The cover photo of the Golden Gate Bridge is by Joe Norton.

A classic Columbia Records LP cover for Tony Bennett’s 1962 album I Left My Heart in San Francisco, featuring Normande Italic.

The design uses the high-contrast fat face for all text on the front cover, from the city name to the song titles, echoing 19th‑century display types.

The images show different pressings and crops of the sleeve, all retaining the same typographic hierarchy.

[More info on Discogs]

Title and artist’s name are shown in three lines of alternating colors. The colors are echoed in the slashes that separate the song names. Note also the sign painters’ quotes.

The back cover of this US pressing pairs Univers Italic for the bigger lines with Akzidenz-Grotesk a.k.a. Standard for the liner notes and track listing.

The back cover of the British release uses Gill Sans Italic and Monotype Grotesque. It was printed and made by the E.J. Day Group, London.

Garbage. The Saga of a Boss Scavenger in San Francisco by Leonard (Lenny) Stefanelli was published by University of Nevada Press in 2017. The rotated title in tracked-out caps from Alternate Gothic is paired with Gotham XNarrow for the subtitle.

The City of San Francisco produces one million tons of waste per year and has no space for disposal, physically or legally, within its forty-seven square miles. Here waste management companies have wrestled with logistical challenges for decades, and yet regular garbage collection services have never stopped, except one day after the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Leonard (Lenny) Stefanelli has been a part of that ever-evolving industry for sixty-two years.

Sidewalk street name marker plaques, Market Street in San Francisco. These were likely installed in the very early 1970s, as part of the re-covering of Market Street following the construction of subways underneath it.

The all-caps lettering appears to use Chelmsford, a copy of Optima that’s distinguished by the stroke extension at the top of A. According to Mark Simonson, it was “produced by Addressograph-Multigraph (AM) in the seventies for their phototypesetting machines.”

On the official theatrical release poster, Periódico Display UltraBlack is used in all caps for the title. The blurbs are set in Baskerville Original 120, with credits in Akzidenz-Grotesk Condensed.

Illustrator and designer Akiko Stehrenberger was commissioned to create two distinct posters for Joe Talbot’s 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco.

The posters – while having similar aesthetic styles – use different typefaces. The first poster features Periódico, and the second Caslon Graphique. Both use tight and blocky styling to give the film a 1970s feel.

[More info on IMDb]

This alternative poster features a centered and tight Caslon Graphique.

Union Square is the vibrant heart of San Francisco and an international destination where visitors come to enjoy exceptional retail experiences, luxury hotels, world-class cultural institutions, and great public spaces found only in the City by the Bay.

A new brand was designed to match the lively energy of the environment. The unique people, businesses and experiences were the inspiration behind the identity. A vibrant color palette, paired with classic and quirky font families, and graphic elements, set the stage for an adaptive brand that can continue to evolve as the Square emerges into its next chapter.

The logo, meant to represent Union Square being a gathering place for a diverse set of people, pairs together Avenir Next and Magnat Head. To contrast the playfulness of Magnat, Avenir is used for the word UNION. This allows for a more serious, and trusted tone, while the bold, even characteristics of the font allow for the letters to have pops of color without losing legibility.

The main star of the identity is Magnat. The swooping tail of the Q and the funky leg of the R give the logo extra character. With an extensive family – including text, head and poster weights – the typeface can flex from sophisticated to spunky, and has just the right balance of classic and whimsy to represent a unique place such as San Francisco’s Union Square.

View the full case study on Behance.

Wedge Gothic aka Japanet or Japanette, used in all lowercase letters for the cover of Six San Francisco Poets, a compilation with works by Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Brother Antoninus. Edited by David Kherdian and published by his Giligia Press, Fresno, in 1969.

A bicolor use of Mierop Ginger Snap on the cover of Sausalito Heliport. Recorded with her backing band, the Gentle Reign, and released in 1969, it’s the final album by Gale Garnett (b. 1942) who later devoted herself to writing and acting.

The cover design by Lloyd Ziff superimposes a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge by Bruce Steinberg with a band portrait taken at Sausalito Heliport. Ginger Snap is used in its shaded style; once with red letterforms and a yellow shade, and once with reversed colors for the title. Craig Mierop’s typeface had been released just earlier that year, and also appeared on the cover of the Greatest Hits album by Californian band Country Joe & The Fish. In this use, the geometric display face with its slot and drill hole counters appears at a size that is maybe a tad too small to really shine.

