This is the 1962 Permabooks edition of Evil Come, Evil Go by “Whit Masterson” – a pen name for the writing partnership of Robert Allison Wade and H. Bill Miller.

The cover features a large, cropped setting of Plain Gothic No. 6011, one of many sans-serif wood types offered by Hamilton Manufacturing Co. in the 20th century. Though there’s a possibility this was composed with photo-type adaptations of the original font, the tight-not-touching letterspacing matches a look common with large wood type, where the sidebearings of each piece of type are often cut as close to the letter as possible. I also enjoy the titling-friendly design of the comma, with a shortened descending stroke to allow for tight linespacing, and a height that matches the horizontal stroke of the ‘E’ beside it.

After spotting this book cover recently at Vintage Bookseller, I used it as an excuse to finally make a typeface page for Plain Gothic No. 6011 here at Fonts In Use.

The supporting type at the bottom and on the back is Alternate Gothic, with some small settings of what looks like Copperplate Gothic running along the spine.

Medúza is a novel by Jarmila Loukotková (1923–2007) from 1973. Shown here is a paperback edition published in 1991 by Československý spisovatel in the Spirála series.

Oldřich Pošmurný (1942–2010) designed the cover, using Gary Gillot’s Embrionic 85. He broke the title into three lines, allowing him to feature three of the font’s wriggly swash caps, apparently in order to reference the snake-haired Medusa.

Via Radek Sidun of Manual of Diacritics, who points out the “lovely hidden ‘uacute’”, with the accent integrated into the cap height.

The title lockup with the tightly spaced and overlayered glyphs from Embrionic is repeated on the title page.

Karel Vaca’s poster design for Konec jedné Evropy (“The End of Europe”) features Marvin with a custom flat hairline accent.

The documentary film from the cycle “Potomci a předkové” (“Descendants and ancestors”) was directed by Karel M. Majda. It depicts the period from 1929 to 1938, recounting the rise of Nazism and the seizure of power in Germany by Adolf Hitler.

See more examples of Marvin used on Czechoslovak posters.

Detail

Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

The good news? Well, at least navigating is easy. For a good amount of time the only thing on the horizon has been a tiny dot that has to be the lighthouse we’re headed towards. Other than that it’s just water. Lots of water. All around us.

The bad news, then? Well, Kaisa isn’t feeling well. Her seasickness has increased in direct proportion to the intensity of the swells. Right now her color is closer to that of the sea underneath us than would be desirable. Taking to land at the last outpost Yttre Borgen proved impossible as the waves along the rocky shoreline would permit nothing of the sort. Now it’s been more than an hour since we made the decision to continue, and there’s no relief in sight for Kaisa before we reach small lighthouse on Märket.

According to our calculations it would take us two hours to paddle to that desolate island from the last outpost. Right now those calculations start to feel overly optimistic. The fact that Kaisa isn’t feeling well is clearly slowing us down.

Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t worry me, but right now our window of calm winds is rapidly closing. Other than my concerns about the wind the weather is close to perfect. The sky is clear and and now at nine PM the evening air is warm without being oppressively so. I try to discern if the wind is growing in its strength, but my deliberations are broken by some strange noises behind me. As I turn around I see Kaisa throwing up on the front deck of her kayak. This is not good.

However, every tragedy tends to have a silver lining, and after Kaisa has paid her dues to Neptune she begins to feel remarkably better. Our speed increases to its normal rate and soon we are able to perceive more and more details in the architecture ahead of us. We’re getting closer.

Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

An hour later we’re standing on firm ground. It’s not a big island by any stretch of the imagination, measuring some 300 meters at its longest and a 100 meters at its widest. The island is also remarkably flat, with the highest point excluding buildings and other man-made constructions no more than three meters above sea level. But in this particular case we’re not interested in any of these geographic features, we’re just extraordinarily exhilarated to have something solid underneath our feet.

The next day we hoist our small flag on the side of the lighthouse. Seeing it sway in the gale wind makes us feel proud – we have achieved something few have. (Incidentally, the same day a taxi boat carrying tourists arrives at the shore of the island, but due to the heavy sea has to turn around after several tries. It fails in doing what two fledgling paddlers had been able to pull off. Only the knowledge that we still have to make it back to the mainland once the storm had set kept our smugness at bay.)

Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

But back to the flag. We felt that out here on this strange little island was exactly where our flag belonged.

The text on the flag reads “Till Ytterskären”, which roughly translated would read “To the Outermost Islands”. I say roughly translated intentionally, as in Swedish there are more than fifteen different words describing various types of islands, whereas in English, at least to the best of my knowledge, has far fewer. Sorry, English, you lose this one!

But most of you are here for type-related content, so I’ll now share with you the details regarding the design of the flag. The main two lines are set in Ambroise Francois drawn by Jean François Porchez, with the “Till” set in Diversa Sans by Dino dos Santos and Pedro Leal. On the Duck side of the flag we have the numbers 2018, and those are set in Narrow Roman Stencil JNL by Jeff Levine.

Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

But now I feel we should return to the island. The reason I chose to call the island strange a bit earlier has partially to do with the topographical features I already wrote about. But it gets much stranger than that. You’re in for both a history lesson as well as a geography one. For the island Märket not only lies right in-between Finland and Sweden, it also belongs to both countries. Divided half and half, in a sense.

And when I say divided, you might picture a border running right across. That’s where you’d be wrong. Märket hosts one of the most peculiar borders on this planet, as it runs like a ribbon tied into a bow, seemingly all over this insignificant rock in the middle of the sea. The reasons for the strange form of the border are historical – back when Finland still belonged to Russia, a lighthouse was built here. Now as we know unfortunately all too well the Russians have not always viewed borders as something changeless, and thus the lighthouse was constructed on what was then the Swedish side. When the borderline was revised later it was agreed that Sweden should receive an equal share of island as the one Finland had now occupied.

Thus if one wants to take a small swim after enjoying a sauna (of course there is a sauna in a Finnish lighthouse!) then one inevitably crosses over from Finland to Sweden, and once more back to Finland before reaching the water. All in the span of less than a 100 meters. But the form of the border is not the end of the peculiarity – this border is also the longest land border between Finland and Sweden. Two countries that share a total border of some 545 kilometers. Now there’s something to ponder on those long nights you lay awake in bed!

Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Our “Till Ytterskären” flag accompanied us to four more lighthouses that summer, each journey worthy its own entry. I’ve included a couple of photographs from those trips as well, but for the stories you should head over to our homepage.

Christoffer Leka, Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Het beest in ons (“The beast in us”) is the title of a special exhibition that was on display from June 2022 through January 2023 at the Museum for Natural History of Rotterdam, which, according to their website, is “a dead serious museum”. For this project, 25 writers across the Netherlands were invited to reflect on the challenges of contemporary human society from the perspective of a chosen animal. While a fox ponders food security, a jaguar comments on framing, and an albatross speaks about homosexual parenting, to give just three examples.

The written texts were taken to the streets of Rotterdam by means of a small truck. Passers-by were invited to read the texts aloud inside the truck in order to record their voices for the museum’s audio guide. Eventually, the exhibition brought together the Dutch authors, the museum exhibits, and the voices of the citizens of Rotterdam. To top it all off an accompanying book was published. The recordings, meanwhile, can be listened to on the museum’s website.

Responsible for the visual design of the whole project was Rotterdam-based Studio Spass, founded by Jaron Korvinus and Daan Mens. The concept is based on three very clear design principles: the silhouettes of animals, bright plain colors, and one typeface, Media Sans by Production Type. Apart from a few cases the silhouettes of the animals are filled with text, and this text consists of the buzzwords of our current societal discourses – a very clever way to graphically combine the two sides of this project.

Media Sans is a good choice to realize this concept: with its extreme x-height and respectively extremely short ascenders and descenders, it allows for very tight line spacing, even with lowercase typesetting. This also makes the nice animation of the type inside the animals ever more convincing, as can be seen on the exhibition’s micro site. Featured in the pictures to this post is almost exclusively Media Sans Bold, but the project made use as well of Media Sans Text, a text-optimized version that’s not officially released yet.

