F Ron Miller has designed many of the DVD packages for The Criterion Collection. His typographic choices are often interesting and we’ve already highlighted a few. This design for the 2014 re-release of A Hard Day’s Night uses Vonness. For many years, David Berlow’s interpretation of Venus was the only digital version of the classic grot with a broad range of weights and widths. That is, until Mars in 2018. (Vonness is inexplicably not shown on the web, but you can request it directly from Font Bureau.)

Criterion ended up with a different design for the release.

Gen Design Studio:

Dom Villas is rooted in the story of the family business—the hard work and dedication that mark the origins of family tradition. This story became an inspiration for the logo and the brand. Therefore we created the character of a Dairy Farmer. The man who works by hand, using the traditional methods, who takes care of his cattle and of the the quality of the final product.

We combined the farmer with a custom-made wordmark that would reflect the purity and originality of handmade products. The predominant use of blue is unusual for cheese in the Portuguese market, which would make Dom Villas stand out in what tends to be a gold-tinted and over-decorated category.

The custom wordmark is a monoline script with a “geometric” look and slight art deco overtones. It takes inspiration from the vintage hand lettering of the Italian 1930s, also very popular in the Portuguese visual culture. Its style corresponds to a handwriting tool – the square stroke ending recalls the broad-nib pen.

Rejected poster proposals for a few gigs in Montréal

Source: janmiddendorp.com License: All Rights Reserved.

“The Dutch high profile design company n|p|k invited Gerard Unger to contribute to their proposal of a bespoke signage system for the Holy Year (2000) in Rome. An event that was estimated to attract 20 to 25 million visitors, its brief was remarkable. What made the assignment extremely interesting to Unger was the requirement that a new type design be developed as the central element of the information system. ‘A specific typeface, …a modern one for the third millennium (and not at all a philological repêchage), but in some way related to the tradition of the city.’ Thus the brief of the organizers, the Agenzia Romana per la Preparazione del Giubileo. Rome is very probably the only European city that boasts an uninterrupted two-thousand-year tradition of road signage. So designing a typeface for Rome was both a prestigious and a delicate job, perhaps, Unger wrote, ‘the typographic equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle.’

“The brief, which explicitly asked for a contemporary typeface, suited Unger well, as he is ‘not an enthusiastic supporter of twentieth-century revivalism’. He set out to make a pragmatic, versatile typeface – a ‘real Unger’ which, somehow, also had to communicate Roman-ness. In other words: a blond design with a Latin heart. For Capitolium Unger chose to take as his starting point the work of the sixteenth-century writing master Giovan Francesco Cresci – notably a lower case alphabet which Cresci drew to accompany the classic roman capital. For some time, Unger played with the idea of making the alphabet into a sanserif – lowercase with initial capitals – tapping into twentieth-century signage tradition. Yet in Rome classic capitals are still the norm, even for contemporary street signs. Eventually, Unger reconciled readability and tradition by choosing an in-between solution: a brisk seriffed roman of classical proportions, to be used in lowercase with capitals.

Source: janmiddendorp.com License: All Rights Reserved.

“After several rounds of improvements and refinements, Unger finalized Capitolium: an unorthodox signage alphabet with a companion version for use in print. Although the project did not plan for the type to be set in caps-only, the capitals would work perfectly in this way: in their sober stateliness, they recall Jan van Krimpen’s hand-drawn titles. The design team worked around the clock, managing to meet the extremely tight dead line; unfortunately the organizing committee of the 2000 Jubilee did not succeed in implementing the information system. Parts of it were used for signalling single sites, but the street signage system envisioned by Unger never materialized. For Unger, this was disappointing but by no means a disaster. It simply meant he had been paid to design an interesting typeface of a sort he might never have made without this assignment; from 2002, when the copyright went back to him, Capitolium was marketed by Unger himself.”

The quote and the images are from Dutch Type, Jan Middendorp’s illustrated compendium of type design in the Netherlands. Sold out since ca. 2007, the book will be made available again through crowdfunding in 2018.

Joe Flory:

Monaco Hotels has stylish boutique hotels in various cities throughout the states, each stamped with their signature style: vibrant and whimsical, with bold pops of color. A new visual identity was created to embrace a more bold, modern look. The distinct characters of the name create a beautiful symmetry, framed by a timeless, geometric shape. Work completed at FINE Design.

The logo features Neutraface caps with a triangle replacing the ‘A’. It’s not clear if this design was used; FINE Design created another identity scheme for Monaco which is currently in use.

“Prototype for a new package of the oldest product of its kind produced in America. It was rejected by the client.” — Gertrude Snyder and Alan Peckolick, Herb Lubalin, 1985

The top and bottom lines of top use a phototype version of Thorowgood Sans Shaded (probably Photo-Lettering’s Sanserif Shade Blockshadow), a typeface Lubalin used often. Ingredients are listed in Benguiat Buffalo Condensed, though the inconsistency (see ‘S’ in “PLUS”) indicates that it may have been was lettered by hand. PLINC’s catalogs show Buffalo with two ‘A’ variants: without top serif and with left top serif. There may have also been a bilateral top serif as it appears in this design and in House Industries’ digitization.

A dancing typeface to illustrate SHOW for visual identity proposal for the Royal College of Art degree exhibit 2016.

The Royal College of Art SHOW is a big event taking place in the college galleries in Kensington and Battersea each year around June. 600 graduating students within art, design and humanities exhibit their best work to date. Summer Studio was invited to pitch with a proposal for the visual identity for the RCA SHOW 2016.

The dancing typeface takes a standpoint in ZIGZAG, a typeface designed by Benoît Bodhuin. After defining a specific and recognisable dance routine for each character in ZIGZAG, the letters were further evolved and animated to dance. The animated typeface works for the many digital formats of the identity. The keyframes of the animation typed in sequence, creates a sense of movement in the printed formats.

The proposal was never realised.

“Book cover designs for a collection of classic art that the publisher rejected. I still like them so here they are anyway.” — Klas Ernflo