Design and Disability is a major exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London celebrating design for and by disabled people. Spanning DIY inventions, grassroots organising, and individual contributions from disabled, deaf, and neurodivergent practitioners, it showcases the shaping of social change from the 1940s to the present day.

In keeping with this ethos, the exhibition offers a wide range of accessibility features, including a British Sign Language (BSL) video tour, an audio tour, audio descriptions and a dedicated Braille guide. The exhibition captions are written in short, accessible sentences and set in Zed Text Semi-Wide and Zed Icons. Section titles are shown in CirrusCumulus.

Zed Text was developed and tested in collaboration with visually impaired readers to ensure optimal legibility, with inclusivity at its core. Zed Icons, a companion typeface, provides over two thousand symbols designed to transcend language barriers. The accompanying Braille guide is also set in Zed Text and incorporates Braille characters informed by research into tactile readability.

This monograph of American photographer Lee Miller (1907–1977) was published on the occasion of an exhibition shown at the V&A South Kensington from 15 September 2007 to 6 January 2008. It was edited by Mark Haworth-Boothand and published by V&A Publications, and in the USA by Yale University Press.

For the book design, Geoffrey Winston worked exclusively with FF Cellini. This typeface family by Albert Boton was released in 2003 with FontFont. It’s a digital revision and expansion of a Bodoni he originally designed in 1974 for Hollenstein, then named Botoni.

Posted as part of a series that pays tribute to Albert Boton, one of the preeminent French type designers of the past sixty years. Albert Boton died on July 20, 2023, at the age of 91.

Triple Exposure was an exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from September 1999 to January 2000. As this was an exhibition featuring three fashion/music photographers from the 1960s, I avoided focusing on just one of the photographers to represent the show. I devised a graphics solution by incorporating elements of each photographer’s key images, creating three roundels (the “triple” aspect) with photographs that contained circular elements, for example, the football, parachute and sunglasses, and overprinting them to evoke early UK 1960s graphics. Using the vivid CMYK colours on the target motifs linked the design appropriately to the new fashion, Pop Art and UK Mod movement of the period.

Using Bell Gothic as the primary typeface gave the typography a utilitarian feel and a bold print presence. The design was applied across an extensive marketing campaign, including transport and outdoor advertising sites. The shown images were generated from my original V&A artwork files and applied to contemporary mock-ups.

The posters use details from: Ronald Traeger: St Peter’s, Rome, May 1962; John Cowen: Model Jill Kennington in a fashion story “Birds in space”, June 1963; Michael Cooper: Keith Richards 1969.

The brief was to design an identity for a major exhibition at the V&A Museum in London, entitled Art Nouveau 1890–1914. The visual language had to reflect Art Nouveau’s aesthetic and the exhibition’s content and academic aims, and provide a distinctive visual language to appeal to a broad range of potential visitors.

Among those featured in the exhibition were artists and designers such as Beardsley, Gauguin, Gallé, Gaudi, Mackintosh, Mucha, Munch, Tiffany, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

I devised a design concept based on movement, which is characteristic of Art Nouveau forms combined with the natural and mystical aspects of the movement. The line elements evoke the sensual and curvaceous lines often referred to as the whiplash in Art Nouveau design. The light created by the dragonfly wing in motion creates an atmosphere of divine light illuminating the subject.

The typefaces selected were ITC Benguiat and Gill Sans; Benguiat is based on typefaces of the Art Nouveau period but is not a revivalist style and manages to impart an organic and characterful aesthetic to the design yet has a crispness that provides a timeless presentation of the Art Nouveau epoch. Gill Sans was chosen for its legibility for information and text usage. This humanist sans-serif typeface contrasts with the more decorative aspects of Benguiat while still presenting warm type forms.

The shown images were generated from my original V&A artwork files and applied to contemporary mock-ups.

All Will Be Well: Children’s Rainbows from Lockdown at the Victoria and Albert Museum presents a large-scale installation of these joyful artworks initiated during the first lockdown of the 2020 global pandemic. These homemade rainbows became an international signal of hope and resilience, populating streets around the world during lockdown as a symbol of the power and impact of child creativity.

Around 120 drawings are held within eight oversized frames inspired by different window geometries and sky tones creating a ‘windowscape’ bordering each side of the gallery to display the work on mass. A sculptural mobile welcomes visitors in lieu of a regular wall graphic.

The title is set in Brief, designed by Matyáš Machat who modified some of the characters so they could work as cut out letters and also comply with the legibility guidelines set by the museum. The font was chosen for its playful, round and overarching qualities.

