Tentacular Writing is a summer course organized by Metaxia Markaki and Johanna Just of the ETH Zürich and Sila Karatas of the EPFL. The visual identity was designed by Onlab who describe the project as follows:

The summer school intended to experiment with the ways researchers and spatial practitioners perform writing in a non-hierarchical learning format. Set up as a collective retreat, the course offered an experience of community building and a collective exploration in creative writing and collaboration. Based on a typewriter-like monospaced font, the design is a radical and kinetic interpretation of the overall topic. It creates an original visual language for the call for participants as well as a powerful system for showcasing the results of the week online.

Bibliothèque Kandinsky’s Summer University is a cultural programme organised by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It is built around the source material of modern and contemporary art: archives, written documentation, photographs, films, etc. It gathers young researchers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, critics, curators, who work together on this material. The Summer University includes writing workshops and archive visits. The result of this research is gathered into a journal, which each year is produced by a different designer.

Issue 8, “Show/Search” (2022) was designed by Olivier Lebrun. It is set in Axo Narrow (Abyme, released 2024), alongside a bespoke version of Lineto’s Biff with Script 12 Pitch and Univers Next.

Faire Type’s Sprig and Sprig Sans in use for the new visual identity of The Shed.
Adam Studios writes:

We updated the visual identity of The Shed, a hands-on afterschool programme based in Hong Kong. In addition to establishing fonts, palette and guidelines, we also did the illustrations that represent the brand’s core tenet “Me, We, Us” that encourages children to attend to their needs, those of others and those of the planet. This branding process culminated in an update to The Shed’s website, the creation of new social and press templates, and the beginnings of The Shed’s product development phase.

For a youth summer program called Jugend Frei Raum (“Youth Free Space”) LWZ Studio created some graphics promoting those spaces where young people can express themselves freely. They worked with the concept of taking up some (public) space through typography, using a NaN Hyena Black in its three flavors, with flat, concave and convex terminals for most of the identity.

Dinamo’s Favorit offers a welcome contrast in its lighter weight and is used for subheadings and captions.

To view the full range of inflating animations created by LWZ, visit their case study.

Poster for the 2022 edition of Typographic Printing Program, an intense design program focusing on typography and letterpress printing.

The posters have been letterpress printed back-and-front with laser-cut linoleum and freshly cast Ludlow hot metal slugs. In letterpress printing, the visual topic of unsharpness is hard do accomplish. It took me quite a while to develop the visual effect of these matte, dissolving letterforms in white-on-white.

The overall topic was “Typographic Detox”. The white and silver on transparency paper supports the idea of detoxing. In my view, the posters really work! When people hung them over any bad typography posters in the wild, they immediately and actively detoxed their typographic environment – haha!

Detox poster at the premises of Slanted in Karlsruhe, Germany

Detox poster in Detroit, US

Detox poster in Ravensburg, Germany

Detox poster in Saarbrücken, Germany

Detox poster in Stuttgart, Germany

Detox poster at Studio Zeedauw in Tilburg, Netherlands

Detox poster in Padova, Italy

At Minds of Tomorrow, a world-class daycare in Miami, the goal is to empower young creative minds to shape their future, with design and technology as the core of the innovative programs for ages 5 to 13.

The typeface’s intrinsic sci-fi character was probably a decisive factor for the choice of Antipol. In combination with energetic colours, it creates a thoroughly playful atmosphere, good to inspire action and spark creativity.

Double-sided promotional poster for the Typographic Summer Program. Letterpress printed in 10 print runs from hand-cut and laser-cut linoleum and Ludlow slugs. Quite a wild mix of type combinations, colors, stretched proportions and outlines—is it a poster against typographic pollution? Or is this typographic pollution itself?

2018 design created by Kristin Krause. Her flyer and poster design were part of an annually design competition held in the Graphic Design Klasse Fons Hickmann at the Berlin Summer University of the Arts.

