The Feminine Monarchie, or the History of Bees, a 1609 book by Charles Butler, is not only the first book on the science of beekeeping but also brought to public awareness that the bee colony is ruled by a queen rather than a king.

Made as a student project at RISD, this series of ten plates creates a taxonomy that compares the parts of the beehive to societal structures and an anthropology to how communities of bees and people behave. Each plate shows an illustration as a visual representation of the idea, as well as a quote from the book that discusses that specific plates themes.

Size (per plate): 6″×8″

Hermann Zapf’s Melior in its schmalfett style, used for the cover of a sociology book by Warren G. Bennis (1925–2014) and Philip E. Slater (1927–2013), published by Harper & Row in their Colophon Books imprint. The design including the illustration is by Emanuel Schongut (1936–2022).

A noi della partita non ce ne frega un cazzo (“We don’t give a damn about the game”) is a research-based editorial project developed as a final thesis for the Graphic Design course at IED Milan in 2021.

The book investigates the Italian Ultras movement from the 1960s to the 1980s, analyzing its origins, evolution, and visual language. It is divided into two sections.

The first part presents six key Ultras groups through historical accounts and visual analysis of their emblems, mottos, and iconography. Each chapter contextualizes these symbols within their local, cultural, and sometimes political environments, highlighting how they served as tools of identity and distinction both within and across stadiums.

The second section, titled Grammatica Ultras, explores the scenographic and performative practices of the movement, such as choreographed banners, smoke displays, and massive visual compositions that transformed stadiums into stages of collective expression. This part reveals how Ultras developed a unique aesthetic grammar that evolved alongside shifts in media, technology, and generational codes.

Through extensive archival references, interviews, and critical commentary, the book portrays the Ultras not merely as sports fans, but as a subcultural force with its own symbols, rituals, and resistance to commercialization and mainstream assimilation.

Book design and research by Giorgio Craparo, with editing by Mattia Salvia. The book was
printed by PressPoint, Milan, using CMYK plus white ink, on Fedrigoni Ispira Rosso Passione 290 g/m² and Artic Paper Munken Print White 90 g/m². The publication is in Italian, has 40 pages measuring 21×29.7 cm, and is perfect bound.

UNEINS is a young magazine that uses critical and progressive voices to give new impetus to peace and conflict, initiate new debates and diversify existing discourses. The magazine thus aims to make connections between socio-political debates, peace and conflicts accessible to a broad, interested audience. As a magazine, it presents a variety of contributions: from classic academic articles, journalistic pieces and essays, to photography, illustration, poetry, and prose.

studiokwi was in charge of the logo development, the creation of a design system, the web design, and the barrier-free web development.

Sociologie des supporters de foot à Lens: Immersion chez les Atrébates (“Sociology of Football Fans in Lens: Immersion with the Atrébates”) is Adrien Dalle’s master thesis for his Science Politique Parcours study at the Université de Lille. The publication, measuring 165×230 mm, was designed by Edouard Vandycke. The text is set in Neue Haas Unica and headlines use Apple Garamond.

Early version of AC Bandit by Sylvan Lanz alongside with LL Catalogue by Nazareno Crea, used in the book We, the City. Plurality and Resistance in Berlin and Istanbul. From publisher Jovis:

In the face of uninhibited neoliberal restructuring, Berlin and Istanbul have for the past decade been subject to various forms of political polarization and social injustice. As a result, the struggles for affordable housing, access to public space, fair labor, ecological justice, and the right to live differently have intensified. Various forms of grassroots resistance have put the relationship between local governments and social movements to the test, provoking questions about where and how the city’s political subjects emerge. Blending dialogues, essays, and critical reflections, the e-book investigates the ways in which the residents of Berlin and Istanbul experience, express, and resist the physical, political, and normative reordering of their cities, and asks: Who are We, the City?

With contributions by Hilal Alkan, Kristen Sarah Biehl, Ayşe Çavdar, Matthias Coers, Özge Ertem, Tuba İnal-Çekiç, Aslı Odman, İlayda Ece Ova, Sister Sylvester, Sema Semih, Anna Steigemann, Banu Çiçek Tülü, and Urszula Ewa Woźniak

Valua Terra. Faire la valeur des environnements (“Valua Terra. Valuing the envioronment”) was published by Éditions 205:

But what on earth are we going to do in this Anthropocene? By judging that the planet has entered a new geological era as a result of human activities, Earth specialists have placed the ecological emergency at the top of all our agendas, especially those of our political and economic leaders, who are subject to their public opinions and their clients. In the face of inertia, the collective imperative is to rethink the development of societies in order to take into account the finiteness of the planet’s resources, and to face the transformations of human living patterns induced by globalization and the global ecological crisis.

