Philip Surey applies gold leaves onto the painted letters.

Inscriptions designed by John Morgan studio for The Order of St Augustine’s Church in Hammersmith, London, restored and refurbished by Roz Barr Architects (completed February 2018). This is the first application of the typeface Persona, released by Abyme in June 2022. Persona is a display sans serif based on Hans Möhring’s Florida (c. 1931) and inspired by Renaissance letterforms characteristic of the Florentine architecture, painting and sculpture of the fifteenth century.

Inscriptional text is set in a new cast iron light ring suspended above the altar, also designed by Roz Barr Architects, and gilded across the apse wall and below the Stations of the Cross by Philip Surey.

The inscription on the apse wall reads: Qui vult vivere, habet ubi vivat, habet unde vivat. Accedat, credat ut incorporetur, ut vivificetur (Those who long for life have here its very source. Let them come here and believe, unite with You and live).

Read more about the project at the Abyme Revue and at The Architect’s Journal.

The apse wall and cast iron light ring.

Gilded apse wall inscription.

Gilded apse wall inscription.

Cast iron light ring inscription.

Phil Surey painting the Stations of the Cross.

Brand New Conference is a two-day event on the development of corporate and brand identity projects by some of today’s most active and influential practitioners from around the world.

This year’s identity is based on a cliché but we liked where that cliché took us so we went with it: New York is a “Concrete Jungle”, ergo we are going to use concrete. This wasn’t conceived as a metaphor but as the literal, core ingredient through which we would standardize all the materials.

One style that we thought we could expand on is the high-contrast sans serif with its calligraphic/chiseled structure. As a way to further channel the cacophony that New York can be we decided that instead of choosing just one font or type family we would use a bunch of high-contrast sans serifs together. We chose Chap (Black to be specific) from Schick Toikka as the primary font and we added Hoefler & Co.’s Peristyle, Typotheque’s Valter, Fatype’s Beausite, and Frere-Jones Type’s Bosca and Bosca Compressed — that are not yet available but we got to take out for a trial spin.

Weekend trip to Manchester, March 2014.

Detail showing the carved dual-language granite plinth leading into the memorial garden.

The Garda Memorial Garden, or Gairdín Cuimhneacháin an Gharda Síochána, is located in the heart of Dublin city. This memorial is a contemplative garden with large stone plinths and a lot of names and numbers. The list of names, this “roll of honor,” records individual police officers (gardaí) who have lost their lives violently and tragically in the line of duty since the formation of the Irish state in 1921.

An example of an uppercase “G” and “A” carved in granite and infilled.

The stonecutter placed full-sized printed sheets onto the stone before carving.