In Un material para imaginar, architect and researcher Oriol París Viviana traces five decades of Escofet 1886’s contribution to the industrialization of architectural facades. The book revisits the company’s most influential projects to show how concrete has evolved from a structural component into a medium of expressive and technical possibility.

The publication gains much of its character from the visual direction by me, Meritxell Casamira (Casamira), with a design approach that reinforces the book’s central theme. Drawing on the austere vocabulary of brutalism, I’ve build a graphic environment that mirrors the material it examines. The layout embraces weight, texture, and clarity, turning each spread into a distilled reflection of concrete’s physical presence.

The design avoids ornamentation in favor of precision. Photographs, drawings, and text are orchestrated with deliberate restraint, creating a rhythm that guides readers through Escofet’s legacy without overshadowing it. The result is a publication that reads as both a historical document and an interpretive object – one that allows the material’s quiet force to emerge through structure, scale, and visual balance.

Through this lens, the book becomes more than an academic tribute. It stands as an example of how editorial design can translate architectural thinking into a tactile reading experience, giving concrete not just a narrative, but a voice.

Cover of Stella Alcaide’s project for the Master’s in Editorial Design at ESDESIGN

Split-3 is a publication that emerged from a journey to Croatia, where I discovered the modernist neighborhood of Split 3, a residential area built during 1970s Yugoslavia. That visit became a process of observation and documentation: a visual and architectural mapping of a place that fascinated me for its balance between socialist urban utopia and the everyday life that now inhabits it.

The project explores how the forms, volumes, and spaces of that modernist urbanism – originally conceived to promote collectivity – have evolved over time through the personal interventions of its residents. Through photographs, notes, and graphic fragments, the publication seeks to reinterpret the neighborhood as a trace of the architectural idealism of its era, while also revealing it as a living organism in constant transformation.

More than a simple document, Split-3 is a reflection on architecture as a witness to social and cultural change – an attempt to capture the tension between planned order and the spontaneity of real life that continually reshapes it.

Developed within the framework of my Master’s in Editorial Design, Split-3 also reflects my interest in how design can mediate personal experience and spatial memory. I wanted to create a simple yet carefully constructed publication that could convey the essence of a place through rhythm, sequencing, and visual composition rather than excess or ornament. This project became a way of translating one of my travels into a visual narrative, using editorial design as a tool to explore observation, structure, and emotion, bridging the gap between architecture, landscape, and personal perception.

Investigating Decentralized Action in Art was designed for Baltan Laboratories, a cultural institution based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

The publication is the result of ARTeCHÓ, a European initiative connecting five institutions to support artists exploring art, crypto art, blockchain, and NFTs. It explores how AI and NFTs intersect with art, economy, and politics, questioning their sustainability and equity.

Through essays and artworks, the book challenges centralized systems, colonial legacies, and extractive capitalism, proposing decentralized, autonomous alternatives for a fairer digital future and new forms of collective knowledge and creativity. It was edited by Marlou van der Cruijsen, Lorenzo Gerbi, and Julia Kassyk, and published by Lecturis.

The design is built upon the concept of digital brutalism, to recall the material foundation (the hardware) that sustains any software. Harber and ABC Monument Grotesk, along the material qualities of the book, contribute in creating such “digital-brutalist” aesthetic.

CRSL also designed the visual identity of the related exhibition Decentralized Futures, held at Koelhuis in Eindhoven, during Dutch Design Week 2024, see this previous post.

KTF Compact is featured on the cover Achille Mbembe's book Brutalizm. Originally published in French as Brutalisme (Éditions de la Découverte, 2020), the Polish edition was issued by Wydawnictwo Karakter, in a translation by Oskar Hedemann.

Brutalizm offers an original diagnosis of contemporary times from an African perspective, combining elements of critical theory, postcolonial thought, and psychoanalysis. The brutalism of the title is a metaphor for our era, in which rapacious capitalism increasingly ruthlessly crushes, splits, and drains both the planet and human bodies.

Joseph-Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian historian and political theorist. He is well known for his writings on colonialism and its consequences and is a leading figure in new wave French critical theory. Cover designer Przemek Dębowski used URW Franklin Gothic for the author and the publisher, with Knockout for the translator, Oskar Hedemann.