Bureau 205 used the Plaak and Plaax – both designed by Damien Gautier – and Thelo, designed by Tassiana Nuñez Costa⁠. These typefaces are available from 205TF.

On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans woke up to a scorching day in which temperatures reached 41 degrees Celsius. The heatwave would extend well beyond the two days initially predicted by meteorologists. Over the next week, more than seven hundred people died. The great Chicago heat wave was one of the deadliest in American history. Eric Klinenberg undertakes a “social autopsy” of a metropolis, examining the social, political and institutional organs of the city. He examines the reasons for the marked excess mortality in certain neighbourhoods, looks at how the city responded to the crisis and how journalists, scientists and officials reported and explained the events.

Bureau 205 designed and produced this book as part of the collection “À partir de l'Anthropocène” developed jointly by Éditions deux-cent-cinq and the École urbaine de Lyon.
The form and format stem from the editorial principle established at the start of this collaboration, which aims to “reinvent” the way of publishing in the Anthropocene era: optimisation of resources through a format adapted to the size of the paper and machines, printing in France by service providers who are themselves concerned about reducing their environmental impact, reduction of transport, etc.

Over the course of the pages, without the reader noticing, the colour slowly changes from orange to bright red, as if to reflect the – inexorable – rise in temperatures over the coming years.

The typefaces used are Thelo Micro, designed by Tassiana Nunez-Costa, for its high legibility and strong typographic grey, and Plaax, designed by Damien Gautier, used for titles in narrow capitals, headings and footnotes, both distributed by 205TF.

Words from Manchester University Press:

The ABC of the projectariat contributes new thinking on and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in the field of contemporary art. It works as both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide.

Completely typeset in Gineto from R-Typography, the book was published by Manchester University Press and the Whitworth Institute and Park as the first entry of the new publishing series Whitworth Manuals.

Anchor’s ca. 1970 paperback edition of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life comes with a cover design by Jim Cook. Mike Daines’s Hawthorn can easily be distinguished from similar De Vinne interpretations by its single-story g.

The cover for the first edition was designed by George Giusti. Apart from the basic theme of two humans in conversation, shown in profile, the two approaches have little in common.

An odd face for Odd Jobs: Motter Ombra supported by a gradient of Burko Super-Duper

From the inner flap:

Odd Jobs offers and intriguing look at the working world of con men, extortionists, pimps, prostitutes, strippers, and others who inhabit the “underworld” of work.

The book was written by Gale Miller, then Assistant Professor of Sociology at Marquette University.

Title page, featuring Shotgun in Blanks (outline) and Regular styles.

Table of contents.

Table of contents, with what probably is the largest amount of Shotgun on one page ever.

Preface.

Introduction. Chapter numbers are written out in Shotgun Blanks, and integrated into the text block.

Chapter opening.

This book is not a dispute or a “meeting”: in these pages, Christian Laval, co-author of the acclaimed La nouvelle raison du monde (“The New Reason of the World”), intends to unfold the movement of “almost contemporary” research by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu on what they both identified as “neoliberalism”, showing how these French thinkers made it an object of reflection in contexts and with specific theoretical tools, constructing two confrontations that have as common characteristic an explanation and resistance to the historical emergence of the neoliberal event.

In this graphic project that inaugurates the Coleção Práticas Utópicas (“Utopian Practices Collection”), we were looking for an airy solution that would allow the application of titles of varying sizes and layouts on the cover, as well as a two-tone chromatic variation based on the strategy of using two color gradients. radials that interact freely through the cover area.

With the use of a central white vertical line, we try to hierarchize the relationship between title and authorship on both sides of that line as well as the rotation of the author’s name that gives independence to these two central information on the cover of a book.

The use of Bw Gradual was intended to give a marked contemporary look to the project, making a striking use of the characteristic design of this typography mainly on the front cover, spine and flaps. The body copy is set in Bridge Text.

The gradient of the cover, which seeks to represent that which is not clearly seen but which, with the text, becomes clearer, is repeated inside the book except that here it appears in monochrome, only from the black of the ink to the white of the paper.

