A pretty elaborate treatment of Ryter for the title of Valentina. Soul in Sapphire. The science fiction novel about a sentient computer software was written by Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler, and published by Baen Books in 1984.

Valentina, an artificial intelligence program come to life, and her creator, Celeste Hackett, a shy college student and computer genius, are menaced by an unscrupulous lawyer and two computer wizards hired to destroy Valentina.

The cover art is an early work by Bryn Barnard (b. 1956). “Valentina” is based on Ryter Bold, using several of its many alternate glyphs. Some elements were additionally modified, like the swash entry stroke on V, or the hyper-extended T bar, among others. The letterforms were further enhanced with a bevel effect and a double underline. The second line, “Soul in Sapphire”, uses Ryter largely out of the box – apart from the white contour, the addition of a swash on the final E is the only customization. The secondary typeface is ITC Avant Garde Gothic (1974) by Ed Benguiat, used in all caps.

[More info on ISFDB]

Ryter was released by Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC). Of its seven styles, only the heaviest one, Ryter Night, has been digitized. Nick Curtis named his interpretation Edgewise NF (Nick’s Fonts, 2007). It doesn’t include the many alternates of the original, though. I haven’t been able to find out about the designer of Ryter. If you have any insights, please leave a comment. Thanks!

Glyph set of Ryter Bold with alternates, as shown in a German phototype catalog from 1990.

Track cover art for the 2020 album SATELLITE etc by Baltimore-based rapper and producer beardy. The art direction is inspired by ’90s Generation-X CD covers, experiences on the early Internet, and y2k techno-optimism.

Space Grotesk and its older monospaced cousin (used in the little “BEARDY” logo) provide a dose of modernity to clarify that the work is looking back on the 2000s from the present and not simply emulating them whole cloth. We discussed a lot of directions, all balancing the vibes of growing up online, dealing with broken connections both digital and personal and the twin lost arts of physical music media and software packaging.

FF Screen Matrix works double duty conceptually. Sure, it evokes ideas of “cyberspace” and technology, but it also evokes memories of a time when those were new ideas.

When reviewing the finals for these we realized they look “small”; almost like Minidiscs or some other proprietary music format that kids would be encouraged to collect and trade.

The covers are based on a simple two-column layout; elements can move up or down but not horizontally. The stickers, like a real sticker, are slapped on in “random” locations not constrained by the grid.

Anonymity in Cyberspace is a contribution to Desire Press’s campaign “Visual Transaction”. The campaign invites to bring art to the oversaturated flyer walls of Manchester, UK.

It was designed by Annika Soja (@iinnas) using Apoc Revelations and Eurostile.

In the age of anonymity on the World Wide Web, avatars and gender swapping, we have the opportunity to try out diverse roles, enjoy them at will, change – and – discard them again. The anonymity of the Internet offers us a space in which we can reinvent ourselves again and again. At the same time, it raises the question of who we really are and what our real identity is.