Handverksfestivalen is a free annual two-day festival at the National Library of Norway, celebrating craft heritage through workshops, lectures, and hands-on experiences. Smuss Studio was commissioned to design the campaign identity for this year's edition, themed ‘around the sea and its lores’.

The identity builds on the library’s base profile. It uses STK Bureau Sans for body text and navigation, and RG Gaueko as the expressive display face. Gaueko’s organic, curling forms and unconventional ligatures, rooted in Basque letterforms, give the festival its distinctive character across posters, pocket programmes, digital screens, and social media.

Collage-style illustrations and historical cut-outs drawn from the library's archives bring texture and a sense of maritime folklore to the system – balancing the mysterious with the playful.

Crewplanet is a crewing agency located in the Netherlands and Latvia, supplying crews and providing crew management for almost any type of vessel. This information brochure (pdf) was designed by Alexey Murashko using Osnova.

Spoon and Oh My have redesigned the website and identity for nordic marine and transport industry service company Wesmans.

The website uses the light and regular cuts of Store Norske Nord, while the logo is set in the regular weight of Store Norske Geita. Both typefaces from are available from Skriftkompani.

The historic Pier 57 in New York’s Hudson River Park was redeveloped into a mixed-use community destination featuring a rooftop park, Google office space, and Market 57 food hall.

Handel Architects led the core design. Jamestown designed both logos in-house and worked with Airspace on the signage. Pier 57’s nameplate and mega-scale wayfinding aptly features Export, a blocky yet approachable font based on hand-carved prints found on a shipping box in NYC. Pier 57 dons a range of materials and finishes, from neon signs to glossy paint. Some of the wayfinding is also set in Bodoni Egyptian.

The accompanying food hall Market 57 is branded with the inviting and slightly quirky Auster. Like the rest Pier 57’s wayfinding and graphics in the market are set in Bodoni Egyptian, with smaller signs and text in the humanist-style Source Sans.

Large window decals set in Export

Chilean design studio Comunas Unidas (run since 2004 by Myrna Cisneros and Manuel Córdova) was in charge of the art direction, illustration and design of the first vinyl LP by Chilean band La Golden Acapulco.

The design uses only the first version of the Mazúrquica typeface family in its original three weights (later, in 2020, Quintana-Font released a 2.0 version). The interior features a fold-out poster with handmade letterings.

[More info on Discogs]

Studio Size created the visual identity and packaging design for NatureSafe Marine—a brand of eco-friendly cleaning products for yachts. Chemicals used in traditional cleaning products harm marine life, degrade water quality, and pollute the oceans.

NatureSafe Marine is changing this with innovative product formulas that are effective yet non-toxic and safe for people. The packaging material is recycled PET but with plans to transition to an innovative plastic-free technology.

Our challenge was to create a brand aesthetic that reflects several qualities of the brand and the context of its use: it is technically sophisticated, environmentally friendly, maritime, and has to fit on a luxurious yacht. We used clean layouts, a simple and suggestive color palette, stylized icons, and the Roobert typeface to balance the technical and organic appearance of the brand.

The logomark is an ns monogram and represents a stylized whale. Icons identify product variants, suggest their use, and create a visually cohesive set. We placed the products in inspiring 3D scenes conveying the brand’s clean, maritime, and elegant personality.

Before Sea World became SeaWorld and introduced a logo set in Charlotte around 1996, it had been using a logo featuring swashy roman letters (inspired by Benguiat Caslon?) since around 1981. And before that, in the 1970s, the name was commonly shown in caps from Optima Bold.

In 1978, though, a different, lesser known typeface was chosen for plastic and paper bags by the chain of amusement parks. It’s Vero Square, issued by the Visual Graphic Corporation in Tamarac, Florida in 1973. “Sea World” is here shown in all lowercase letters, set on an angle. As far as I can tell, this was not a new logo version, but just a one-off application.

