While studying via Typomania School, Maria Kasatkina from the educational website Arzamas decided to create a book based on one part of the Marie Curie article on Wikipedia. However, she eventually used only the short “Legacy” section for her peculiar professional biography, along with some fragments from Curie’s personal diaries and several stories about the elements she discovered.

The titles and half-titles are set in Transgender Grotesk by Alexander Cherepanov, while the text itself and the book cover use Wremena by Roman Gornitsky.

Halyard Display is the typeface used for AfroCuration. This movement aims to address the alarming lack of multiculturalism in the digital space. With a series of education edit-a-thons, AfroCuration wants to remedy the fact that of all the existing online content pertaining to South Africa, virtually none of it is available in indigenous languages.

Breinstorm Brand Architects from Johannesburg were in charge of developing all branding and collateral. The design is composed of square modules in a range of strong colors derived from the South African flag. The squares are filled with symbols and pictograms including speech balloons, pencils, goggles, and hashtags. The typeface to go with this straightforward graphic vocabulary is Halyard Display. The grotesk by Darden Studio is used for all text from online graphics to the event signage, programs, passes, and giveaways. For the hashtag/logo, Halyard Display is used with its alternate monocular a.

Hosted by the Moleskine Foundation in partnership with the Constitution Hill Trust, the first ever AfroCuration event took place on World Teacher’s Day (5 October) in 2019. Educators and learners came together to write 100 new Wikipedia articles on the story of the South African Constitution, all in the country’s indigenous languages.

Announcement.

Modular elements with topics and sponsors.

Modular wall at the venue, with names of guests of honor.

Room sign.

Wayfinding.

Notebooks and tote bag.

Event collateral: drinking bottle, attendee’s pass, lanyard.

Stubs sheet and programme.

A type-only pocket-sized paperback book made from a Wikipedia article and designed by articulating ideas of heaviness and voidness.

A series of typographic devices were used to keep the body of text as heavy as possible while maintaining a degree of readability. Quotations inside the text were treated like fading memories and the introduction to each of the chapters fall into the gutter in order to create a slight feel of discomfort.

4¼ × 6.88″, 136 pages printed and perfect bound at Lulu.com

V for Wiki is a beautiful app for browsing and reading Wikipedia on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. It has a great interface and smart layout for articles so that the images and content are optimized for the best experience.

Especially interesting is the Nearby feature, which lets you learn about interesting points around you. It turns the app in an interactive travel guide.

“Best typography on the small screen yet.” — Erik Spiekermann, typographer

The Lithuanian studio New! got a lot of attention this month for their Wikipedia redesign proposal. And they got almost as much attention for the typeface they chose to describe the project: FF Schubuch Süd, a revival of a mid-20th century German schoobook typeface. Many commenters said they were thrown off by the font’s unusual capital ‘I’ that resembles a ‘J’.

So what’s the story with this crazy ‘I’? The answer lies in handwriting. The letterforms in the FF Schulbuch family are derived from the styles of writing that children learned in various regions of Germany, in the same way that the type in English books for young readers often has simplified, handwriting based forms, like a single-story ‘a’.

So was FF Schulbuch Süd a good choice for this project? I give them credit for trying something new (not Helvetica), but the answer is probably no. The ‘I’ appears early and often in the proposal, becoming a noticeable distraction for most readers. I would have gone with FF Schulbuch Nord which has much of the slightly quirky Neo-Grotesk style but more conventional forms. Or they could ask FontFont for a customized Süd with a standard ‘I’. That’s the glyph FontFont should offer as a default anyway.

For the Wikipedia brand itself, the studio chose Maiola, an underused typeface inspired by the dynamic and angular style that characterizes early Czech design. All other Wikipedia text is in Arial.

Used in an announcement (in this Manystuff blog post at least) for an event at Centre Pompidou in Paris.