Studio MPLS brings Roastar’s coffee tins to life with Coquette by Mark Simonson, adding a nostalgic yet vibrant touch to the packaging. Coquette’s unconnected, upright script delivers a playful, retro flair that pairs seamlessly with the bright color blocking and bold geometric patterns. Arrevederci JNL and Main Feature JNL, two quirky sans serifs by Jeff Levine, add to the retro vernacular feel of the design. The result is a packaging design that feels like a fresh take on classic pantry staples—timeless with just the right amount of charm.

Read more about the project on the Dieline blog.

The Awake Volcanoes is the first solo show in a U.S. museum for Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, a Chilean artist based in Berlin. It’s on view from April 7 to July 21, 2024, at the Denver Art Museum:

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra reimagines the world and deconstructs societal and cultural norms through her playful and surrealistic drawings and paper sculptures. Her work delves into shared and untold histories, trauma, desire, fantasies, and taboos. Born in Chile during the repressive Pinochet regime, she has lived and worked in Germany for decades, incorporating Latin American and European traditions into her unique artistic language. Her drawings – along with paintings, photographs, and films – explore mythologies, fantastical hybrid botanicals, diverse geographies, and text, with writing in Spanish, English, Italian, Latin, and German, that expands the possibilities of meaning for each image. She imbues the traditional technique of drawing with tactility by dipping finished drawings in beeswax, and she continues to challenge our preconceptions of what drawing can be by turning paper into three-dimensional sculptures. Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s work invites us in and exposes the mysteries and intimacies of our shared experiences.

The exhibition catalog was designed by Matt Avery/Monograph. It uses ABC Whyte Inktrap for headlines and a beta version of Euchre for text.

Editorial piece for Christie’s auction of Hippopotame II, a monumental bronze that’s configured as a bar on the interior, made by artist François-Xavier Lalanne in 1978. The booklet was designed by Pifarré Vallejo and printed on Colorplan G.F. Smith paper. The typography uses BallPill by Benoît Bodhuin and Futura Book by Paul Renner.

AC Visual by Jan Novák paired with Rhymes by Jakub Samek and Bitstream’s Swiss 721 for the November/December issue of frieze Magazine (No. 231). From frieze’s website:

‘What if artists were in control of the funding and distributing the money that powers are?’ – Bhavik Singh

In the November/December issue of frieze, senior editor Terence B. Trouillot convenes a roundtable discussion with artists and writers on decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Skye Arundhati Thomas profiles artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, whose games, installations and videos centre around Black Trans experience⁠.

SuperMag was a teen magazine published in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Issue 8 from 1978 included a feature with jack-o’-lantern recipes by Carolyn Vanderslice, with illustrations by Gordon Kibbee. The title is set in bichromatic Fat Albert, with a big round and pumpkin-colored double O, supported by Kabel Condensed.

Ink Dreams was and exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from September 19 to December 12 2021, which showcased the works of 53 local artists from Asia, Europe and North America, who all had one thing in common: the medium of ink. It explored how the ink spirit is translated across other mediums, global makers and contemporary art and included 78 works including photography, sculpture, video, painting, etc., proposing a new perspective on contemporary ink art, integrating the traditional characteristics of ink painting and new adaptations of traditional themes, not being bound by traditional materials.

The exhibition catalog, designed by Lorraine Wild and Xiaoqing Wang at Green Dragon Office, is entirely set with Riviera Nights. Several contrasting weights are used to create a complex but refined layout, highlighting the art pieces.

Riviera Nights is part of the Riviera family, available from Swiss Typefaces.

+Halle is a Danish furniture design company, focused on spatial solutions for the corporate and industrial market. To emphasize and communicate their specialized knowledge, approach and views, +Halle decided to create a magazine that could be published in print.

In collaboration with +Halle and Kristoffer Dahy Ernst, we designed a magazine concept and layout that could bring the +Halle universe to life, as well as creating a platform where others within the industry could voice their views on the future of workspaces.

