset by diagonals that shoot across the glyph space like laser beams. They crash through the baseline, extending the underlying grid by a fourth underground level, and adding to the KOPYME’s kinetic energy. Black Mamba is an offshoot of the SangBleu series. Its swash letterforms are melting and churning as if they were drawn under the influence of the intoxicating Aztec elixirs mentioned in “The King, His Court, The Explorer & The Gift”, the essay included in the SangBleu Book.

Guest contributor is Thomas Louzoun aka Zombie Tears, a French art director, illustrator and tattoo artist. His whimsical drawings and handmade letterings were created specifically for Type Life. They are complemented by samples of recently released fonts like the fat display serif IKANSEEYOUALL and the bonkers Euclid Stencil, and previews of fonts that were in the making at the time of the publication, like new styles for TheW Clan (ODB & GZA, in addition to already released RZA).

An underlying theme in Type Life #1 is the confrontation of opposites. Systematic typography is interspersed with footloose lettering, accurate vector shapes are shown side by side with drippy comic blackletter. Highbrow clashes with subculture when an icon of the Swiss International Style gets remixed with street art. Past meets present also in the typeface designs that always and inevitably are contextualized in history. The digital is contrasted with the analog, the local with the cosmopolitan, the abstract with the personal. On a formal level, all of this is represented by the combination of uncoated newsprint and glamorous spot colors. The unique color palette featuring Pantone neon colors along with silver and black is a defining element of the publication’s identity.

Type Life issue #1 v2 was printed in an edition of 1,500 copies. It is now available exclusively from Physical Company. Fonts are available on Swiss Typefaces.

Cover, with magazine logo set in Ikanseeyouall. The theme is set in SangBleu OG Condensed, with showings of Krsna and Kopyme underneath.

outlined Krsna used as a frame.

Type amidst lettering by Thomas Louzoun: “Type Life Choose Us” is set in Black Mamba.

Capital K’s set in Euclid Stencil and Krsna. The font names are set in Brrr .

Medium 0 is an internal printed publication, self-initiated by Medium’s design team with assistance from the editorial and marketing teams. It comprised a handful of the best pieces published on Medium in 2018, representing the broad spectrum of stories that appear on Medium from writers of all types.

This project came together in just over a week. The two designers worked together to establish a basic grid and typestyles, and then mostly separately to translate the articles from their digital form. In most cases, this meant creating a bespoke feature treatment from scratch as the original articles didn’t have accompanying artwork or display type.

Lars and an unreleased serif by Kris Sowersby are used for body text throughout. The front and back cover consist of a modified M from Maelstrom, creating an abstract front cover that reveals itself upon opening.

44pp, oversized newsprint. Design by Noah Baker and Dora Godfrey. Art direction by Ryan Hubbard. Special thanks to Bethany Heck and Renald Louissaint.

Further documentation by Bethany on heckhouse.com.

The narrow type in the black ovals is Cardinal Fruit, available from Production Type.

The X on the left hand page is taken from Breite Fette Antiqua by Forgotten Shapes.

Lonely City, with caption-like snippets set in WiseType’s Monarch.

Justified Compacta Black is paired with Klim’s unreleased serif for a powerful opening page.

All-caps Lars is contrasted with Klim’s upcoming Fournier-inspired serif.

A “writing surface for experimental sound practices”, Revue & Corrigée is a quarterly magazine on experimental movements in contemporary music, performance, cinema, dance, sound installation, and sound poetry. It was first published in 1988.

For the special 30th anniversary issue, French designer Hélène Marian was given carte blanche. She limited herself to a single color – red – but went all in with the typography, and indulged in a wild mix from several styles from her own PVC series. In addition to the extrawide PVC Banner (in regular and Ultra weights) and the punchy PVC Promo, the issue also has a preview of the upcoming PVC Dynasty. This sharp serif will further expand the range of the heterogeneous typeface collection. In a supporting role, another typeface from Production Type: Minotaur Sans is used for body copy.

This poster was made for a traveling exhibit in Spain put on by Ladies, Wine & Design (Madrid chapter) and Half & Twice studio with the open theme of “women and design”. A single style of Schnyder is used in all caps.

How does anyone truly reach their fullest potential if they let gender dictate their worth, or their full identity? I am a woman, a designer, a wife, a feminist, a creator, a sister, a go-getter, a daughter, a friend. I celebrate each and every woman working within their field, and I encourage all of us to not let a specific facet of our identity be the sole lens through which we and others see our work. I don't believe we should limit ourselves to being the best female designers we can be; let's be the best designers we can be.