"My idea was: The physical form of flyer/poster informed the design. I was imagining for someone to take the flyer outside to the lake and sand would collect in the folds of the paper. I liked the idea, that it was not too straightforward. Actually, part of the reason why I chose the Riviera typeface was its name and association with beaches." – Kristin Krause

Riviera is part of the Lab, available on Swiss Typefaces.

Part of the UCLA Masters of Design Series. The goal was to combine summer, Los Angeles and the UCLA brand colors. Monotype Grotesque Extra Condensed added a vertical element, like umbrellas on a beach.

AdamsMorioka, UCLA Summer Sessions 1998 poster, 1997;
offset lithograph on paper, 36 in. × 24 in. (91.44 cm × 60.96 cm);
© AdamsMorioka, Inc.

ISIA Type Week is an intensive course in type design led by Fred Smeijers and held at the Higher Institute for Applied Arts in Urbino, Italy. The 8-day course will run from 23 July to 1 August. It includes contributions by visiting tutors Eric Kindel, Riccardo Olocco and Luciano Perondi and is coordinated by ISIA lecturer Roberto Arista.

The dedicated website pairs two-color illustrations with Puncho and Monitor, both designed by Smeijers. Announcement graphics used on social media additionally feature letterforms from the Bery series, a triplet of fonts based on the works of the late 18th-century Parisian stencil cutter Jean Gabriel Bery.

Double-sided promotional poster for the Typographic Summer Program with Dafi Kühne, an intense 2 week summer program in Switzerland for international graphic design students and professionals.

Letterpress printed in 3 print runs from Helvetica Plakat (plastic and wood) in 12 Cicero, Ludlow slugs from Record Gothic in 48pt, and brass rules.

Format: 55×88cm
Paper: Chromolux, 100g/m2
February 2018, edition of 250 posters on a FAG Control 900

The Porto Academy project, going for its 5th edition in 2017, is a yearly architecture summer school held at FAUP (Porto University’s Architecture Faculty). It includes conferences, visits and classes. The founders say “Porto Academy doesn’t pretend to be an institution, to us Porto Academy is a compliment to the school”.

VOLTA has been involved in this project since the beginning, designing their identity in 2013. But this year, Porto Academy wanted something different and they called us to create the new Porto Academy identity, in a way that would be intuitive, institutional, practical and timeless.

We opted for a very clean and simples aesthetic, supported by smart use of typography and flat colours that have been part of the brand since the beginning.
The logo can stretch and collapse in 2 lines, as if it was in an editable text box. All of the identity was inspired by the architecture technical drawings graphic language (like blueprints, sections, facades…), that are present in each single piece created. The stationery, merchandising and website design are good examples of the possibilities the graphic language of the new Porto Academy identity can give to its multiple applications.

ISIA/WT Summer School:

In 2009 two remarkable schools with a course in Graphic Design, Werkplaats Typografie (ArtEZ), Arnhem, The Netherlands and ISIA Urbino, Italy, joined together to set up an international Summer School. Over the past 8 years we have organized the summer school with great enthusiasm, and due to its success and the positive responses from all the students who took part in it, we continue to organize the summer school again for this summer. Therefore we’d like to draw your attention, and invite you and your colleagues and friends to apply for this years summer school.

Concept and Design: Jin Kwang Kim (Werkplaats Typografie/ArtEZ)
Development: Cas Spoelstra

Sound: Luca Napoli (Werkplaats Typografie/ArtEZ)
Typeface: Lars Extended, Bold–decisions

Michèle Champagne:

A-B-Z-TXT is a school for 21st century typography. Too often, typography is treated like a mere marketing tool or trend, and split between print or digital. A-B-Z-TXT will offer a hybrid alternative, with greater rigour and investigation. With Creativeapplications.net and InterAccess in Toronto, the school will offer hands-on masterclasses, workshops, lectures and group discussions. Leading practitioners will include LUSTlab from The Hague, N O R M A L S from Paris, Steph Davidson and Tracy Ma from Bloomberg Businesweek, Lauren Wickware from Hamilton, and yours truly.

Visual identity for Summer Design Intensive 2015 at California College of the Arts.