On her personal portfolio website, Daria Cohen writes:

I’m a Type and Media trained type designer based in Berlin. I’ve worked on Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek with Dinamo, NaN, Swiss Typefaces and Vectro (to name a few) contributing to various retail typefaces as well as projects for Call of Duty, Spotify, Wise, and a generous number of NDAs.

My self-initiated projects revolve around one goal: making fonts my grandma would recognize.

The gravestone on my homepage ties into my passion for death studies. I dream of opening a funeral home someday, but until then, my fonts are free for all death-related projects.

The website was designed and built by Lena Weber, who comments:

Since Daria is a type-designer the goal was to build a home for her fonts & projects, linking to different foundry websites for purchase.

The site is an homage to extended glyph-sets, alternates, carefully crafted letters and – of course – to Daria. 🥀🕊️

On reload random characters are pulled from the fonts, creating encrypted inscribing on the digital headstone: The »Daria Cohen password-generator«?

The site is divided in »the living« (fonts, released and available for purchase) and „the rising“ stuck as for in progress fonts in the bony underworld.

The custom backend allows for font upload, everything else is generated automatically.
Free font conditions hidden in an easter egg. Thank you Daria for your trust to go wild! I really enjoyed working with a type-only asset pool, diving deep into details, digging for glyphs and expressing an idea through placement and color only.
Swipe for a graveyard of discarded designs as well!

Text on the website is set in Daria’s own Onlysans.

Last words – the last utterance of a person before their death. That which a person leaves behind for posterity in the face of their death.

Last words – the final sentence of a book before its end. That which the narrator leaves behind for readers in the face of their ‘death‘.

Letzte Worte (“Last words”) is a collection of the respective last sentence from 45 books. Cautiously arranged in sequence, each sentence stands on its own, yet when read together, new stories can arise.

Launched in Spring 2020, Pioneer Works Broadcast is a virtual and annual print magazine that encourages radical thinking across the arts, sciences, music, and literature. Broadcast reflects the spirit of Pioneer Works and extends beyond the space’s physical walls in Brooklyn through narrative-driven journalism, essays, criticism, ruminations, video, audio, and much more. For their Death Week Series, they used Ceraph by Emma Piercy, available at Sharp Type.

Screenshot from the Pioneer Works Broadcast website, which uses faux-bold Times for the smaller texts; the headline is set in Ceraph.

MadeByShape collaborated with Stoneletters, a leading creative letter-cutting studio, to revitalise its branding and develop a bespoke website. Stoneletters creates bespoke headstones and architectural pieces through a personal and caring service, so the brand and website needed to reflect this.

The project aimed to reflect the studio's craftsmanship and personal service through a sophisticated and human-centric design. Utilising Craft CMS, the new site emphasises visual and written content that showcases Stoneletters' high-quality work and the people behind it. The typography and design elements were carefully selected to convey professionalism and trust, ensuring the brand feels exclusive yet approachable.

RxYxO of Coldrain wearing a “Wish You Were Here” top

Killstar are an alternative fashion and lifestyle brand with global distribution.

Killstar created the “Wish You Were Here” design which was featured on a range of clothing items including T-shirts, tank tops, and kimono tops. A large element of the design is the phase which has been set in the typeface Bonez by Bonez Designz.

Over the years a few rock stars have also been spotted wearing items in the design.

“Here lies a most terrific collection of recorded sounds”.

From the liner notes, via Discogs:

The Sound Effects Department of the Walt Disney Studio has been collecting all kinds of noises since 1927. The first sound film which Walt Disney made and the first sound cartoon made by anyone was Steamboat Willy starring a little mouse named Mickey. This picture, like every other one Walt Disney has made, whether short subject or feature, animated cartoon or live action, contained many sound effects.

Drawing upon this enormous library of sound, Disneyland records has produced this LP.

[More info on Discogs]

Scott Boms published a second expanded edition of I Take Full Responsibility, a small book produced and assembled by hand. From his description of the project:

I Take Full Responsibility collects fourteen of the most significant communications from technology company CEOs since November 2022, who, during that time, have reduced their employee bases by huge swathes. Accompanied by a personal introduction, photos, and artwork from more than ten years in tech, it’s intended to be a time capsule circumventing Silicon Valley’s short-term memory and a clear statement of fact that work will not love you back.

Risograph printed in black, bright red, sunflower, and metallic gold inks on 5 different paper stocks, its urgent message arrives enclosed within a redesigned and screen-printed closed-spine format along with laser-cut accessory prints delivered in a personalized Inter-office envelope.

Scott shared also some notes about the typography by email:

I chose Bennet Text 2 as the main typeface used throughout the book for practical reasons, such as its character set, which includes small caps and a solid range of figures. It’s also one I’ve used before with the Riso and has proven to work well with that process. As I started setting the text, I experimented with other options but kept coming back to Bennet because of its solid, authoritative feel and consistently even color. It’s made for editorial uses like this but also works well at larger sizes where its subtle details become more apparent.

Gridlite PE was originally only going to be used for the “Approved” stamp on the pink slip card because it could look authoritative while also solving a practical need when run on the laser cutter. As the design of the cover evolved and I added the original acetate layer in the first edition, it became an obvious choice as it worked really well against the other imagery and helped then connect the various pieces together.

