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.

For the 2017 edition of the Brand New Conference, UnderConsideration took inspiration from Chicago’s iconic landmark, Cloud Gate, or more commonly referred to as “the Bean,” by Anish Kapoor. The distorted look was meant to imply that the type was reflected off this public sculpture. Read more about this year’s identity on underconsideration.com, and about previous editions also on Fonts in Use.

Brand New is the place on the web for writing and critique on branding and identity design, published and maintained by UnderConsideration LCC. In February 2017, they launched a new version of their website, meta-reviewed here. Highlights from the post include:

We are rocking Hoefler & Co.’s Mercury Text ScreenSmart and Operator ScreenSmart, served from their Cloud.typography service. Mercury has always been one of my favorite serifs and I have been wanting to use Operator since it came out; it works amazingly well at small sizes and I was surprised at how readable it is, despite having an off-beat structure. [...]

Because I end up on Lineto.com often, usually getting the link to Circular or Brown, I decided to poke through all their fonts, especially the display fonts. Prismaset caught my attention (because I have a thing for concentric letterforms) and the style with five lines was starting to look pretty cool. [...]

When I typeset “Brand New” in Prismaset Five I immediately liked it but I hated how fuzzy it got once I used it as a web graphic, even as an SVG because those strokes start to show up as 1.5pt thick and they get fuzzy. So, based on Prismaset Five — I paid for a license, yes — I redrew the characters so that the vertical and horizontal lines would render, always, as 1-pixel-thick lines and look perfectly sharp. So each line is 1 pixel thick with 3 pixels in between. This forced me to change some of the original shapes of Prismaset, primarily the “B” but pretty much all letters are different as the proportions changed. As an SVG file the logo looks even crisper and it’s only the diagonals and circles that have a little bit of unavoidable fuzz. As the site shrinks responsively, the logo stays at the same size, keeping its 1-pixel lines intact. (Except for the mobile version; that had to budge.

For the 2016 edition of the Brand New Conference, UnderConsideration took inspiration from the rhinestone-studded clothing and bold typographic music posters of its host city, Nashville, Tennessee. As UnderConsideration explains, the historic Hatch Show Print led them to a wood type inspired look:

Hatch Show Print and their woodtype typographic exploits that have helped promote and build the visual expression of Nashville’s music scene. […] We did not want to imitate the stacked woodtype aesthetic because that’s too easy and not necessarily original but we couldn’t ignore it completely. […]

Our concept for the logo was taking our now well-recognized "BNCONF" shorthand name and treating each letter like a suit to be adorned. We needed big, chunky letters to be able to fit in more decoration and that’s where the woodtype element comes in. After thorough vetting of various black-weighted fonts we found our hero in Behemoth — designed by Dave West and digitized by Martin Wenzel — from House Industries’ Photo-Lettering typesetting service (and available for rent from Fontstand). Behemoth has a large volume and some beautiful, curvaceous details that give it plenty of personality.

Read more about the design of the conference at Brand New.

The Brand New Conference

is a two-day event organized by UnderConsideration, focusing on the practice of corporate and brand identity — a direct extension of the popular blog, Brand New.

The visual identity for the 2015 edition, dubbed “Grit to the Future”, combines Underware’s Tripper with Obsidian by Hoefler & Co., both released earlier this year and hence in line with the event’s name. This couple is complemented by Georgia (the 2011 Pro version, including the newly added Light weight) and, for smaller items, P22 Underground.

Read about the thoughts that went into the typeface selection on the conference website:

At first we thought that using a stencil font would be too easy as they can be trendy and there was no real concept behind it other than “it’s cool”. We couldn’t shake Tripper though, so we pushed a little bit: what good is a stencil font if you are not going to use it as a stencil? That led us to thinking about a long-forgotten time when subway cars in New York were drenched in graffiti. […]

The second [element] is a reflection on the contrast of yesteryear’s nasty New York with today’s very affluent, sometimes opulent, money-demanding New York — the one where the 1% thrives. Before you think this is turning heavily political or social, don’t be fooled: What we were really looking for was an excuse to use Hoefler & Co.’s Obsidian. We really liked this combination of grungy, dirty, rebellious stenciled graffiti with this super elegant, finessed, luxurious serif. […]

UnderConsideration wrote thoughtfully about their very nice identity for the 2014 Brand New Conference. Here is an excerpt about the type choices:

“Moving away from New York is a big deal so we wanted to make sure to acknowledge this year's host city, Chicago, in the conference's identity.

…Because we are always obsessing about 1984 — the year, not the dystopian novel — one day our thoughts led us to the origins of the Mac, the venerable tool that allows most of us to make a living. This led to thinking about Susan Kare and her original family of fonts for the deliciously low resolution interface of the original Mac Operating System. Short of a dozen bitmap fonts, all were named after the world's greatest cities: New York, Athens, San Francisco, Monaco, among others. And, yes, Chicago.

A delightful bitmap font with a heavily accentuated contrast between its thicks and thins, Chicago was the main interface font in Mac's OS and decades later it was also the UI font of the original iPod. However, as the OS evolved and the resolution increased, Apple moved away from bitmap fonts and began introducing smooth-edged fonts in the interface; not ready to leave Chicago behind Apple commissioned Bigelow & Holmes to literally smooth out the original version, keeping the same structure but curving all the corners. The result could be considered one of the least appealing typefaces today and Apple slowly swept it under the rug; first decommissioning it from its UI use and later leaving it out completely of the OS.

This Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — or, well, more like Mr. Hyde and Mr. Hyde — double personality and the legacy of Chicago as a font in the Apple brand was very appealing and seemed like a good place to start exploring.

…The supporting typeface is the new Burlingame by Carl Crossgrove for Monotype (and served online through fonts.com). It has a hard-working, blue-collar feel to it that we feel goes well with the city and oddly enough pairs well (or really wrong) with Chicago, the font.”

A design conference identity is a difficult assignment. There is no tougher crowd for a designer than other designers. Not only does it have to appeal to that audience, but it has to be of the moment as well (a conference that feels behind the times won’t attract any goers). And to top off that tall order, this particular conference is on branding. The conference branding better be good.

Given all the demands, Armin Vit did an admirable job building an identity for his first Brand New Conference. Armin was clearly aware of the Fat Font Fad, documenting it on Speak Up three years ago. And while his design for the Brand New Conference may seem to follow that trend, it can’t be accused of being out of date. The key is Klimax, by far the most interesting of the ultra bold poster fonts to come out of the Oughties. Ondrej Jób’s take on the genre eschews pure geometry, using a sort of super ellipse shape for rounds instead of a circle. The counters are monolinear lines, the same weight of the typeface’s thin counterpart.

Klimax is more than the logo type, it makes great frames for the speaker photos as well. What is normally the blandest part of a conference program (we’ve seen many of these mugshots before) is now a poster-worthy part of the conference brand.