When the Chief Justice of India compared the unemployed, lazy, chronically online youth who rant against the system to cockroaches (a comment which he retracted later), Boston University graduate student Abhijeet Dipke, with help of anonymous friends and ChatGPT, made a satire political outfit named Cockroach Janta Party.

Within a week it became world’s fastest growing online political movement, gathering hundred thousand signups in website and 20 million followers in Instagram, surpassing India’s ruling Bhartiya Janata Party and main opposition party Indian National Congress combined. Its AI-generated videos and meme content caught the fancy of GenZ of India. Government crackdown in form of blocking its X handle for “threat to national security” also helped in its popularity.

Oggy and the Cockroaches is a French animated series produced by Gaumont Multimédia for season one, and by Xilam from seasons two and onwards (though Gaumont would continue to license the show until season 3).

The series is very similar to Tom and Jerry, as it’s a silent cartoon with heavy slapstick. The series has aired on multiple networks beginning in 1998, including France 3, Fox Kids, Cartoon Network, Netflix, Disney Channel, and even Nickelodeon. Despite being more well-known by American viewers through Netflix, Tubi, and YouTube, it briefly aired in 2015 on Nickelodeon, but was pulled following a controversy from the episode “(Un)Happy Camper”.

The credits are set in the font FF Klunder Script, which would be the main font for the show.

The Radio Planet is a science fiction novel written by Roger Sherman Hoar (1887–1963) under the pseudonym of Ralph Milne Farley. The third instalment in his Radio Man series, it was first serialized in Argosy, in six parts, starting 26 June, 1926.

This is the first book edition, published as Ace Book F-312 in 1964, with cover art by John Schoenherr. The (uncredited) typography combines Peignot Bold with Latin Bold.

Fun fact: in his other life, Hoar served as state senator and assistant Attorney General for the state of Massachusetts.

[More info on ISFDB]

Loading screen for the ZX Spectrum video game The Bird and the Bees II: Antics

Bug-Byte Software was a UK software publishing house active at the end of the 1970s and the early part of the 1980s before it dissolved and was re-acquired and used as a brand label.

During its most popular and prolific period, when it published titles like Mazogs, Twin Kingdom Valley, The Bird and The Bees, and the hugely popular and influential Manic Miner, it often used the Bug-Byte wordmark in Television (and Microgramma). Antics, the sequel to The Bird and The Bees and published in 1984, may mark something of a transition: it appears the product packaging used a new neon wordmark, but the loading screen for the game itself has a rendition of the Television wordmark.

I don’t know if Mazogs, June 1982, is the first Bug-Byte advent to use the Television wordmark, but opposite this advert on the opening is a different Bug-Byte ad that has their wordmark in Penny Farthing. The copy in this ad uses ITC Kabel. Sinclair User in the same month runs the Mazogs advert in blue.

Detail from the instructions included with Mazogs, published 1981. The game title is in Profil. Body text is reproduced from material printed on an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer, or something very similar.

Advert for Twin Kingdom Valley, a text adventure. Or Interactive Fiction as some people now call them. Ad copy uses News Gothic and Futura.

Wordmark rendered on the ZX Spectrum loading screen for The Birds and The Bees; clearly based on Television.

Cassette inlay cover for the ZX Spectrum version of Manic Miner published by Bug-Byte (also later published by Software Projects).

Film posters for the feature documentary Shelf Life – observing the parallels of the cheese aging process and the human experience of growing old.

The Field Meridians’ Observer is a printed, quarterly neighborhood newspaper highlighting local news and seasonal perspectives. Published at the turn of each season and distributed for free to the Crown Heights community, local neighborhood stockists include the Brower Park Library (155 Brooklyn Ave) and Another World (629 Nostrand Ave) and The Word is Change (368 Tompkins Ave). The first issue is tied to the winter solstice, including a warming soup recipe, a piece on the joy of winter birding, and a calendar of the season’s best activities. A digital copy of the first issue is available here.

Jordi Ng designed the newspaper, which is typeset in International Edition and HAL Repost. Céline Hurka created a customised masthead, drawing bespoke initials of the Repost caps spelling “OBSERVER”. The pictograms are taken from Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Noto Sans Symbols. The issue also features illustrations by Lillian Ansell, Thomas Colligan, and María Medem.

An entry with Egyptian hiero

The Insectarium opened in 2023, a permanent installation in the American Museum of Natural History’s Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation. The exhibition was art directed by Catharine Weese. Rayna Weingord served as the lead designer on the Gilder Center from 2021 until it opened in 2023. She worked with Eleanor Kung, Molly Magnell and the AMNH’s in-house team.

Rift and Aglet Slab, both monolinear with round stroke endings, support the approachably educational science center. The condensed proportions of Rift lend it toward titles, while Aglet Slab performs in exhibition-scale paragraphs. Atlas Grotesk is used for smaller-scale body copy, such as in the Insectarium Educator's Guide.