The Vero series spans eight styles in total, see also Vero and Vero Antiqua. Vero Square is distinguished from the other family members by its squircle shapes. I haven’t found a design credit for it yet.

The SeaWorld logo uses Charlotte Bold. Designed by Michael Gills at Letraset, Charlotte was released in 1992 in their digital Fontek range, together with Charlotte Sans. The family currently is available from Monotype’s ITC label, now named Charlotte Serif. The logo in Charlotte Bold was introduced around 1996, together with the CamelCase spelling, replacing the previous one featuring swashy roman letters.

SeaWorld is a chain of marine theme parks in the United States with facilities in San Diego, California (opened in March 1964); Orlando, Florida (opened in 1973); San Antonio, Texas (opened in 1988); and previously also in Aurora, Ohio. The parks are a mix of dolphinarium (with sea lions, polar bears, manatees, penguins, dolphins, and whales) and amusement park.

Founded by four graduates of UCLA, SeaWorld was purchased by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. in 1976, and by Anheuser-Busch in 1989. Since 2009, the theme parks are part of SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Blackstone Group. In 2019, SeaWorld Orlando was the 10th most visited amusement parks in North America, with 4.64 million visitors. SeaWorld San Diego followed in 14th place with about 3.74 million visitors.

SeaWorld Orlando

SeaWorld San Diego

A beautifully illustrated and brightly coloured book from UCLAN Publishing. Written by Dr Adam S. Smith and Jonathan Emmett, and illustrated throughout by Adam Larkum. The text is split into three styles, each with its own font. Aunt Mildred is used for the speech bubbles, Hawkland for general text and the main story, and Pembroke is used for the information found in the coloured boxes on each page spread. The title font on the cover is Blackcat.

All-lowercase Motter Ombra, with initial and final letters that were hyper-extended to form a frame around the four featured photographs, for a poster advertising Poseidon.

First issued under this name in 1962, Poseidon was a magazine about all things maritime. In addition to sailing, diving, underwater photography or sealife, this also included naval ships. After all, it was published by the Militärverlag der DDR, the military publishing house of the GDR.

The logo on the magazine itself never used Motter Ombra. In 1978, shortly after this poster was made, a new design featuring Antique Olive was introduced. For more facts and images, see poseidon-archiv.de, a dedicated website maintained by Marko Wargulski.

Cover of Poseidon No. 202 from 1979, ft. Antique Olive for logo and number. The small text is in Monotype Grotesque.

Five of the six issues from 1979. For some reason, “203” is in Gill Sans instead of Antique Olive.

The Thalassa title card. Univers Condensed is used for the subtitle.

Thalassa – Le magazine de la mer is a reportage-centered TV magazine about all things sea (maritime animal life and human activities from France or all around the world). Created by Georges Pernoud in 1975 and still broadcast to this day on France 3 (a network of regional television channels), it is one of the longest running shows on French public television.

In a true 1970s fashion and for the most time after its creation, Thalassa’s logo has been set in Cooper Black, sometimes with condensed letterforms. The typeface is strongly associated to the TV show as it has been used on all kinds of tie-in objects. It’s still displayed on the barge tied up to the river Seine in Paris which is the floating studio of the show.

From the late 1970s through 2003, the program opened up with a morphing sequence of several sea-themed objects on a deep-blue background: a fish turning into boat, then a conch, a compass rose, a crab, a diving suit, ending in the shape of Jacques Rougerie’s futuristic underwater habitat project named Galathée. This sequence created by Gérard Marinelli has fascinated generations for decades not only because of the mesmerizing quality of the image morphing, but also because of the beautiful and dreamlike music accompanying the animation that has been composed by Guy Pedersen.