The museum’s truck in the streets of Rotterdam, collecting voice recordings for the exhibition

Passers-by are being invited to choose their favorite animal

Inside the exhibition: the wall display depicts a beetle silhouette filled with buzzwords

Exhibition guide as concertina fold

Cover and spine of the exhibition catalog

Endpapers with a butterfly silhouette

Spread from the exhibition catalog featuring a gold pheasant talking about gender fluidity, written by Selm Merel Wenselaers

Spread from the exhibition catalog featuring an ostrich commenting on free sex, written by Ernest van der Kwast

Detail from the website

Detail from the website, featuring Media Sans and Media Sans Text

Detail from the website with a partial list of the animals, including a brown rat about social distancing, a badger on housing crisis, and a dromedary about water scarcity

Installation in front of the museum

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The youth organisation of Sweden’s social-democratic party (Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Ungdomsförbund, SSU) was founded in 1917 and is the country’s largest entity of that sort. In 2022 it launched a new visual identiy. Responsible for the makeover are Birdh as the content strategists and 25AH as the graphic design agency. Both are based in Stockholm.

The main targets of the redesign were to create a coherent overall appeal, both digital and in the physical world, across a multitude of groups organized on a municipal level, and a fresh approach to a young target group. The resulting means of promotion should communicate in a clear, direct and genuine manner.

The design uses three dominant colors: (socialist) red, white and, interestingly, violet, the latter probably in order to avoid the more shallow plain black. As a fourth color, magenta is used in a few spots to highlight the sender of the message. Illustrative elements display an informal, casual style of drawing. The strongest element to shape the identity, however, is the display typeface: Media Sans in its normal width and bold weight. Lighter weights and Helvetica Now are used for subordinate parts and reading text.

Media Sans was designed by Jean-Baptiste Levée and published by Production Type. It is characterized by a mix of monolinear strokes and such with an extreme contrast that only shows when used in big sizes, and that provides the typeface with a certain crispness. It furthermore sports an extreme x-height (or extremely short ascenders and descenders, if you will). This makes it a very efficient choice for headlines and all sorts of activating typography, including political activism.

Source: www.25ah.se 25AH. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.25ah.se 25AH. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: ssu.se SSU. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: ssu.se SSU. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: ssu.se 25AH. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

From Country and Eastern:

The Swedish jazz guitar giant Göran Klinghagen has arranged some of the classic Swedish folk music tunes and plays them with the German ensemble he has been working with during the last decade. Singer Fola Dada has written new texts to evergreen folk songs and performs them in Swedish, German and English.

Alias Harbour is used throughout, for title type with an amended umlaut that tucks below the cap height.

[More info on Discogs]

Third Ear Studio is a podcast producing company based in Denmark but operating in Sweden too. On their website, they showcase their activities and dozen of podcasts.

This website used Reymund Schröder’s NaN Hyena Noon in its blackest weight for all titles, as well as for its logo, in a customized version with a Th ligature. Lighter weights of Hyena are used for sub-headers and bigger texts while the smaller sizes and UI elements are supported by Colophon's DM Sans and DM Mono.

Third Ear Studio makes a distinctive use of Hyena stacked diacritics, with its accented letters keeping the same height as the unaccented ones and allowing for very tight line-spacing.

Stawka większa niż życie (English: “Stakes Larger Than Life”) is a Polish novel written by Andrzej Zbych (literary pseudonym of Andrzej Szypulski and Zbigniew Safjan), based on the script for a televison play (1965–1967) and a TV series of the same title (1967–1968).

The plot is set during World War II. The main character is Stanislaw Moczulski, a Pole from Koscierzyna, Pomerania, who, because of his deluded resemblance to the German Hans Kloss, was recruited for cooperation by Soviet intelligence (the officer in charge was Colonel Jakubowski, who had Polish roots). Throughout the rest of the war, Moczulski, as an Abwehr officer, gained valuable information for the Soviets as agent J-23 for the People's Guard and People’s Army intelligence under the pseudonym “Janek.” In the Polish People’s Army, he reaches the rank of major, while as Kloss he attains the rank of hauptmann and receives the Iron Cross.

First published in 1969, this is the third edition published by Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, the publishing house of the Polish Ministry of National Defense, in 1989, in three volumes: Drugie Narodziny, Kurierka z Londynu, and Spotkanie na zamku. The covers and title page were designed by Waldemar Żaczek, using New Zelek and what looks like a bold phototype version of Times.

On the title page, the ogonek and the kropka (dot accent) are implemented as negative marks.