The self-titled debut album from April 1978 was designed by Zoran Busic with art by Rene Zamic.

Record collector, DJ and musicologist Klaus Hiltscher on Saga’s debut album:

In Germany the most sold Saga LP. I like this one because you hear also some rock guitars. In later LPs was the keyboards very dominant! “Humble Stance” is a very significant song for Saga, like “Satisfaction” for the Stones. To me it was the last LP which I really heard. In that year we opened our record shop ROCK ON, from then on I mostly heard Punk/Metal or New Wave like Gary Numan.

The cover established Solemnis as the typeface closely associated with the Canadian band’s early years. For the follow-up, Images at Twilight, the festive uncial by Günter Gerhard Lange was also used for the album title.

The track list on the back is set in Friz Quadrata, mostly in all caps.

The cover for Images at Twilight from May 1979 was again designed by Busic, this time with art by Tony Roberts.

Tracklist and credits on the back are set in Trump-Mediäval Italic.

Silent Knight was released in November 1980. Busic collaborated with Roberts another time. Solemnis made way for Parsons.

The S AM Cup, a soccer cup organised by S AM Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel, has been held since 1992. In 2024, 24 teams played against each other at the Landhof stadium, the former soccer stadium of FC Basel.

Among the participants was ARGE FC, a team of smaller offices (Diwersy Weimar, Studio Hammer, Guerra Clauss Architects, Atelier Neume, and others) that united “to beat the big ones”. While for years the S AM Cup was dominated by teams from bigger architecture firms in Basel, such as Herzog & de Meuron or Christ & Gantenbein, in 2024 the cup was won by “the small offices” of ARGE FC.

The soccer jerseys of ARGE FC were designed by their right forward, Studio Bosco Ferreira, using an unreleased rounded version of Farmacia by Nguyen Gobber.

Sant’Or is the first certified biodynamic winery in Greece. As this is an important advantage of the winery, Kommigraphics were assigned the redesign of the winery’s labels, with the aim of enhancing the biodynamic and vegan nature of the different wines it produces.

The design of the labels refers to the fauna of the area Santameri in Achaea, which is where the Sant’Or winery is located. Through an abstract and at the same time archaic-ish design of the illustrated animals and insects, they aimed at the emotional and direct connection of the consumer with the product and consequently with the winery.

The logotype is set in Cako. The accompanying sans appears to be GT America Expanded.

Gordita is used for the design studio’s presentation, but is not part of the winery’s identity.

EcoBites is student project part of Maryland Institute College of Art, mentored by Jennifer Cole Phillips.

The project presents a collection of ten ecology-themed DIY experiments called Science Snacks from The Exploratorium, a public learning laboratory in San Francisco. This project aimed to package these hands-on experiments into pamphlets that are easy to carry. Printed on newsprint, they unfold into miniposters that can be savored as collectables.

Typeset in Cronos created by Robert Slimbach and Graphik by Christian Schwartz.

Maryna Zevako designed and created this A1 poster titled “Animal Vision, Part 2”. It was silkscreen printed with custom-made ink infused with UV-reactive powder, mixed in the printing workshop of Gerhard Müller at ABK Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design.

The content and images were generated with ChatGPT, Dalle-2, and Dreamstudio.ai to illustrate the differences between binocular and insect vision, with fun facts about bees, flies, and other insects. These creatures can identify objects by detecting UV-glowing patterns. The poster is printed “white on white,” requiring a UV lamp for reading.

The “Animal Vision” project has been exhibited at the exhibition IMAGINE it’s 2050… by the communication design class of Professor Lucienne Roberts at the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart, which took place in February 2024. The poster will also be exhibited at this year’s ABK Stuttgart Rundgang. It was typeset in Arial Narrow by Monotype and HAL Timezone, published by HAL Typefaces.

From Kaaitheater:

After two seasons in Brussels, Kaaitheater continues the rich collaboration with VUB’s [Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s] Crosstalks around the series of lectures, debates and workshops under the name More-than-human Encounters. For this third edition, we join forces with international partners from both the arts and academia and in kinship with our more-than-human relatives.

The Series of More-than-human Encounters elaborates on different ways of being and different ways of knowledge, on what can be known and what will never be knowable. With the forest, the mountains, and the deep sea as our thinking companions, you are invited to come and discover what lies behind the horizon of human knowledge.

→ In collaboration with KVS (Brussel), Framer Framed (Amsterdam), La Casa Encendida & Artea (Madrid) and Rosendal Teater & The environmental humanities research group at NTNU (Trondheim)

Pauline Sesniac was invited to illustrate this series of events, which was also accompanying the exhibition Charging Myths in the Framer Framed, Amsterdam, through 3D compositions and visual landscapes. The fonts she used are PicNic for “more than”, New Spirit Condensed for “human”, and Apple Garamond Italic for “encounters #3”. The choice of PicNic was inspired by the organic shapes of the elements.