[More info on Discogs]

The back cover typography is set in no-nonsense Akzidenz-Grotesk.

Detail of the title typography

ITC Novarese (1980) with its peculiar mix of roman caps with an italic lowercase, for the cover of Jack Fritscher’s “Memoir-Novel of Gay Liberation in San Francisco 1970–1982” [Fritscher]. First published in 1990 by Knights Press, this is the cover of the 20th anniversary edition from Palm Drive Publishing, 2010.

Super High Right Now is a psychedelic band from the San Francisco Bay Area. For their 2019/2020 concert season, I collaborated with artist Maya Meissner to create a series of posters that combine collage images, typography, and extremely vibrant color combinations.

Cover design inspired by vintage postcards and the architectural letters of the San Francisco Bay Area. Features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art from and about the region. Available for purchase from ZYZZYVA.

Conference guide for Square One (SQ1), an annual design conference held by Advance Designs. The guide features workshop, daily schedules, and conference guidelines,
20+ designers, panels, studios, and galleries involved in this 3-day conference experience which was held in San Francisco. Additionally, it includes a detailed guide of transportation, food, and sites around San Francisco.

Design: Christian Ortiz, Bethany Chan, All Day Dreaming
Risograph printed by Platform
104 pages, 4.9″×7.9″

The Match Book showcases a collection of over 150 matchbooks collected by Randy Shaw, founder of the Tenderloin Museum [in San Francisco]. Mucho designed the book to showcase the fronts and backs of the collection at actual size. The cover is constructed from craft paper, foil stamped and blind embossed with a typical matchbook shape. The spine of the book is created from strike material so it can be used to light a match.

Rather than attempt to mimic the vintage lettering or typography of the matchbooks featured within the book, Mucho opted for a purely contemporary approach for the cover and typeface choices. The title is set in SangBleu Empire, whose sparkling contrast and angular details play up the foil stamping. The plainspoken Suisse Int’l, also from Swiss Typefaces, is used throughout, allowing the imagery to take center stage and not competing with their own eclectic letterforms. I like the choices — the only thing that could improve them is if they sourced typefaces made in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Overall, the book is a beautiful thing, with a great lay-flat binding that you really need to experience in person.

Artforum was first published in San Francisco in June 1962, “as a mouthpiece for West Coast artists who felt overlooked by the mainstream New York–based art press”. It moved to New York in 1967. In a great article for Art Practical, Gwen Allen set the stage for the logo design by James Robertson with info from his partner, Bruce Montgomery.

Artforum’s design and logo were created by a young graphic designer named James Robertson, who was then teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. The Artforum logo and the magazine’s square shape reflect the influence of the Swiss style of graphic design, pioneered during the 1950s by Josef Müller-Brockmann and Emil Ruder. Swiss design was rooted in the principles of objectivity, utility, and, perhaps above all, legibility. Sans serif typefaces, stripped of their excrescences as if to reveal their most basic alphabetical form, were believed to be more legible and hence more suitable for relaying public messages because they would not distract the reader with “decorative feet and growing and diminishing thickness of the up and down strokes [of roman typefaces].”

The Artforum logo is a condensed, bold version of the Berthold Akzidenz font, a notable fact, considering how difficult it was in 1962 to order the fonts favored by the Swiss school through local European foundries. (This was about to change: Spartan Typographers in Oakland began carrying the Helvetica font just a few months after the Artforum logo was designed.) Robertson created his logo by hand with a razor blade and adhesive. The rest of the magazine was set in News Gothic, an American sans serif designed in 1907 by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders. News Gothic, while not used by Swiss designers, was known for its geometric look and had more affinity to the Swiss aesthetic than other American sans serifs. Since Artforum was printed with hot-metal type methods, the choice of News Gothic was most certainly guided in part by the availability of that font at the Pisani Press, which had a limited variety of molds for casting type.

Contrary to this interview, Anzeigen-Grotesk (Haas, 1943), not Akzidenz, appears to be a match for the logo. That aside, condensed grots like Akzidenz, Anzeigen, and Aurora were used quite frequently long before Helvetica Condensed and Helvetica Compressed hit the scene in the mid 1960s.