The alignment to the right also appears as a strong element of the graphic design as a whole, appearing from the title on the cover as well as in the internal subtitles and footnotes.

As it is a collection project, the design we carry out in this work is not so much related to the content of the book itself, being, let us say, more self-absorbed, but at the same time it opens up simple possibilities for variation so that each title of the set has independence and own aesthetics.

Foucault, Bourdieu e a questão neoliberal was translated to Portuguese by Márcia Pereira Cunha and Nilton Ken Ota, edited by Tadeu Breda, and published by Editora Elefante. Design by Hannah Uesugi & Pedro Botton / Arquivo, with art direction by Bianca Oliveira.

The Forest People is an ethnographic study of the Mbuti pygmies in the African Congo region, authored by the British-American anthropologist Colin M. Turnbull (1924–1994). First published by Simon and Schuster in 1961, this is the paperback edition, issued in 1962 in their Touchstone imprint. The cover was designed by John and Mary Condon, using tightly spaced Akzidenz-Grotesk against a posterized photograph printed in green and black.

Gigantisme is an art triennale taking place in Dunkerque, France. In the context of a collaboration with Cnap, the National Centre for Visual Arts, a selection of films from the collection of the institution was shown at the Cinéma Orson Welles in Amiens. The films programmed for Les lundis de Gigantisme all offer different representations of work, as seen through the lens of urban space.

The association between the strong presence of architecture and the toughness of our society’s relation to work needed a font that’s able to assess these aspects in its shapes and not only in the words it bears: it is Media Sans. Julien Lelièvre had the good idea to use Media Sans Extended for the design of the poster part of this leaflet. The huge red letters seem to shout a warning signal, an emergency that is still very much recognizable even with the poster folded into a leaflet. The programme on the other side is devoted to legibility, showing the diversity of Media Sans family including its upcoming Text styles.

The logo of the Cinéma Orson Welles uses PVC Banner Bold.

L’écriture de l’ombre (“shadow writing”) is a book about graffiti photography, published by Editions Terrain Vague:

The graffiti artists, by archiving their ephemeral productions, develop new photographic practices that Bernard Fontaine tries to define through an artistic and sociological analysis. In this essay, the photography of graffiti is brought to light thanks to a methodical and referenced reflection, which leaves the floor to different actors with unique approaches.

Spectral by Production Type is used throughout the book design. Primarily intended for on-screen reading in web apps, Spectral has been designed with relatively wide spacing. For the use in print typography and especially in larger sizes, this has to be adjusted by applying some negative tracking, as designer Arthur Calame has done here. The text typography employs Spectral with its optional oldstyle figures.

The title on the screen-printed cover features the lightest weight of the Spectral family. In a self-referential graphic allusion, it’s repeated a second time, black on black.

Front cover

Zabalin. Die Müllmenschen von Mokattam, Cairo is a book by German photographer Anno Wilms (1935–2016), published by Edition CON in 1985. Starting in 1972, Wilms made many trips to the Middle East and to North Africa. In 1981 and 1982, she portrayed the Zabaleen (“garbage people”) of Mokattam, Egypt. The photographs are accompanied by texts by Christine Bücking and Claus Kühne. Some of the images are shown on the website of the Anno Wilms Foundation.

The title is presented in tightly spaced lowercase letters from a bold and somewhat condensed phototype version of Helvetica.

Front cover

Paperback, 593 pages. Cover design by Sydney Butchkes (1920–2015), with reversed Univers on a photograph. The text on the back cover is set in Trade Gothic.

The agrarian population of Latin America includes some 100 million of the world’s most oppressed people. These people are the victims of a rigid stratification system which has existed in that continent for centuries. There has been much talk in recent years about land reform in Latin America, but few analysts have come to grips with the fact that effective reform must involve revolutionary institutional change, not simply modernization of agricultural techniques.
In an attempt to explore all the ramifications of this vital subject, Rodolfo Stavenhagen has collected papers by anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists. The authors of the selections represent a wide range of nationality, including Latin American, North American, and European. Many of the selections appear here in English for the first time, and several are original contributions to this volume.

This volume is part of a publishing program on Latin America, under the general editorship of Otto Feinstein and Rodolfo Stavenhagen.