La rueda de la vida (“The Wheel of Life”) is a children's book written and illustrated by Chilean artist Andrea Franco. The story, written in verse, is also a song and tells the story of how different animals feed in a life cycle, and interact with life and death, making “the wheel of life” turn.

Published by Una Casa de Cartón, which provides a commentary on the book (translated from Spanish):

Life comes and goes in its natural cycle, in constant renewal and growth. In this lively journey through life and death, we invite readers to play, sing and laugh in a carnival that travels roads without endings or beginnings. This accordion book encourages play and imagination in young and old readers of text and images.

The typesetting is simple and aims to blend in with the illustrations without overpowering them, allowing for harmony between text and image. The book's title is set in Mazúrquica (v1.0) Regular and the main text in Berenjena, also in Regular weight.

Merchandising visuals designed by Mihailo Kalabić for The Weeknd’s 2022 tour called After Hours Til Dawn.

Man In The Moon is the 1980 studio album by Nektar, and the first after 1977’s Magic Is A Child. The line-up only has keyboard player Alan “Taff” Freeman from that album, but Roye Albrighton is back on guitar after he left to pursue a solo career in 1976.

The band logo and album title are both using Westminster. This font was also used for the 2002 re-issue on CD on the VoicePrint label.

Cover design by Gerd Huss.

The uploaded scans are from Voiceprint’s CD reissue from 2002. Looking at the quality of the CD cover, it was probably taken from a scan of an LP sleeve instead of using the original artwork.

[More info on Discogs]

Front cover

Evolution is a studio album by Nektar released in 2004. It was the first Nektar album since 1977’s Magic Is a Child to feature original drummer Ron Howden, who rejoined other founding members Roye Albrighton and Taff Freeman.

The cover art is by Helmut Wenske. Layout by Phil Smee, using Harry Light for the typography.

[More info on Discogs]

Cover for If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes is an exhibition catalog showing the work of Katja Novitskova. Commissioned by the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) for the Estonian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, it was copublished by Sternberg Press in May 2017. In 2018, a sequel titled If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, Stage 2 was published by the Art Museum of Estonia – Kumu Art Museum.

Both books were designed by Ott Metusala. For the titles and the headings, Metusala chose FF Blur. The titles are composed of different font sizes and with a significant texture game to blend with the textures of Novitskova’s work.

While the cover of the first catalog featured a leopoard, the second one depicts a bee. There are many animal representations in the books in connection with the artist’s vision at the heart of the ecological crisis. We can find wild and genetically modified life forms in the exhibition as on the cover.

From the exhibition notes about the second show:

Stage 2 works from the intersection of big data-driven industries and the expanding domain of seeing in the thick of ecological crisis. The display is an immersive environment inhabited by living machines, graphic charts embedded in synthetic materials, and two-dimensional sculptures of wild and genetically modified life forms. (...)

“If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes,” says the replicant Roy Batty to the maker of his eyes in the sci-fi film Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott. Katja Novitskova and the curator Kati Ilves borrowed the quote for the title of the exhibition in the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017, produced by the Centre for Contemporary Arts Estonia.

Katja Novitskova (b. 1984) is an artist originally from Tallinn, but living and working mainly in Berlin and Amsterdam. Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture, digital technologies, and speculative fiction: she is interested in how the rapidly changing planet is increasingly dependent on various data streams that mediate, preserve, and alter the environment around us in visual form.

Cover for If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, Stage 2

Spread from If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Table of contents and title page from If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Spread from If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Spread from If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Back cover for If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen with Your Eyes, 2017

Title page

Cockroaches: Here, There, and Everywhere by Laurence Pringle presents “a brief introduction to one of the world’s most durable insect species that has survived over 300 million years and thrives almost anywhere in the world”. It was published by Thomas Y. Crowell Co. as part of their Let’s-Read-And-Find-Out Science Books series.

Jacket design with an illustration by James and Ruth McRea

Bickerstaff developed a visual identity for Ostriv Khortytsia (Острів Хо́ртиця), the largest island in the River Dnieper, Ukraine. The project was jointly commissioned from the Office of the President of Ukraine, Metinvest Group, and BigCityLab.

From our interview with designer Ksenia Milchenko:

It wasn’t easy to find a relevant typeface — there is actually a broader problem with general scarcity of serifs supporting the Ukrainian language. Normally, people design new typefaces for projects like this. But we had neither time, nor resources. Tesseract is modern, and it fits very well in terms of image. It has quite sharp and strict forms, yet looks ‘nice’. Tesseract is easy to use — it doesn’t drag all the attention, well balanced with signs and graphics. We limited ourselves to its two styles: Light in the logo, ExtraLight for body text.

I particularly like how elegant the typeface looks in the material. We printed posters using stencil in 5-6 layers of paint, with only two copies of each.

Read the entire article on the type.today website.