Mallory by Frere-Jones Type is the typeface used for Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, designed by Miko McGinty. Published by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and DelMonico Books, this is the first publication to focus on Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors was the companion guide to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s exhibition which celebrated the legendary Japanese artist’s 65-year career and was one of 2017’s essential art experiences.

From DelMonico Books:

World-renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has worked in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, performance art, and installation. Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms, which originated with Phalli’s Field in 1965, situate viewers in kaleidoscopic spaces filled with multicolored lights or whimsical forms. These mirror-lined installations reflect endlessly, distorting rooms to project the illusion of infinite space. Over the years, the works have come to symbolize different modalities within the various contexts they have inhabited, from Kusama’s “self-obliteration” in the Vietnam War era to her more harmonious aspirations in the present. By examining her early unsettling installations alongside her more recent ethereal atmospheres, this volume aims to historicize the body of work amidst the resurgence of experiential practices within the global landscape of contemporary art. Generously illustrated, this publication invites readers to examine the series’ impact over the course of the artist’s career. Accompanying essays, an interview with the artist, and a scholarly chronology round out the book.

Polymode designed This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance which accompanies the exhibition by the same title at the National Portrait Gallery curated by Rhea L. Combs. The catalogue was edited by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Hilton Als together with Rhea L. Combs.

The book brings together artworks that feature James Baldwin alongside portraits of other key figures who had an impact on his life and situates him among a pantheon of culture bearers who were instrumental in shaping his life and legacy, particularly in relationship to his advocacy for gay rights.

La Grotesque (designed by Francesca Bolognini and Naïma Ben Ayed) is used as a core typeface on the book cover and for titles and captions throughout the book. La Grotesque embodies stories of queerness and migration which echos the life of Baldwin. More on the typeface design process at TPTQ Arabic. It is supported by Joshua Darden’s Dapifer.

The catalogue was published in hardback (9″×0.6″×12.5″, 112 pages) by DelMonico Books/National Portrait Galley.

A further refinement of the Smithsonian Institution's magazine, which I shared in a previous post. The only typeface that has been retained from the earlier design is Millar, used for “prologue” in the second image.

I like Saol Display, but sometimes those super-thin thins can get lost when the type is dropped out of a colored background. Saol Display is combined with GT Walsheim and Tiempos.

And they still haven't fixed the kerning in that nameplate!

Creative Director: Maria G. Keehan
Associate Art Director: Erik K. Washam
Designer: Eritrea Dorcely

Founders Grotesk first appeared on the Hirshhorn website in October 2016, replacing the previously used URW Franklin Gothic. This redesign also introduced a new animated logo and refined the existing structure based on horizontally scrolling boxes.

Mackenzie Pringle:

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is a modern and contemporary art museum located within the National Mall in Washington DC, US. The museum exists under the Smithsonian Institution, exhibiting a vast collection of post World War II art as well as rotating contemporary exhibitions. The new identity evokes a graphic language that combines a practical logotype and a flexible logomark. The ‘H’ logomark can shift to form containers for information, large scale typography as well as organic, playful and generative form.

This very active table of contents page shows the most recent redesign of the Smithsonian Institution's magazine. The original design, shown below, was created in 1969 by Bradbury Thompson (1911-1984), a native of Wichita, Kansas. The magazine used his design for at least 25 years. Thompson used Baskerville types exclusively: note that the body text in the original is set in Monotype Baskerville, but the nameplate is in Fry's Baskerville, a more suitable display face, which was also used for article heads.

Thompson was noted for his subtle use of white space. The third scan shows the magazine's famous "Thompson corner", a blank space that often occurred at the top left of a double-page spread. In an interview, Thompson explained that the white corner was there "to balance a gang of pictures on the facing page and add relief to a page that would otherwise be a gray mass. Also, it provides a more inviting entry to a new page." The white corner doesn't occur in the magazine anymore, though it's sort of there on the new contents page (but the nameplate is kerned really badly).

Bradbury Thompson taught design for over 30 years at Yale. Another of his many famous designs is Westvaco Inspirations, a periodical published by the Westvaco Corporation, a paper manufacturer, to showcase its printing papers. His magnum opus is the Washburn College Bible of 1980, which he did for his alma mater. His design for the Bible features lines set flush left and ragged right, with line breaks occurring where a reader would naturally pause.

Published by the Smithsonian Institution for a 1972 exhibition.

Detail.