Cover of the Spring 2023 Preview

“Bombs in yellow jackets” – that’s how German newspaper DIE ZEIT described the books by März in 1972. In 1969, the then newly founded publishing house with its signal-yellow volumes instantly became the epitome of left-wing politics, avant-garde literature, and pop culture: März Verlag came to stand for “Pop, Porn, Politics”. The März publishing house was the journalistic bogey of the bourgeoisie during the old Federal Republic. In 2021, it was revived by Barbara Kalender and Richard Stoiber.

The old books used Berthold’s Block typeface with a compact umlaut Ä in the all-caps logo. In 2021, the new publisher Richard Stoiber approached astype fonts with the question of whether it would be possible to adapt the Wood Heinz font to replace Berthold Block. Since the re-founding, an adapted version of Wood Heinz from astype fonts has been used – the custom MaerzType. Reprints of backlist titles retain the yellow dust jackets with the old MÄRZ logo. However, titles and subtitles are set in the new MaerzType. The new editions are colorful and varied, and almost always use MaerzType. So do the preview brochures and other promotional material.

Für eine afrikanische Revolution by Frantz Fanon, translated by Einar Schlereth

Bis aufs Blut by Kathy Acker, translated by Johanna David

Power Bottom by Eva Tepest

Manifest der Gesellschaft zur Vernichtung der Männer S.C.U.M. by Valerie Solanas, translated by Nils-Thomas Lindquist

Physical by Andrew McMillan, translated by Mazlum Nergiz and Richard Stoiber

Die Küche der Armen by Huguette Couffignal, translated by Monika Junker-John and Helmut Junker.

Eine Geschichte des amerikanischen Volkes by Howard Zinn, translated by Sonja Bonin

A new edition of Siegfried, with other books – including older titles – in the back

Cover of the Spring 2022 Preview

März at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2022

März: Alles Gute (“all the best”)

Digital and analog flyers for a free talk about Franklin Gothic on October 24, 2022, as part of Type@Cooper and The Lubalin Center’s Herb Lubalin Lecture Series at Cooper Union in New York City.

The flyers are set entirely in various weights and widths of HEX Franklin. The main title is set with the HEX Franklin Tyght variable font for extra-tight letterspacing, including an alternate set of non-overshooting round glyphs intended for similarly tight line spacing.

The physical flyers were printed on various Astrobrights papers in two variants: one with tear-off tabs along the bottom and one without.

Bantam Books, 1968 (reprint). Cover illustration by William Hofmann.

The cover for Brave New World from the same series, with art by Lynn Sweat, uses the same compact typography, featuring a narrow block in Permanent Headline in the top left corner. Karlgeorg Hoefer’s condensed display grotesk was released by Ludwig & Mayer in 1964. It’s distinguished by compact descenders (see y and p), allowing for tight linespacing.

See also Manny Schongut’s cover design for another edition of the same book, published by Harper & Row in 1972.

[More info on ISFDB]

To design the booklet 12 jours à Amiens Métropole (“12 days in Amiens Métropole”) by Mehdi Zannad, Brest Brest Brest used the typefaces Maax Unicase and Maax Rounded by Damien Gautier, both distributed by 205TF.

From Maison de l’architecture:

Through the design and distribution of a drawing guide of these plural architectures, accompanied by the inhabitants, their words and their experiences on the territory, Mehdi Zannad reveals through drawing, these natural sites, these buildings, these constructions and these materials, which shape the cities and the countryside of the metropolis.

[ ... ] Mehdi works in collaboration with a graphic designer, in charge of arranging the drawings to give a map, a route, so that everyone, inhabitants as well as tourists, can seize it to discover Amiens and the surrounding villages. The editorial object will have this format: 22×11 closed format, and 66×44 unfolded format. There will be 5 accordion folds and 1 “rolled” fold to close the map.

Album art for the 1967 Columbia Masterworks release of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra with Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, performing Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra and Music for String Instruments, Percussion and Celesta. The design is uncredited but was likely prepared in-house at Columbia Records.

The cover features a tightly-spaced setting of Akzidenz-Grotesk fett (known as Standard Bold in the US market) with a stripy effect alternating between slightly-offset slices in silver and gold. The extra-sharp acute accent for the ó in Bartók’s name appears to be an after-market creation. The F and i also appear to have been modified for better alignment in Fizdale’s name. The smaller testimonial quotes are set in Helvetica.