For the longest time the name of the designer behind the opening sequence has been little known by the vast majority of the audience, but last year the French design-related online review Strabic published a very interesting and must-read interview of Marinelli conducted by Tony Côme and Charles Villa. Marinelli there recounts his career (in which he met Raymond Loewy, Cassandre, and Savignac!) and comments on his works (he has designed the famous first France 3 logo, at the time called FR3, with a play on shapes as France is nicknamed “the hexagone”) as well as his technical tours de force, such as using a British army computer to digitally create Thalassa’s morphing thanks to an Oxford University professor, Tony Diment (who has for the first time on British television used computer-generated animation for the titles of the TV-series The New Avengers — starring Joanna Lumley!).

Georges Pernoud on the set in 1984.

The 1990s version of the logo, with Gill Sans for the subtitle.

Gérard Marinelli’s constructed set design for the show.

Club Thalassa sticker, with “club” in outlined Cooper Black Italic.

The barge/studio of Thalassa on the river Seine in Paris.

Thalassa’s board game.

Unrealized rebranding proposal for Les Merveilles de la Mer (The Wonders of the Sea), a maritime museum in Beirut, Lebanon that displays a vast range of aquatic animals, historical diving and sailing equipment.

The logotype is set in Minérale by 205TF. Seen from a distance, the breaks in the typeface make the logo look distorted by refracting light and the letters seem to be immersed in the sea, setting an underwater feel. This impression is reinforced by the use Kanit by Cadson Demak, a typeface with support for Thai and Latin scripts. The organic curves in the font mirror a seahorse’s tail or an undulating seaweed.

The museum’s signage is based on Minérale’s extensive glyph set. Several shapes have been used to create symbols that allude to the gallery’s contents: the diamond shape – a grain of salt – indicates the saltwater aquariums; the semicircles point to the invertebrate display.

A template has been created for the temporary exhibition’s posters. Each would have its title set in a typeface matching its theme. For instance, the eerie blackletter Respira Black (slighty modified) by Sharp Type introduces the collection of immortal and deadly jellyfish, whereas the organic stencil Saint George by Triple Double Type is used to promote coral reef aquariums. Rasmus by New Letters appears for an exhibition about poisonous fish.

It is worth mentioning that red and yellow are rare in the palette as these colors are invisible in deep waters.

Business cards

Indoor signage

Jellyfish exhibition poster

Poisonous fish exhibition poster

Coral reef exhibition poster

Graphic identity, exhibition graphics and routing for Lighter, Stronger, Faster: The Herrreshof Legacy. This semi-permanent exhibition at the MIT Museum celebrates innovation in marine technology and nautical design in an ambitious display of the work of Nathanael Herreshoff, MIT alumni and design genius.

Exhibition design: Studio Joseph

RightShip is the world’s leading maritime risk management and environmental assessment organisation. It provides ship vetting services to help companies chartering ships make an informed decision on a particular vessel’s safety, risk factors and environmental performance.

Self-titled worked on an evolved brand identity single-mindedly that reinforces RightShip’s driving commitment to safety through both a forward focussed arrow and signature orange – a colour synonymous with maritime safety.

The new identity has been rolled out across a broad scope of materials including printed literature, digital and print advertising, animation and completely redesigned website.

The font in use is Simplon Norm from the Simplon collection, available at Swiss Typefaces.

With its grass-green color, melting motif and curiously centered composition, this 1966 reissue of the 1952 field recording Sounds of the Sea Vol. 1 feels like something pulled directly out of Trend List.

The fonts in use are the bold condensed weights of the Venus series.

The Discogs archive documents blue (1961), yellow and light green (1966) cover variations.

Exposed:

The EXPOSED aquaculture operations centre draws upon Norway’s strong position in the aquaculture, maritime and offshore sectors to enable safe and sustainable seafood production in exposed coastal and ocean areas. Technological innovations, such as more autonomous systems, offshore structures and vessels are needed to sustain farm production under all conditions and enable more robust, safe, controlled and continuous operations.

Visual identity for The Danish Shipowners' Association. Stationary, annual reports and other publications, website, PowerPoint presentations, infographics, ads etc.