When I was designing the pink slip and Tech CEO Bingo cards, Aglet Mono just felt right. I was going for something that wouldn't feel out of place on a business form but could also hold its own visually and pair well with type used elsewhere in the book.

The monospace form of both Gridlite PE and Aglet just seemed to make sense. I believe an early version of the cover was set in Aglet which led to me to try Gridlite PE, which ultimately stuck in the end.

The book also includes appearances by Knockout, Champion Gothic, Fern Micro, Rhody, and San Francisco. The accompanying prints add to the eclectic mix with Displace Cut and an early use of Regrets.

Cover detail

The title page, set in Bennet Text.

Pink slip and Tech CEO Bingo card, primarily set in Aglet Mono, with die cut in Gridlite, small text in Fern Micro, and heading in Champion Gothic.

Pink slip detail

An interior spread (with the first edition’s staple binding)

Interior excerpts (San Francisco used for the email text)

Interior excerpts (Rhody featured on the first page)

Bonus print, featuring Regrets and Displace Cut

Bonus print, featuring Champion Gothic. (The Risolute Press logo is Banque Gothique.)

Sem Regresso (There’s no coming back) is a book written by Miguel Babo. Made up from eight short stories, it focuses on the relation between time, life, and consequences. The art direction reflects a look and feel reminiscent of old illustrated anatomy books. As a touch of dark humor, the shape of the book itself plays with the shape of a headstone, symbolizing life’s point of no return. The idea was to take some weight off from the almost fatal tone of writing and to give the book the essence of a “stand alone” piece that you can show on your book shelf or on your coffee table. The book is very small, almost pocket size, and the paper used is over 120g/m² which makes it almost impossible to close, transforming it into a standing object.

Miguel’s prelude is: Life is made on a path of no return. Time obliges us to have a single meaning, a fatality common to all men, of all conditions and of all times. But life is not just the present, and those who were, are not just those who passed, they continue in us and in the eternal inheritance of humanity, no one is left behind.

This book is composed using the typefaces Newzald by Kris Sowersby from Klim Type Foundry and FF DIN by Albert-Jan Pool from FontFont.

Tanatopedia is an encyclopedia with entries on death, with illustrations by Caroline Murta. The crowdfunded project was designed to make the book sumptuous, a physical object that does not go unnoticed due to its size or theme. Sober, elegant and dark – words that define the aesthetic used for the design of the cover and inside.

The design includes illustrated drop caps and column-organized entries. The flickering terminals of VVS Nobleman, a typeface family chosen especially for the entries, refer to the mystery that the book evokes. The text is set with Adobe Jenson, with Cloister Initials. The cover additionally features Orpheus and Mrs Eaves.

Gig flyer for an experimental show at Charnel House, Chicago, featuring Hali Palombo, Jeremiah Fisher, and Anthony Janas. It took place in a former mortuary on Friday the 13th December 2019. The grey-on-black design with blackletter type (in Frida Medrano’s Jabin) references tombstones.

The original stone, 1980

Much has been written about Joy Division, Ian Curtis and the tragedy of his death. The best of these texts is probably the late Mark Fishers’ essay from Ghosts of My Life, where he writes:

The male lust for death had always been a subtext in rock, but before Joy Division it had been smuggled into rock under libidinous pretexts, a black dog in wolf’s clothing – Thanatos cloaked as Eros – or else it had worn pantomime panstick. Suicide was a guarantee of authenticity, the most convincing of signs that you were 4 Real. Suicide has the power to transfigure life, with all its quotidian mess, its conflicts, its ambivalences, its disappointments, its unfinished business, its ‘waste and fever and heat’ – into a cold myth, as solid, seamless and permanent as the ‘marble and stone’ that Peter Saville would simulate on the record sleeves and Curtis would caress in the lyrics to ‘In a Lonely Place’.

Today, we can visist Ian at Macclesfield Cemetery. His final resting place was originally marked with a beautiful hand-carved plate. In a style typical of British vernacular (and rather similiar to Albertus) it is almost as austere as the music he once wrote.

Sadly, the original stone was stolen in 2008, and replaced with … sandblasted Helvetica in all caps.

The new stone, 2008

A new gravestone for Ladislav Sutnar and his wife Františka in Pilsen.

This grave is on the cemetery St. Elisabeth in Lage Vuursche/Baarn (NL). It seems that the 2 oldest nuns were born in 1806 and 1809 and died in 1974. More than 165 years! This must be two typos. I think.

Anthony Froshaug (1920–84) was an English typographer and teacher. His grave is located at the East section of the Highgate Cemetery in London, just as those by Karl Marx, Douglas Adams and Malcolm McLaren.

“Not often does type work well on gravestones, but this version of Gill Sans is appropriate.” — Paul Barnes

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.

We wanted something natural, like the stones Dad used to pick up at the end of a long hike and skip across the lake. We got something close, but the cemetery required the rectangular concrete base. I typeset the text, excerpted from a speech given by one of his ward members (parishioners), with input from the family. I'm pretty proud that it's a little bit different from your average gravestone, and I think he'd like it, though he might argue that he isn't worth all the fuss. Well, he is.

Original art, set in Illustrator. Uses Adobe Garamond Premier Caption (for small text) and Display (for “Coles”).

The Last Words campaign was developed at Leo Burnett. Tailor Made by creative director Marcelo Reis, art director Murilo Melo.