Don’t Wake Roko is an independent game by 400x240 (named after the console’s screen resolution) for the Playdate handheld console, developed with the help of Nico “Path” Paget, with pixel art by Adele Polina and cover art by Jim Dunoyer. Available on itch.io, the game uses Grenat in mixed case for its cover thumbnail and in-game titles.

The Playdate’s 1-bit screen (strictly black and white, with no greyscale) transforms the typeface in an interesting way: its forms are rendered through dithering, breaking letterforms into a pattern of dots that gives them a particular texture. This effect is pushed further in places with the addition of a halftone screen, adding yet another layer of visual grain to the type.

The sans used for smaller text is Eas VHS. 400x240 documented their typographic choices in a devlog post.

Front cover

Moon Safari is the debut album by French electronic duo Air. Featuring the singles “Sexy Boy”, “Kelly Watch the Stars” and “All I Need”, the album was a huge critical success and a landmark title in the downtempo genre. The album design is by Mike Mills.

The artist name uses ITC Pioneer. The A has been modified, with the top left corner of the glyph and the counter being changed to right angles. The length of the shadows have also been extended. All other text on the cover, back cover and inner sleeve use Eurostile.

Back cover

Inner sleeve of the vinyl release by Astralwerks

In 2021, Dave Depper of Death Cab for Cutie released a cover album covering Moon Safari. It seems the designer of the new logo, Katie Geppert, was unaware of the original font, so modified a different font (Sporty Pro Xbold?) to look like ITC Pioneer.

Boogie Nights Halloween flyer, red backside (Instagram version)

Halloween flyers are some of my favorite designs to create because they tend to be fun and creative. This BOO-gie Nights flyer is one of my own personal favorite Halloween flyer designs that I’ve created over the years, thanks to the extremely dramatic composition, costumes, facial expressions, and lighting. The flyer was designed for the Boogie Nights Halloween party presented by DJ Frank G and Gil Cabrerra on Saturday, October 28th, 2023, at Islanders on 151 W. Alder St. in Stockton, California, featuring DJ Manuel C, DJ Frank G, and a special Michael Jackson impersonation performance by QStar.

The design features zombies, witches, demons, vampires, a vampire queen, and Día de los Muertos painted-faced girls. It utilizes the fonts Lycanthrope,Trajan, and Futura in the main section. The Islander’s logo utilizes Hawaiian Punk In addition, Cadeaulx and Century Gothic are found on the DJ Emir Logo tag in the right lower corner.

The Boogie Nights Logo was created utilizing the Lyncanthrope font with multiple layers to emphasize that the word BOOGIE is a play on words BOO-gie by highlighting the “BOO” in gold metalic font color over the eerie goulish green color for “BOOGIE”.

The flyer designs were created by DJ Emir and Extreme Flyer Designs as was the logo design for the DJEmir.com logo.

Boogie Nights Halloween flyer, front side (Instagram version)

Boogie Nights Halloween flyer, back side (Tall poster and flyer version)

Boogie Nights Halloween flyer, front side (Tall poster and flyer version)

MovieCorder Model 126

The MovieCorder is a line of compact VHS camcorders that was produced in Japan for Realistic, a consumer electronics brand by retailer RadioShack. It was launched around 1987.

The logo uses oblique Lee (VGC, 1972) in CamelCase and with added stripes. The typeface designed by Leo Weisz apparently was chosen because of its use for the VHS logo.

MovieCorder logo on leather bag

MovieCorder Model 151

MovieCorder 8 Model 161

MovieCorder Model 100

MovieCorder Model 126 with bag

Zona SDQ/MCR is used here in deliberate contrast to the elegance of Palatino. Where Palatino carries classical proportion, calligraphic grace, and literary heritage, Zona SDQ speaks in a sharper, engineered voice – contemporary, constructed, unapologetically digital.

This tension defines the spirit of One Point Six, a Manchester-based design studio active during the 2000s.

Lunenburg Academy is one of Nova Scotia’s most iconic public buildings, a designated National Historic Site overlooking the harbour. In 2018, the former school began a new chapter, becoming home to the Lunenburg Branch of South Shore Public Libraries.