The layout principals focused on a minimalistic design system, that clearly differentiated between the essays and interviews – allowing the reader to easily navigate between the two. The publication has been a huge success, and truly supports the company’s ethos and collaboration with other designers and thought leaders throughout the industry.

FIDE decided to hire the services of Morillas, a Spanish international agency founded in 1962 that has worked with sport stars and brands such as Leo Messi, Davis Cup, FC Barcelona, and Nike Spain. From Chess website fide.com:

“Developing a strong brand for an event like the FIDE World Championship match can help build credibility, engagement, recognition, and support. This will benefit not only the event, but FIDE in general, and chess as a whole”, said FIDE Chief Marketing and Communications Officer David Llada, who oversaw the creative process.

Event branding and design create the look and feel of an event. This comprises printed materials, signage and structural elements, video, digital assets, and sonic branding. In the case of a world championship match, even the smallest elements, like the scoresheets, are branded.

The agency chose to work with Apoc for the titles and headings, alongside Aktiv Grotesk for the text and further informations. The designers selected several of Apoc’s alternate lettershapes – see for example the R, B and the italic Y in the slogan (“You are your best move”); The E in “ARE” can be found in Apoc’s expressive Revelations style.

South Korean pop singer Sunmi’s latest single “You can’t sit with us” from the mini album 1/6 features Roslindale in its music video and promotional materials. Many thanks to Thy Hà for telling me about this use!

The heavy lifting is done by the Display Condensed, but I was excited to see the Deck used for some supporting text. Typically I don’t endorse faux-small caps, but I think the designers pulled it off!

See the video clip below. (Just a heads up that guns are involved in the video.)

A receipt card for the cocktail Paper Plane, by Lauren Griffin, based out of Los Angeles, CA. Beverly Drive is used with rounded corners. Lauren is a full time freelancer that specializes in illustrations and custom type.

Cover.

Teen Cuisine, A Beginner’s Guide to French Cooking, published in 1969 and designed by Peter Max. The cookbook by Abby Gail Kirsch and Sandra Bangilsdorf Klein features menu suggestions and simplified recipes for preparing soups, meats, vegetables, and desserts in the French manner. It also includes a glossary of cooking terms and describes special utensils and techniques.

The pages feature intensely vibrating color combinations and gradient-on-gradient text, as well as Art Nouveau inspired 1960s illustrations of seemingly recipe unrelated subjects.

Title page.

Mike Ashworth:

On fetching pink card an advert that would have been slotted into the runner guides on the curve of the bus upper and lower deck ceilings and that were much used by many operators both for their own notices as well as for commercial advertising. This is from 1968 and is for the special services operated by Newcastle upon Tyne’s “Corporation Omnibuses” to the Gosforth Park Races.

I’m sure that the Transport Department were amongst the last, if not the last, to use the joint “Transport and Electricity Supply Undertaking” title as they’d lost their electricity undertaking to nationalisation in 1948. I think, but not sure, that it had hung on due to the continued operation of electrically operated trolleybuses in the city until 1966 – two years before this advert appeared. I do know Newcastle were very unwilling to be ‘merged into’ the newly proposed Tyne & Wear PTE at about this time and issued adverts to that effect so I wonder if it was part of that ‘promotion’?

The typography features three typefaces by Monotype. Gill Sans and Ultra Bodoni Italic are combined with the lesser known Temple Script for “Gosforth Park Races”.

Detail.

This leaflet from the 1930s shows various products by the Georgii Elektro-Motoren-Apparatebau-Aktiengesellschaft from Stuttgart, Germany. Founded in 1924, the company started to manufacture electric motors for the use in sewing machines in 1926. The Kobold in the name probably refers to the small size of their motors. As of 2020, Georgii Kobold is still in the same business.