Back cover and spine

In July 2018 we were invited to create the poster for the colloquium “Die brasilianische Wunde der Welt: kritische Theorie in der Peripherie des Kapitalismus” (“The Brazilian Wound of the World: Critical Theory on the Periphery of Capitalism”). This event held at the Humboldt University of Berlin sought to study the thinking of Brazilian philosophers Paulo Arantes and Roberto Schwarz in German-speaking countries.

We worked with collage and torn paper to symbolize the idea of the wound, and as it should be, highlighted the figures of Paulo Arantes and Roberto Schwarz. We have chosen to use Butler, Butler Stencil, and Adobe Garamond to contrast with the torn up visual of the poster, as a way to maintain balance between the seriousness of an academic event and the radical essence of critical philosophy.

The German translation of The Greening of America was published by Fritz Molden Verlag in 1971. While the American editions reveled in swashes, the designer of this cover went for another 1970s fad: geometric multiline faces with varicolored fill. What looks a lot like Filmsense by Push Pin Studios is actually a German knockoff named Expressa Color Line. It’s different in a number of details, here most notably in a and g, cf. this cover designed by Seymour Chwast with Filmsense in 1969.

The subtitle “Der gewaltlose Aufstand der neuen Generation” (“The nonviolent uprising of the new generation”) uses Caslon Black, designed by Dave Farey and issued by Letraset in 1969. Both typfaces, Expressa Color Line and Caslon Black, were available from Typeshop, a photosetting chain with offices in Linz and Vienna, among other places.

Source: www.abebooks.co.uk Rareeclectic (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

Jacket of the hardcover edition, third printing. Random House, New York, 1970.

Via Michael Bierut:

Remembering the Bantam paperback of “The Greening of America” with its truly relentless deployment of Bookman Swash Italic. Quintessential 70s. RIP Charles Reich, 1928–2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/books/charles-reich-dead.html

Let’s have a closer look at the cover typography for this “paean to the counterculture of the 1960s and its values”. Both the hardcover edition by Random House published in 1970 and the paperback version by Bantom Books from 1971 use versions of Bookman Italic with swashes.

On the dust jacket for the hardcover (shown above), the title and author name are set in a phototype version of unclear origin. It typically goes under the name Bookman Bold Italic (Swash) and is distinguished by mechanically slanted letterforms without optical correction. Mark Simonson pragmatically refers to it as “Sixties Bookman” and gives a “c. 1965” date. Here it’s used with only a few of its many swash alternates – and the inescapable undone-laces ligature for The, of course. The black text is in a different Bookman, though. This is the original ATF Bookman Oldstyle (c. 1901), or probably a phototype version thereof. It’s less bold and the ear of its g points upwards, not sidewards. Note that these lines are not really center-aligned, but rather stacked and staggered, another thing that was fashionable in the 1970s.

Source: www.abebooks.co.uk Rareeclectic (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

Cover of the hardcover edition by Random House, with the title embossed in gold.

The paperback cover (shown below) uses yet another Bookman: The star of this swashfest is Bookman Italic Swash by Photo-Lettering, Inc. It’s used both for the title and the text, apparently specced “with as many fancy extensions as possible”. PLINC’s Bookman is not to be confused with their earlier Photo-Bookman, or Benguiat Bookman, which is a precursor of ITC Bookman (1975). It’s better drawn (also by Ed Benguiat?) than “Sixties Bookman” and can easily be told apart by its wider e and the upward-pointing ear in g. The phototype company from New York first showed this version in their 1967 Alphabet Yearbook (Alphabet Directions No. 6).

Source: www.abebooks.co.uk Kenneth A. Himber. License: All Rights Reserved.

Paperback edition, first printing. Bantam Books, New York 1971.

thedenverbeard2013. License: All Rights Reserved.

Spread from PLINC’s 1967 Alphabet Yearbook. The face used for the Bantam paperback, 4446 Bookman Italic Swash Bold 6, is shown in the middle of the right-hand page (“Everything’s”). A bolder version, 4450 Bookman Italic Swash Heavy 8, is shown below (“Tareyton”). Their upright companion styles are presented on the opposite page: 4448 Bookman Swash Heavy 8 (“Which”) and 4444 Bookman Swash Bold 6 (“Now that”). The other faces are 5653 Papirtis Bodoni Ital Swash Shaded F (“New Carnation”), 5552 West Cooper Nouveau Swash 10 (“Miles Davis”), and 5559 West Fantini Ital Swash 8 (“The Uncommon”).