The Raiders graphic novel is described by publisher Dark Horse as follows:

From Daniel Freedman (Undying Love) and Cristian “Crom” Ortiz (Golden Campaign), comes an original graphic novel about family, freedom, and killing monsters for loot.

Marken and Maron, inseparable brothers, are dungeon raiders in a land ruled by corrupt royals and filled with fantastic dangers around every turn. But just as Marken decides that it's time to give up the raiding life, both brothers find themselves at the wrong end of the powers that be and stumble upon a secret that may unravel the entire political system.

Tupã Bold, by Diego Maldonado (Just in Type) is used all caps for the logo created by Diana Ortiz (with a little cut at the first R). The text uses Liquorstore, by Chank Diesel (Chank), also in all caps.

Cristian “Crom” Ortiz is credited as artist and colorist of the graphic novel including the cover.

Designed by Jerod Rivera under art direction from Amy Browne, Mazagan is the main typeface for all communication for the new Frida Kahlo exhibition at the De Young Museum:

At the time of Frida Kahlo’s death in 1954, a treasure trove of the artist's highly personal items—including jewelry, clothing, and prosthetics—were locked away. 50 years later, these belongings were unsealed—now they’re on view for the first time on the West Coast. Discover what these objects reveal about their now iconic owner in Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving.

All smaller text is set in Akzidenz-Grotesk Next, used by the De Young Museum as their brand typeface.

Front end developer and Awwwards young jury member Gosha Khidzhakadze built up his online representance while completely drawing the whole design process directly into the coding itself.

This unorthodox didactic of a creative professional but actually non-designer led into a minimalistic big-type styled portfolio with smooth micro interactions, using Grand Slang from Nikolas Type and Technique Sans from Artur Avtuhov.

Explore the site and it's playful interactions on gosha.xyz.

Grade Easy: An Introductory Course in The Principles and Practices of Grading and Drainage by Prof. Richard K. Untermann from the University of Washington is a book about landscape topography developed and distributed by the American Society of Landscape Architects Foundation.

The cover typography takes advantage of the alternate glyphs included in Letraset’s Stripes and extends the letterforms wherever possible. It also features a very original use of a connection piece between the letters A and R in “Richard”.

Only the first two interior pages are designed professionally, and then the rest of the book was made with a typewriter. It includes illustrations and uses Letratone textures and architectural patters to indicate a new chapter and to complete the drawings.

Title page featuring Stripes with hyper-extended glyphs and Helvetica.

Letratone textures and architectural patters were used for marking chapter beginnings as well as for illustrations. Letratone was Letraset’s brand name for screentone, a technique for applying textures and shades to drawings, used as an alternative to hatching, introduced in 1966. Watch a demo on how to use Letratone on YouTube.

The writing workshop Aula d’Escriptura, held in Girona, is a space to fly with words. Quotation marks are predisposed to creation and freedom, while clouds form a simulated text open to free interpretation. Double quotes – inverted commas – are also called “cometes volades” in Catalan (literally “flying quotes”) and ragged text is also known as “text en bandera” (literally “flagged text”).

The font used for the quotation marks is Poster by Íñigo Jerez. Text is set in Aribau Grotesk by Eduardo Manso. Aula d’escriptura’s logotype (not by Senyor Estudi) appears to be based on Akzidenz-Grotesk.

Women have been fighting for suffrage for more than seven decades. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was established in 1890, and became the most mainstream and vocal organization of the United States to push for the national suffrage movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the first president of NAWSA and resigned in 1892 at the age of 77. Her resignation speech “The Solitude of Self” beautifully illustrates the philosophical premise of gender equality, and eloquently presents a classic argument for why women need to be enfranchised by a Sixteenth Amendment.

Solitude of Self is based on this speech. I act as both the editor and meaning maker of the book. The design is inspired by newspapers in 19th and 20th century, thus attempts to give a journalistic presentation of an old but still relevant message to the modern audience—classical yet modern, just like the chosen identity typeface, Ogg (Sharp Type). Ogg’s elegant and outstretching Italic is interspersed with the Regular style, suggesting breakthroughs and a sense of non-conformity. The text of the speech is set in Graphik (Commercial Type), lending simplicity and cleanness as a counterbalance.