Amsterdam-based design studio What The created a comprehensive brand campaign for the 2018 Nederlands Theater Festival. The project pairs Sharp Grotesk and Chapter. Sharp Grotesk is used for strinking campaign images that featured themes of the festival such as, falling into the “Waarheid” (Truth), confronting “Gezag” (Authority), getting pulled in into “Lust” and hesitantly going into “Spijt” (Regret). More styles of the Sharp Grotesk family are used on the festival website.

See more pictures at Sharp Type News.

The Moving Festival is student project for ELISAVA, Barcelona. A five days film event that would take place in different spots in the city of Barcelona. Settled in multiple places, the festival would offer the opportunity to the attendants to watch a well-selected list of movies in a unique and unforgettable surrounding. Taking the word moving as a starting point, the graphic proposal explores its different meanings and uses them to generate a system.

Based on the idea of movement, the typography of the festival is formed by the letters moving vertically within their frames to generate a motion effect, referencing to sequences in the film strips. The layout of the posters follow the same principle of movement, creating a modular system with three elements (bar, image, typography) that move vertically as a film strip.

Commissioned by music label Milkshake/Sony Music, Gregory Page designed the visual identity for their newly signed artist Nea (Linnea Södahl). Among the produced elements: a logo with custom bold letters; a tape logo system that can be applied on everything, everywhere (campaigns, merchandising, apparel …); artwork design and music video titles for the first track “Some Say”. The serif in use is Inferi, designed by Matthieu Salvaggio and available from by Blaze Type.

Photography: Alexandra Cepeda Robles
Models: Victor & Laura

Arkkitehtipäivät (Architecture Days) is an annual architecture seminar held by SAFA, the Finnish Association of Architects. The 2019 event took place in May and included 350 architects and architecture aficionados.

Designer and illustrator Sofia Pusa created the identity for this year’s event, featuring Fit in bold displays and Graphik Wide and Graphik Condensed for supporting text. Pusa describes her process:

The theme of the 2019 event was Kuri ja järjestys (Discipline and Order). I really loved how the Fit typeface made the words kuri (discipline) and järjestys (order) look like brutalist architecture and a condensed city, which made it a perfect match for the branding concept.

As Fit’s designer, it is incredibly rewarding for me to see Pusa take full advantage of the typeface’s blocky, architectural forms and set it at monumental sizes. The words in Fit act like illustrations, contrasting the otherwise-sparse design with bursts of complexity. I also really dig the colors.

A Challenge from Sweden is an initiative of Energimyndigheten (the Swedish State Energy Agency), which sorts under the Ministry of the Environment and Energy.

Sweden has committed itself to the long-term goal of reducing carbon pollution.
Through the initiative A Challenge from Sweden, the Swedish Energy Agency promotes challenge driven innovation to accelerate the shift towards a zero carbon growth economy.

Its brand identity has been created by the design agency Söderhavet. A Challenge from Sweden needed to have its own brand and design system in relation to the national brand of Sweden, and to clarify its mission to its stakeholders. The core elements of the identity (colours, grid, logostructure/sender system) derive from Sweden’s brand identity. This also includes the typeface, Sweden Sans.

The main theme is energy, both as a resource and as a force that is driving change. The brand identity creates a systematic scheme for A Challenge from Sweden and its different thematic sub-initiatives. Find more information about the project here.

Ça ira (1): Fin de Louis is a play by French theatre director Joël Pommerat, created in 2015 at Le Manège theatre in Mons, France. According to the New York Times:

The more than four-hour-long play, written and directed by Joël Pommerat, is an exploration of the early years of the French Revolution dating back to 1788. The characters speak in contemporary language, are dressed in clothing from the 1970s, and are led by a king who poses for a selfie. […]

French critics have compared the theatrical experience to watching a “revolution live,” and the honors for “Ça ira” come as demonstrations against an overhaul of the labor code have swept across France. […]

The play — the first in a series that eventually will include a version that addresses the “Reign of Terror” in France after the revolution — is told from the viewpoint of ordinary French citizens rather than leaders like Robespierre and Lafayette. The main historic characters are King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, with the monarch issuing familiar demands for fiscal reforms to tame his nation’s astronomical budget and offering reassurance: “Ça ira” — or, in English, “It Will Be Fine.”

Since 2015, the multi-awarded and acclaimed play has been touring the world. For its premiere at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in Paris, Pierre Jeanneau continued his colourful series of posters.

The use of SangBleu Empire as the main typeface is interesting in several ways considering the subject of the play:

– Although many styles from SangBleu are inspired by the French King’s commissioned type Romain du Roi, Empire, with its lineal serifs and dramatic contrast, owes more to the Didot genre, a style appearing in France circa 1790: at the same timeframe as the French Revolution events.

– The typeface could also have been chosen because of its name, as the play depicts the turning point of the end of the Kingdom of France (also the name of one of SangBleu style) with the execution of King Louis XVI, and the proclamation of the French Republic which will quickly turn into the French Empire, declared in 1804 by Napoleon. This could technically be considered as a very subtle LTypI.