This booklet accompanied the exhibition Patchwork. The architecture of Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak set at the New York Center for Architecture. Through models, films, and photographs, the exhibition examines the architect’s work during the creation of the new Wrocław. Marking the first comprehensive presentation of her work outside Poland, it offers a rare insight into the legacy of one of the country’s most influential architects.

The booklet is set entirely in Di grotesk by Threedotstype.

Brutwax offers “homemade brutalist homeware”:

Chamber is a solid concrete sculpture, designed to conceal a single tealight that when lit, illuminates the inner walls, creating a warm, diffused glow.

The Monolith is a two-part pillar candle, composed of an all natural wax upper and a concrete base.

The packaging design by Everall Design utilizes FKT Sinvoll Sans Mono.

SCRIB3 is a team of web3 growth experts specializing in content, social media, public relations, community, design, and business development for crypto companies.

Serene Industries’ Icebreaker is a meticulously crafted full-metal keyboard. Milled from a solid block of aluminum, the piece amalgates a brutalist aesthetic with precise typing performance.

A culmination of thoughtful design and expert craftsmanship, the Icebreaker has been in development for over a year.

Grand Slang from Nikolas Type is used for the engraved Icebreaker name on the aluminium body.

Pablo Desportes’ first Lineto release, LL DMT, is used for the keys themselves, and is paired with JetBrains Mono by Konstantin Bulenkov and Philipp Nurullin for the technical information that is engraved on the tool itself.

The back of the keyboard is branded with Serene Industries’ company logo, set in Optimum Compress, designed by Simon Bent.

Nuditi is a brand of handcrafted takeaway cocktails. Their slogan “cocktail socialism” reflects the brand’s mission to make bar-quality cocktails widely available. Nuditi cocktails are enjoyed with friends in the park, at weddings, social gatherings, or just at home after a long day at work. The visual identity and packaging are a tribute to the brutalist aesthetic of the socialist period in the brand’s home town Zagreb.

Base spirits are color-coded. Cocktails based on gin have a blue label, whiskey-based cocktails are green, and so on. The handwritten information on the label gives the packaging a craft touch. It is also functional because the same preprinted label can be used for different bottle sizes.

From Sometimes Always:

Béton is a pop music festival that takes place every summer in the French city of Le Havre. The city went through a long process of revitalisation after the WW2 bombing, hosting a mix of modern urbanism and brutalist architecture that can be found in the buildings such as the Volcano by Oscar Niemeyer, the apartment blocks and St. Joseph church by Auguste Perret, among many others.

The idea behind the graphic work is to explore a rigid grid that emphasises the brutal landscape of Le Havre, paying reference to the ortogonal urban planning, the patterned facades and also the diversity of the artists featured in the festival.

The identity is made with Right Grotesk by Pangram Pangram and Favorit by Dinamo.

Musée du Débarquement Arromanches is a museum dedicated to the memory of D-Day in the Second World War, located in Arromanches in Normandy, France. It was initially built in 1954 facing the sea where the artificial harbour Mulberry B (B for British) operated. After almost 70 years of activity, a new building opened in 2023. The new museum was designed by the Projectiles architecture agency.

The graphic design for the wayfinding system and the exhibition was done by WA75 (Laurent Mészáros & Yorel Cayla), using BN Times Gothic. The imposing wayfinding information is painted on the concrete walls in a white area, which provides a brutalist response to the building. This graphic composition first appeared on the concrete caissons (Phoenix breakwaters) built as part of the artificial harbour.

A Phoenix breakwaters from the artificial Mulberry harbour in Normandy during World War II.

A new book published by Phaidon and designed by Philipp Doringer at Studio Joost Grootens. This unprecedented survey of more than 250 architects working in the Brutalist style features a bold typographic hardcover using the condensed geometric typeface WT Skrappa (designed by WiseType). The inside layouts are clean, simple and methodical – owing to Joost Grootens precise attention to detail and experience with architectural publications. The typography marries Skrappa for headlines with the robust ABC Monument Grotesk medium (by Dinamo) for text.

