In 2020, San Francisco Symphony celebrated the 25th and final season of the acclaimed Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, who has guided the organization into one of the world’s leading ensembles. San Francisco studio Manual was commissioned to update the identity and design a campaign for these remarkable milestones and Thomas’s final season in 2019–2020.

Beatrice Display’s unique high-contrast model caught the eyes of the team at Manual Creative and seemed like a suitable match for SF Symphony. In order to take it to the next level and ensure that the typefaces could be used in more contexts for an updated, robust brand, Sharp Type designed custom optical sizes including Beatrice Headline and Beatrice Deck to be used alongside Beatrice. The typefaces are used throughout the website, on print, and on marketing collateral. On the Beatrice family, the team at Manual Creative writes:

Having just launched when our work began with the symphony, Beatrice struck us as the perfect contemporary typographic expression. Its high contrast, idiosyncratic forms, and overall visual rhythm provided a musical quality to letterforms.

The Desert Music is a work of music for voices and orchestra composed by the minimalist composer Steve Reich (b. 1936). It is based on texts by William Carlos Williams (1883–1963).

Carin Goldberg provided the art direction and design for the 1985 album release by Nonesuch Records. For the cover, she combined a monochrome photograph by Benno Friedman with Eagle Bold.

This all-caps typeface originated in 1934, designed by Morris F. Benton for ATF. It was among Goldberg’s go-to choices: The bold geometric sans with Art Deco overtones appears throughout her work, for example on the cover of a book by poet Raymond Carver from 1987 and later, in the form of David Berlow’s extension, for the Kurt Vonnegut paperback series by Dial Press.

The airily spaced words are arranged in five long justified lines of decreasing size, crossing the hazy sky, slowly floating to the horizon and blending into the desert, where the typography passes on the task of texturizing the surface to the rocks in the foreground. To me, this tranquil cover with its accurate execution is one of the finest works by the great designer from New York.

Carin Goldberg died on January 19, 2023, a few months before her 70th birthday. RIP.

The back cover has a conversation by Steve Reich with Jonathan Cott, set in Futura Light with initials in Eagle Bold. The track listing additionally uses Futura Bold.

The conversation is continued on the inside of the gatefold, followed by notes by the composer. The portraits of Steve Reich and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas are by Deborah Feingold. For their names, Goldberg used a third geometric sans, Metroblack.

[More info on Discogs]