It’s complemented by Home SPM, Clemens Piontek’s take on Spartan (Classified) which he originally drew for the identity of Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 designed with Lehni-Trüb. The letters have been evened out, the spacing reworked, but the typeface keeps the odd characteristics of the original. Piontek is currently working on a new version, moving further away from the original design.

Finally, all the body text had to be set in The Sans to comply with the visual identity guidelines of the V&A.

Exhibition curated by Kristian Volsing & Brendan Cormier
Architectural design by Sam Brown, mobile fabrication by Sam Fish

Mobile with the title in colored letters from BC Brief.

The rainbow letters in this display are based on Sassoon Infant (not part of the exhibition design).

Legend with artist names in Home SPM.

Wall label with the title set in Home SPM Italic, the description and details in TheSans.

Together with Made by Many, the Victoria & Albert Museum redesigned its website in 2016. Unlike earlier versions of the V&A website, the 2016 edition uses webfonts of TheSans for all of its text. The museum itself has used V&A Sans – an adapted version of TheSans, from Luc(as) de Groot – in its design palette since 2002.

Visitor information

Collections index page

Detail from the events page.

The works on display explore our current and complex relationships with technology from a philosophical and critical perspective, the meaning of being human in a hyper-connected, technological world, provoking questions about the state of these relationships and our interactions with machines.—V&A

Alias Anostencil is used for headline type.

The main design for the Frida Kahlo retrospective at London’s V&A uses Gza with Gräbenbach, but for these merchandise items Alias Harbour is used for FRIDA KAHLO, with Making Her Self Up set in Gza. Perhaps Harbour’s lower case was seen as too extreme?

Arguably one of the most revolutionary and striking figures in art, Frida Kahlo requires little introduction. Famously married to muralist Diego Rivera, when Kahlo passed away in 1954, Rivera locked away her possessions in the Blue House, Mexico City for over 50 years. But earlier this month, the V&A opened the doors to Frida: Making Her Self Up – an exhibition designed to showcase a selection of these previously unseen artefacts – many of which have never travelled outside of Mexico.

Alongside an evocative exhibition design by stage designer Tom Scutt and architects Gibson Thornley, the team at BOB Design were brought on board to bring the 2D graphics of the exhibition to life.

Considering that Frida Kahlo spent much of her life in a wheelchair, Tom Scutt and the architects also wanted the exhibition to be really inclusive. We found a set of typefaces [GZA and Gråbenbach] with elements that echoed the angular shape we were looking for, but we then had to consider how the type would look and read to someone in a wheelchair.

The V&A actually held focus groups where people would come and look at the object labels while sitting and standing, to gauge at what level it was readable. They also conducted interviews with people in wheelchairs to help define the hanging heights of paintings and labels.

The contrast of the typography also needed to be high enough to help people with reading difficulties, who need a very distinctive start and end when reading something. There was quite a lot of requirements. We received documents detailing all the different type sizes, to make sure we didn’t go below or above certain measurements. — BOB Design

This pinback button/badge was collateral from the VIctoria & Albert Museum’s 2013 “David Bowie is …” exhibition.

Horst: Photographer of Style is V&A Museum’s retrospective of one of the most important fashion photographers. The exhibition uses Euclid Flex by Swiss Typefaces. The 3D titles and the font’s stylistic sets evoke Horst's distinctive theatrical lighting and style.

The Jameel Gallery was officially opened on 18 July 2006, by HRH The Prince of Wales. The Jameel family gave the V&A a substantial donation to transform its Islamic Middle East gallery The displays explain how Islamic art developed from the great days of the Islamic caliphate in the 8th and 9th centuries AD. They encompass carved ivories from Islamic Spain, inlaid metalwork from medieval Egypt, Iznik ceramics from Ottoman Turkey, tilework from 14th-century Uzbekistan and oil paintings from 19th-century Iran. — V&A

Jude is used throughout the gallery for its main signage and titles for interactive screens and item descriptions. Its chiselled design suits the angular, geometric patterns of Islamic design.

According to Michael Harvey’s description of his typeface, “Tisdall Script is based upon the brush-drawn script lettering of Hans Tisdall, who was the designer of many distinctive lettered book jackets for [London-based publisher] Jonathan Cape in the 1950s.” An appropriate selection for a book about British mid-century modern textile design. But there is and even stronger historical connection here: Tisdall was part of the Edinburgh Weavers, designing many textiles for the label and also the logo in the very style on which Harvey’s font is based.