The Brutalists was written by Owen Hopkins and published by Phaidon. The hardback edition has 368 pages measuring 290×205 mm (11⅜×8⅛ in) and contains 350 illustrations.
ISBN: 9781838665630

As introduced by Phaidon on their website:

An unprecedented survey of more than 250 architects who continue to define one of the most polarizing yet celebrated of styles

Brutalist architecture inspires a passionate response, be it adulation or contempt. There is no disputing, however, that the style produces some of the world’s most breathtaking buildings. This landmark volume documents the movement as never before, by profiling the architects behind the style.

Featuring more than 250 historic and contemporary architects (organised alphabetically) along with specially selected examples of their work, this book includes international icons alongside those who are less well known or who have for too long been neglected, providing a unique record of this influential global architecture movement. The book includes 350 stunning images of more than 200 iconic Brutalist buildings, alongside fresh and surprising masterworks from 1936 to the present day, creating the ultimate companion to the Brutalist masters.

Featured architects include: John Andrews; João Batista Vilanova Artigas; Lina Bo Bardi; Bogdan Bogdanović; Marcel Breuer; Douglas Cardinal; André-Jacques Dunoyer de Segonzac; Bertrand Goldberg; Ernő Goldfinger; Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak; Agustín Hernández Navarro; John M. Johansen; Louis I. Kahn; Denys Lasdun; Le Corbusier; João da Gama Filgueiras Lima; Alberto Linner Díaz; Owen Luder; Paulo Mendes da Rocha; Oscar Niemeyer; William L. Pereira; Affonso Eduardo Reidy; Paul Rudolph; Moshe Safdie; Alison Smithson; Clorindo Testa; Decio Tozzi; and John Carl Warnecke

Brutal food served in Vienna by Javier Mancilla, Xaver Kislinger and Sendi Gbinia: Döner Brutal is a new interpretation of a classic: “Döner” with organic meat and fermented tomatoes and onions.

feeeels—fuzzy is used for the wordmark; headlines use the narrower styles of Halisa and information is set in Ballinger Mono.

The Macao Design Week is a yearly event held in Macao, China. It is organized by the Macau Designers Association (MDA) which was founded in 1986, while the city was still under Portuguese rule and spelled according to Portuguese orthography. Sparked by the felt need to propagate design as a discipline, to further its public awareness and to improve on the local designer’s education, MDA, over a period of more than 30 years, unfolded an incredible range of activities.

What started as the Macau Design Biennial in 1994 meanwhile turned into the Macau Design Award, and other, theme-based competitions and exhibitions were initiated starting in 2004. In 2015 MDA even managed to open the Macau Design Centre. That same year the Macao Design Week was organized for the first time.

In sum, the association worked hard to turn Macao into a regional hub for interchange and networking in the field of design, reaching out today to the wider Asian area and an international public.

The 2019 edition of the Design Week invited Portuguese designers to exhibit their work alongside that of participants from Macao. The visuals promoting the event were designed by Untitled Macao, a local design agency founded in 2017. Their concept is based on four 3D-generated shapes and radiant colors, orange and green, exactly those that can give headaches in print. But they excelled at it!

The impact of the posters is further boosted by the typeface used: it is Minotaur Beef, designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée and available from Production Type. It is characterized by straight lines in places where you wait for curves, expressive ink traps and unexpected, bold solutions. The graphic designers at Untitled Macao took special care and developed a custom lettering style for the Chinese text that picks up on these devilish features in order to bring heavenly harmony to the typography.

Design: Untitled Macao
Video production: Mirage Visuals 蜃海視覺
Director: Puzzle Lai 賴明德
3D animation: Pancy Ng 吳穎儀

A map of, and essay about, the buildings Alison and Peter Smithson designed at the University of Bath. Commissioned by Edge Arts and designed by City Edition Studio.

From 1978 onwards the Smithsons realised five built environments on campus and Peter Smithson taught architecture students within the Department of Architecture & Civil Engineering.

Although the Smithsons’ Brutalist style is quite unlike the Palladian architecture of Bath, they took enormous inspiration from the built heritage of Bath, sharing design aspirations for cohesion, organisation and enjoyment in habitation. They saw their additions as ‘mat building’, stating that the campus was like a fabric laying on the sloping landscape of the hillside. The Smithsons wanted to understand and complement that existing fabric and ‘weave onto its edges several terminating fringes’.