The typography uses three (or four?) weights of a typeface family known as Neue moderne Grotesk or Aurora-Gotesk, among many other names. They are paired with the compressed style from the same series, which goes by the names of Neue moderne Grotesk eng, lnserat-Grotesk schmal, or Aurora-Grotesk schmalhalbfett VIII. While the compressed has been available in digital form from Bitstream as Aurora Condensed since the early 1990s, an accurate digitization of the regular-wide styles was released only in 2020, as Neue moderne Grotesk FSL by Forgotten Shapes.

Studio in use for the cover of Dawn In A Duck Blind. A Guide to the Calls of Waterfowl. The 10″ record was released by Cornell University Records, a division of Cornell University Press.

Dolf Overbeek’s typeface was first issued by the Typefoundry Amsterdam in 1946. With its organic strokes, it goes well together with the reed and blades. The subtitle proves that Studio looks good in all-caps settings, too. Note how some words are subtly scaled down to let the important ones come to the fore. The cover illustration is by William C. Dilger (1923–2015), director of research at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and author of Finding Out About Birds, The Behaviour of Lovebirds, and The Loss of Teeth in Birds, among many other publications.

A record of the same title was issued with a different cover design by Houghton Mifflin in 1963. That edition came with a 28-page book with “identification drawings by Roger Tory Peterson, numerous color photos, black-and-white photos, waterfowl descriptions, and more. […] One side has narration of various waterfowl heard in duck blind at dawn, and the other side being straight mixture of waterfowl sounds.”

Via Jim’s Record Barn.

The unconventional arrangement of the title typography on the book jacket nicely integrates with the chosen detail of one of Manet’s paintings – and adds a contemporary touch along the way.

Manet and Modern Beauty: The Artist’s Last Years is a book on the French painter Édouard Manet (1832–1883), featuring his work and correspondence as well as a chronology of his life. It uses the Halyard Text typeface family extensively from the cover to the smallest text inside.

The publication goes with an exhibition given at the Getty Center in Los Angeles from October 8, 2019 to January 12, 2020. It was edited by Scott Allan, Emily A. Beeny, and Gloria Groom, and published by J. Paul Getty Museum.

400 pages
, 9⅝×11⅜ inches, 206 color and 97 b/w illustrations, 1 table.

ISBN 978-1-60606-604-1

The title is repeated on the inner flap, shown reversed in a light weight from Halyard Text.

The Halyard superfamily comprises three optical sizes. Book designer Jeffrey Cohen decided to go exclusively with Halyard Text and its more open shapes. Halyard Text also appears for titles, skillfully set with reduced tracking and hanging punctuation.

The headings are set with a short line measure, leaving opening pages with a generous amount of white space. Halyard Text is specified in roman and italic styles, with non-ligning numerals.

Image captions are enlivened by the use of two contrasting weights.

Running titles are set vertically in the outer margins, echoing the rotated “Manet” on the book jacket. The inline headings are highlighted by the use of bold small caps.

The nominator and denominator glyphs included in Halyard Text come in handy for setting arbitrary fractions.

By working with various distinctive styles, clarity is achieved even on dense pages. By keeping everything within one family, the page looks calm and harmonious.

This ad for Deutsche Städte-Reklame GmbH was included in the September 1934 issue of Gebrauchsgraphik, a German journal for the graphic arts and printing trade.

Deutsche Städte-Reklame GmbH (“German City Advertising Ltd.”) was founded in 1922. It later was renamed to Deutsche Städte-Medien GmbH (DSM). In 2003, 28 German cities held shares in the company, with Frankfurt (ca. 26%) and Munich (ca. 20%) being the major shareholders. The national market leader in outdoor advertising was acquired by Ströer Media in 2004.

Apart from the Städte-Reklame logo in the form of a city’s arms, the ad is exclusively typographic. It features two typefaces by Rudolf Koch, the influential German calligrapher, teacher and type designer who had died on 9 April 1934. One is Holla (1932), a script typeface derived from the artist’s handwriting – or at least the specimen cover suggests as much. It comes with swash caps and dynamic underscores, both of which are shown here. The other is Wallau halbfett (1930), which pairs a rotunda-like lowercase with “unzial” capitals. Wallau was later amended with a second set of “deutsch”, i.e. blackletter capitals. Both typefaces are used with ligatures for ch/ck and tz, as it was common in Germany at the time. Only Wallau features an ſ (long s).