SangBleu Empire is part of the SangBleu family and is available from Swiss Typefaces.

The teaser video (below) adds the narrow caps (actually the lowercase set) of Anisette to the mix, used for newspaper quotes.

Jose Berrio, a designer based in Brooklyn created a “locked screen” wallpaper which aims to remind us that “there are other things to do besides looking at our phones every 5 seconds.”

The wallpaper, available for various screensizes is available for free download.

Solenizant is combined with a semi-psychedelic, grungy aesthetics of a gradient that almost looks like a hand-made texture. The design is balanced by thin hand-drawn lines and lettering.

For the exhibition, catalog and collateral for Martin Parr: Souvenir at Miguel Urrutia Art Museum (MAMU, Bogotá), Tangrama used Maax Raw Stencil (designed by Damien Gautier and distributed by 205TF) and Fugue (designed by Radim Peško).

From Tangrama’s website:

For the development of the graphic identity of the exhibition, we worked with the Maax Raw typeface in its stencil version, to refer to concepts such as the transport of goods and souvenirs.

For the entry of the exhibition, we developed a montage that simulates a commercial shelf of stencil letters and images from Martin Parr’s photographs. The background wall is covered with a wallpaper that recalls the domestic interiors captured by the early work of this English photographer.

For the exhibition room, Tangrama proposed a color palette based on each of the series included in the exhibition and extended sheets with a laser cut lettering for the holders. Between each series, a blank strip was left on the wall to accentuate the soft color changes.

Since 1994, the Macau Designers Association has established the Macau Design Biennial, which has been organised for 11 times. After 25 years of accumulation, it has become the only professional competition of Macau comprehensive design industry, and the Macau Design Award is now the name to represent this professional and global competition with a long history of Macau design industry.

“Design Roll Up” is this year’s theme, an echo to the renaming of the event, changing from ‘Macau Design Biennial’ to ‘Macau Design Award’. From the past 12 editions of design competition in 25 years , it rolls up the young design power in Macau.

Macau is surrounded by the South China Sea in the east and south. Except when travelling via mainland China, you must pass through an ocean if you are going to Macau. Wind → (generate) → Wave → (Accumulate) → The sand accumulates to form a pagoda → ( Many littles make a mickle) → Design Power.

Works from all over the world find their way to Macau over the sea, to build up the foundation of Macau Design Award. We acquire wind speed, wind direction and sea level from observatory, to simulate how wave hit Macau. After value accumulation, it turns a plane into an island, and generate 11 digital sculptures according to years, each years has its own landscape. The 3D digital sculptures are applied as key visual, except a set of 12 posters showing the history of Macau Design Award, its variation and be adopted a series of key visual design items.

We have expanded the timeline with a series of 12 posters, expressing the design history of Macau in 25 years time. Through the operational visual system constrcuted to generate a series of different forms by advertising media, in order to response the meaning of ‘evolution’ and ‘vitality’.

The typography uses Helvetica Now for the Latin alphabet, paired with Noto Sans CJK for Chinese text.
Visual identity design by Loksophy Design.
Computation and dynamic visuals by Dimension Plus.

For the visual identity of the Paris based school Camondo, Travaux-Pratiques used the typeface Maax designed by Damien Gautier.

The last redesign of Fast Company, with creative direction by Mike Schnaidt, includes a new logo and an updated visual identity.

The new logo uses the Grifo typeface with a custom adjustments made by Rui Abreu from R‑typography, to harken back to the old Fast Company logo, designed by Jim Parkinson.

Mike Schnaidt:

The wisdom of the Fast Company brand is achieved visually through the extreme vertical contrast of our new letterforms, a strong characteristic of neoclassical typefaces. The new logo is modernized through the sharp triangular terminals on the letters, a technological achievement not possible in the earlier days of old-style serif type, which is what the original Fast Company logo was modeled after. […]

The backbone of our new suite of typefaces is Grifo, which was used to create our new logo as well. We selected Grifo for its versatility – depending on the weight and width of a chosen piece of text, Grifo can look elegant, bold, or even downright radical. Its name derives from the Portugese word for Griffin, the mythological half-lion, half-eagle creature with sharp talons–thus the sharp serifs of the typeface. Heavy metal, for sure.

Our sans serif font is Centra, which derives its humanist design from the classic typeface, Gill Sans. It follows the rigid Bauhaus approach to geometric type, yet bends the rules when necessary in favor of legibility. The result is a very readable typeface, accessible by all.

We have two other typefaces in the supporting role: our condensed font, A2 Beckett, and our monospaced font, Simple. Think of the previous two typefaces as our salt and pepper, and these two as the spices.