Visitors can use the map to tour these key buildings and campus locations in order to better understand the Smithsons’ work and legacy.

NATI (НАТИ, Russian abbreviation for New Archive of Limited Edition Art) is an initiative of Shaltai Editions gallery, an homage to the project conceived by Moscow Conceptualist artists Andrey Monastyrsky, Lev Rubinstein, Nikita Alexeev back in the 1980s. They packed the works of artists close to their circle into folders, calling them the Moscow Archive of New Art, MANI (МАНИ). Each participant put a new work they wanted to submit into an envelope, while a compiler brought all the envelopes under one cover and wrote an accompanying text.

From the interview with the designer Maria Rudakova:

When it became clear that the construction would be made of metal and plexiglass, I started looking for a typeface that I would associate with these materials — Brutalist and wide. I decided to play with justification — and found out that Metal was a perfect fit for it. I chose the № 8 style — it has a certain balance, not too stretched and not too narrow. The typeface does the large part of the work for you in page headers and at large sizes — even two words on the line look good.

Read the entire article on our website.

For the contribution Visit by Boris Groys, CSTM Xprmntl 02 Italic by Yury Ostromentsky was used.

Who defines our daily dress code? Who decides how our close future will look like? Which role should I play in society? These are just a few of the presented questions in Invisibles, an editorial piece made as student project at EASD Pedro Almodóvar. It makes gender stereotypes preconceptions visible to break them into a critical, social and didactical analysis. In essence all these concepts are perpetuated realities.

The main concept was to visualize the problems that comes from gender role definitions during a journey through the different stages of life. In a didactical way, along this piece designed with different die-cuts the reader will deconstruct reality into divided images as the result of the usage of the collage technique. Invisibles is a limited edition with various sizes, printed on demand in black only. The absence of color and its rich typographic language using exclusively Fixture (including its compressed Ultra styles) gives this piece an adequate look for the extraordinary harsh critique of its main message.

This project was awarded during the 2020 edition of the Laus Awards, receiving a Bronze award in the “entire book” category. Graphic design, creative and art direction by Lara MM and A Lajara.

Sabrina Lucas is an art gallery located in Nantes, France. Twistudio associated with Sabrina in 2021, and created an online gallery. The esthetic is minimalist and brutalist. The branding uses Kaftan Serif with black and white to visually highlight the artworks.

The website is now live at sabrinalucas.com. All text is rendered in Swiss 721.

This project was created for the sock brand Mileage & Coup.

As the person in charge of the branding, I have based the design on the architectural style of brutalism. The project intends to create the identity of the brand by using three main features: color, absence of decoration, and repetition of patterns.

For the typography, I paired Belwe Bold (Letraset, 1975, after Georg Belwe, 1907; Bitstream’s digitization) with Montserrat (Julieta Ulanovsky, 2011).

The personal website for Adam Nocek contains a playful hero section that resonates with his core practice – moving and working at the intersection of philosophy, design, media, and the biological sciences. Adam creates multilayered and complex projects, where all those disciplines crossover each other without any specific hierarchy. Website features wide and various Nocek’s body of work: books, writings, talks, teaching, and collaborative projects.

In both theory and practice, Nocek seeks to expand what we mean by technology to reimagine how it designs and mediates life on earth. His most recent work focuses on the political, economic, and ecological exploitation of computational design at scale. This has propelled his work to engage a wide range of pressing topics in recent years, from algorithmic governance and computational biosciences to tactical urbanism, the design of artificial ecosystems, and the loss of biodiversity through urban development.

The rawness of elements and refinement in animations clashes in the website – creating its unique flow and visual language.

To accompany animated bubbly shapes and brutalist layouts, a straightforward typeface was selected. ABC Favorit by Dinamo is a low-contrast grotesque that combines geometric rigidity with subtle oddities and humorous touch. Minimalistic, but bold typography is brought to life by jumpy animation.

In the website hero section, users can interact with flowy typography and move and detach or push bubbles from each other. Interaction elevates the visual and brings fun and playfulness to the website.

Design: Gabriela Baka. Development: Dannnk.