The book also includes secondary texts such as captions, facts, and timelines (in the monospaced Courier New) to assist for a better comprehension of the speech.

See the full project on my website.

The title stencil on the book cover is created based on the Ogg typeface, achieved by laser-cut.

Poster for the tenth installment of the International Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, designed by Milton Glaser. For the typography, Glaser chose the Condensed style of Windsor, in all caps. It’s paired with Helvetica for the smaller bits.

The organizers must have liked the poster so much that it was used a second time in 1977, with different colors. There, the block with the dates of the four different sections, “Vive la France”, “Jazz-Rock”, “Jazz”, and “Folk & Blues”, is set in Univers (with its original ampersand). This might be a modification made by local partners, and not by Glaser himself.

Source: web.archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Vol. 33, No. 21, “Turandot”, March 22, 1969.

Three covers for Opera News, illustrated by Milton Glaser. The classical music magazine was art directed by Bob Ciano at the time. The magazine logo is in Gros Titre, a caps-only alphabet drawn by Swiss designer Roland Schenk in 1959 and reproduced in the second volume of Lettera (1961), edited by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler. It was probably this alphabet source book where Ciano found the letterforms. The small line below is set in all-caps Optima.

Steve Heller featured Bob Ciano’s work for Opera News in a “Daily Heller” post from 2012:

Published for members of the Metropolitan Opera Guild in New York, the magazine cost just 35 cents, but its covers were worth a million bucks. Ciano was the conductor of an ensemble of superb illustrators, including Milton Glaser, whose artworks were preludes to choruses of articles inside.

Heller’s article includes an interview with the art director and several more covers, with illustrations by Douglas Benezra, Erté, Virginia Fritz, Robert O’Hearn, Sam Kirson, Don De Mauro, Leontyne Price, and Stanisław Zagórski. The post seems to be currently unavailable on Print magazine’s website. The Internet Archive has a backup. The Opera News logo in Gros Titre was introduced in summer 1966, and remained in use until summer 1973. Previous issues had a logo in Profil, and for the 1973/1974 season, Gros Titre was replaced by Helvetica.

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

Vol. 31, No. 22, “Traviata”, March 25, 1967.

Source: web.archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

Vol. 34, No. 12, “Die Zauberflöte”, January 17, 1970.

In the 21st-century, infographics are everywhere. In the classroom, in the newspaper, in government reports, these concise visual representations of complicated information have changed the way we imagine our world. Susan Schulten explores the pioneering work of Emma Willard (1787–1870), a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today.

This is a web republication of the original essay by Susan Schulten, Professor of History at the University of Denver, and the author of several books on maps and US history.

Curbe by Olga Pankova has been used for title and headings.

Curbe is an expressive display typeface inspired by Soviet 1960s. Technically, there are no historical letterforms—it is more about vibe and style: the script is contemporary, active, broken, dynamic.

Set in Adobe Caslon by Carol Twombly. Mrs Eaves Roman All Petite Caps by Zuzana Licko has been used for captions.

The original essay can be found on Public Domain Review.

Posters to promote a workshop about composition and typography in São Paulo, Brazil.

Gone To My Head was released in 1972 on Mercury Records. It’s the debut album by Andy Bown who later joined Status Quo. Design by John Youssi, with cover Illustration by Doug Taylor and art direction by Des Strobel. The artist’s name is in a film typeface named Horse Tank. The lowercase-only bold oblique face with tiny counters and thin stems here appears with an outlined drop shadow. The album title shows lettering based on Mistral.

Horse Tank was designed by Joe Taylor for Lettergraphics and is shown in their 1968 catalog. It was also carried by FotoStar. Castcraft’s 1978 Encyclopedia lists the face with the alias Ifitz. In 2015, Nick Curtis made a digital revival named Feedbag NF.

Spotted by Ken Barber in the Sweet Sweet Music exhibit at the Herb Lubalin Study Center.

The 8-track cartridge packaging features a bicolor use of Yagi Double. Like Horse Tank, the Yagi series was available from Robert Trogman’s FotoStar.

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.

One of the all-time great examples of type on a circle. Design by Ira Friedlander. Photography by Rod Bristow.