The typefaces are credited at the bottom, indicating that this ad may have been designed and co-paid by the Klingspor foundry.

The seventh issue of the Offset. Buch und Werbekunst magazine – published in 1926 – was dedicated to the Bauhaus. The issue included a school overview-article, written by Walter Gropius, as well as a László Moholy-Nagy article on contemporary typography, a piece by Gunta Stölzl about the Bauhaus weaving studio, another by Oskar Schlemmer about work for the school’s stage, and articles on letterform design by Josef Albers and Herbert Bayer. The Bauhaus portion’s or the magazine – which differed greatly from the magazine’s normal appearance – were designed by the Bauhaus’s Druckerei und Reklame-Abteilung [printing and advertising department]. I assume that means that the issue was designed by Moholy-Nagy and Bayer, etc. The cover (not shown) was designed by Joost Schmidt.

The Bauhäusler also designed the ads running in the issue. There was was one for the Leipzig typefoundry J. G. Schelter & Giesecke’s Koralle typeface, and another for Monotype. The Monotype ad seems to have been composed with Schelter & Giesecke type, rather than with Monotype fonts. The fonts used were Breite fette Grotesk and Breite halbfette Grotesk (at least). The ad has a design credit on it: the word “bauhaus” appears in all-lowercase type at the top-right corner of the page.

A fine contemporary advert for the Pilkington’s Glass Works product “Vitroflex” issued in 1937. This, thanks to the flexible backing sheet, allowed coloured and mirrored finishes to be fitted to curved surfaces and this rather accorded to the contemporary architectural vogue. It shares a similar tradename to Vitrolite, the coloured glass sheets developed in the US and that Pilkington's had acquired rights to in 1932.

At the time of the advert Pilkington’s were highly successful not just because of their willingness to adapt to new glass making technologies but also their marketing techniques. Glass, as a decorative and semi-structural material, was very much in fashion as the 1930s progressed and modern architecture that made much of ‘light’ and techniques such as curtain walling were a growing market for the company.

The slab-serif caps are from Ludwig & Mayer’s Tempo. Designed by Walter Höhnisch and first cast in 1930, it was marketed as bold condensed companion to Hans Wagner’s Welt-Antiqua. For markets abroad, Tempo was named Luxor Bold Condensed (and Welt-Antiqua was known as Luxor). Tempo also went under the names Nilo (Nebiolo) and Ultra schmal halbfett (Schriftguss).

The body copy is set in Imprint (Monotype, 1913), with loose linespacing, non-lining numerals, and fractions. The bottom line features Erbar-Grotesk (Ludwig & Mayer, 1926) in tracked out caps.

All-caps Playbill for the title and all-lowercase Tempo Bold for the track names, on the cover of Viennese Waltzes as released by Merit Records (M-300-2) in 1952. Ludlow’s Futura follower is here used with its alternate monocular a. The cover is signed by Einhorn.

350g neighbourhood honey jar

Brand and packaging design by Studio Gangplank for Bee One Third, an Australian beekeeping initiative founded on the premise that one third of our global food supply depends on bee pollination.

Studio Gangplank produced a packaging system that not only expresses Bee One Third's values, but also solved their growth challenges. Inspired by winemaking’s appreciation of terroir and climate, each hive and harvest features a unique range of artwork to be released in sync with the Australian beekeeping seasons.

The honey company’s logo, in full and compact version, is set in Tilda by Jessica Hische. All copy is set with Aperçu by The Entente.

350g neighbourhood honey jar detail

90g honey jar

350g raw honeycomb container

150g wild flower pollen jar

90g neighbourhood honey jar and raw honeycomb

Honey jar collection

250g neighbourhood honey jar detail