The liner notes on the back cover are set justified (presumably on a Linotype machine) in Palatino. The labels on the record itself use the condensed width of Erbar-Grotesk along with a some other workaday sans-serifs like Bell Gothic and Monotype Grotesque.

[More info at Discogs]

Visual identity for the Winter Werkschau 2017/18 at the Hochschule Augsburg – University of Applied Sciences, designed by Kai Bergmann and produced by the Faculty of Design Augsburg. The logotype set in TWK Everett Thin defined some typographical principles that are used throughout all applications: a custom W based on the angle of the slash (/) and the use of the uppercase I instead of 1. The slashes could be repeated and mixed together, generating different patterns.

Source: www.flickr.com Bruce Jamieson. License: All Rights Reserved.

These cassette tape inserts made by Grundig in 1971 come with a terrific Swiss/International-inspired layout. Bold condensed and bold letter shapes provide high information legibility, paired with a sizzling color palette of oranges for the C 60 (and blues for the C 90), contrasted with black.

The large words are set in Permanent Headline, distinguished by its tucked-in descenders. It’s paired with Helvetica Bold.

Via Bruce Jamieson’s collection of tape cassette inserts.

Source: www.45spaces.com HOOK45 / 45spaces. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.45spaces.com HOOK45 / 45spaces. License: All Rights Reserved.

Poster made by Rémy Poncet / Brest Brest Brest for the festival Assis! Debout! Couché! in Nantes (France). The festival is curated by the famous theater and concert hall Le Lieu Unique. The typography features various styles from Bureau Grot, used exclusively in all caps. Printed in two colors on all support material (posters, flyers, etcetera).

Not the first Polish edition of Alfred Döblin's Weimar classic (which is from 1959) but a handsome one, published in 1979 in Czytelnik’s retro series. The Czytelnik logo is deftly set in Stripes while the author and title are in ITC Souvenir (the umlaut does not appear to be standard).

Before Leipziger Antiqua, there was Lipsia-Antiqua. Lipsia is the Latin name of Leipzig, which used to be the center of German book trade and related fields like graphic arts, and still is a hotspot for books and type design.

This ad is taken from the Gebrauchsgraphik issue from September 1928. The same ad was used over the course of several years. While the constructivist owl strikes me as very much modern, the typeface had reached (German) legal drinking age already. It was designed at Wagner & Schmidt in 1911, possibly in response to Bauer’s Kleukens-Antiqua (1910). The matrices were sold to numerous foundries, including Böttger and Klinkhardt in Leipzig, who offered the cast type under the name Lipsia-Antiqua. Other names for the same design included Neuklassisch (D. Stempel AG), Regent-Antiqua (C.E. Weber), or Moderne Renaissance (Haas). See the typeface page for a more extensive list. Here it’s used exclusively in caps, featuring a compact umlaut (Ü) and its peculiar ampersand (&).

Berger & Wirth was a manufacturer of printing inks. Established in 1823, the company from Leipzig-Schönefeld had branches in Berlin (1891), Barmen (1896), Hamburg (1910), Amsterdam (1910), Budapest (1907), Prague (1924), St. Petersburg/Leningrad (1892), and Rio de Janeiro (1925). In GDR times, it was merged into VEB Druckfarben Halle, and the famous name disappeared. The Leipzig operations ultimately closed down in 1997.

The design is credited to “Hofmann”. This could be Walter Hofmann, a Leipzig-based painter and commercial artist active in the 1920s and 1930s. It looks like the client didn’t really have confidence in Hofmann’s modernist owl: A small, less blocky version of the logo is repeated in the bottom left corner.

On July 13 and 14, the students of Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design will present their annual exhibition. Lisa Linz and Maja Redlin developed the visual identity. To announce the event, they designed a series of typographic posters.

Due to the current political climate in Germany we take a stand as an art institution with three distinct political statements:
“We protect the freedom, diversity and independence of art and design”, “We stand at the side of those who are pushed to the edge of society” and “We commit ourselves to a plural togetherness and individual, idiosyncratic ways”. — @burgtypo

Media Sans Bold is used for the statements, arranged in alternatingly left- and right-aligned lines. The information is shown below in caps from Fakt Condensed. The serif used for the smaller text blocks is Eliza. Produced in the school’s print shop, the posters and cards feature gradients in fluorescent Pantone spot colors, offset printed on RecyStar Polar stock.