Sears Fine Food is a San Francisco restaurant that has served Swedish pancakes on Powell Street since 1938. This newspaper ad appeared in 1960. “Nationally famous for our 18 little pancakes…” was part of their ad copy for decades (e.g. 1949, 1990).

Jennifer Morla, San Francisco Airport Commission Annual Report, 1993.

For the 1993 San Francisco International Airport annual report, Jennifer Morla was tasked with creating an annual report that emphasized numbers to highlight the positive economic impact the airport had on Bay Area services and employment.

The die-cut cover modifies OCR-B by Adrian Frutiger to create a stencil effect. The interior spreads feature clever infographics that communicate the airport’s fiscal contributions.

In July 2018, Jennifer Morla donated her archive to Letterform Archive. A monograph of her work, Morla : Design, is Letterform Archive’s second publication.

Book Design / Interactive Installation. Advanced Transmedia Studio / MediaTecture Class

The Symbionese Liberation Army was a hardcore, left-wing group of Berkeley radicals whose formation occurred between 1973 and 1975. The group committed bank robberies, two murders and other acts of violence culminating into a Los Angeles shootout with the LAPD that decimated an entire block near Watts. Led by a militant escaped convict, Donald DeFreeze, the SLA became internationally notorious for the notable kidnapping and brainwashing of American heiress Patty Hearst. The SLA’s rise and fall captivated the media and the country’s attention, even garnering a following of those supportive of their cause.

It is important to emphasize the societal temperature of the time. The 345 page book opens with a retrospective into the cultural unrest of the sixties, which permeated to the radical seventies, setting the stage for the birth of the SLA. One of the major challenges is designing a system highlighting the unpredictability of the group. By forming strategic chapter breaks within the structure, it create a sense of unpredictability within the sequential flow of the story. These chapter breaks includes a catalogue of radical press artifacts along with SLA communique documents to name a few. Furthermore, the book introduces readers to individual examples of extremism from current and historical cases. Excerpts from the book The Voices of Guns by Paul Avery and Vin McClellan is juxtaposed with curated content from the book, Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us, by Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko. This juxtaposition offers a broader insight on the psychological factors, stressors, and motive of individual and group extremism. By presenting some similar and contrasting views on radicalism, it engages readers to ask the essential question; liberator or terrorist?

The interactive installation component of the book sheds light on the media frenzy over the kidnapping and brainwashing of Patty Hearst. The installation served as an opportunity for users to experience the realities of the chaos brought forth by the SLA. The Symbionese Liberation Army grew from an escalating discontent with the status quo by voicing a powerful rallying cry that promises revolution. Whether their actions were justified or not, one thing is clear, their revolution was televised.

Mentors/Instructors: Brad Bartlett, Miles Mazzie, Ivan J. Cruz
Consultants: Sherlan Abesamis, Matt Adams

*A class project from ArtCenter College of Design during the summer of 2017.

Papa November used to be a place for very good coffee and conversation. Sadly, it closed on October 31st, 2017.

Lowell Herrero (1921–2015) was an illustrator and designer who co-founded San Francisco agency Butte, Herrero & Hyde in the 1950s. His true love was painting and he retired from commercial art in the 1990s to paint rotund people, landscapes, and cats. This poster depicting Coit Tower advertises a 1970 show of his paintings at Nut Tree in Vacaville, California. The title is in a (perhaps hand-rendered) Baby Fat by Milton Glaser.

Would the yellow type shadow be better on the other side, given the position of the sun?

“Lowell Herrero paints for love, fun and money at 716 Montgomery Street, San Francisco.”

Jwelch5742, IMDb:

Three brother bears awkwardly attempt to find their place in civilized society, whether they're looking for food, trying to make human friends, or scheming to become famous on the internet. Grizzly, Panda and Ice Bear stack atop one another when they leave their cave and explore the hipster environs of the San Francisco Bay Area, and it's clear the siblings have a lot to learn about a technologically driven world. By their side on many adventures are best friend Chloe (the only human character in the cast), fame-obsessed panda Nom Nom, and Charlie, aka Bigfoot.

An infographic map that compares the rent prices in SF to private bus stop from SF to Silicon Valley.