The challenge was to create a welcoming, contemporary public library within a protected heritage structure, honouring its past while meeting modern accessibility and public-use standards.

Fathom Studio (formerly Form:Media and Ekistics) worked closely with library staff, town officials and contractors to shape the new environment. Interior colours and materials were chosen to complement the Academy’s historic character, while standing up to the demands of a busy public space.

The signage and wayfinding system drew inspiration from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century academic traditions. Referencing felt banners and pennants associated with school pride, the team created sectional markers – adult, children and youth – to identify the book stacks. Brim Narrow was used prominently across these elements, as well as for room numbers applied as cut vinyl to interior transoms. The accompanying condensed gothic is Knockout No. 27.

Interpretive elements celebrating the career of William J. Roué, designer of Bluenose, Lunenburg’s famous fishing schooner, formed an additional narrative layer within the space.

The project was commissioned by the Town of Lunenburg and realized in 2016–2018. The experiential graphic design and interpretive planning (signage) was in the hands of Fathom Studio, with John deWolf serving as project manager and experiential graphic design lead and Robert Currie doing the research. The architecture and interior design was carried out by Ekistics Planning & Design, featuring Chris Crawford (lead architect), Rebecca MacKenzie (project lead / intern architect), and Julian Boudreau (design). Eye Candy Signs fabricated the signs.

National Children’s Museum is a vibrant, interactive museum dedicated to inspiring curiosity and learning for children and families through playful STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math) exhibits and programs. The brand identity, developed by Ogilvy, uses both Halyard Display and Halyard Text across all applications.

The Tinkering Corner is a hands-on activity space within the museum. To increase visibility and establish a clear point of entry, a series of glass wraps were created along the exterior walls. Typography is pushed into a more expressive mode through playful letter compositions, layered patterns, and high-contrast color. The overall design reflects the spirit of tinkering and discovery while serving as both a visual marker and a wayfinding element.

Team: Emilee Schroeder, Akanshya Upadhyay

In a Baroque church in the canton of Jura, the artistic duo Boudry/Lorenz has created a rollercoaster that also serves as a sound piece voiced by Colin Self.

The visual communication gives a feeling of psychedelia in reference to the sculpture. The geometry of the kaleidoscope could be a nod to the structure of the luna park ride, or the echo of Self’s lament in the space.

Making full use of the variable capacities of Purple Haze, the design uses several weights and instances overlaid on top of each other, and printed in a restricted set of spot colours, creating additional tones as a result of the transparency of the inks. The supporting typeface is an early version of Display Grotesk, designed by Chi-Long Trieu and set to be released with Dinamo.

When things go down, hopefully they go up straight after.

Slow & Low is Chicago’s largest lowrider festival. This curated community-cultural public sphere exhibition explores and presents Lowrider culture as an original form of American folk and contemporary art. The customized car becomes a way of expressing beauty and self-expression by owners, master craftspeople, and innovative mechanics, through modifications including wire wheel rims with whitewall tires, custom pinstriping and upholstery, airbrush muralism, and other contributing visual aesthetics and material objects.

Lowriding began in the 1940s when Mexican American veterans in southern California used their World War II mechanical training to modify cars, especially Chevys, so they rode “low and slow” rather than “hot and fast.” During the Chicano Movement of the 1970s, lowriders took on political roles through car clubs that offered community services and embraced pro-pueblo imagery like flowers, warriors, and geometric designs drawn from Indigenous Mexican stories. These “mobile canvases” used style as resistance, echoed in the Pachuca/o fashion that emerged as a symbol of rebellion.

That same spirit of crafted expression extends into the Slow and Low festival’s visual identity.

Respira made such an impact on past Slow & Low projects that it became part of the visual language people now associate with the festival. For the 2025 edition, the design team pushed the system forward and leaned even more into Sharp Type, customizing Respira to bring in a warmer, marker-drawn feel for the headlines.

It was paired with Cordier Script and Rosalie to amplify the hand-lettered, lowrider-forward voice the curators were aiming for. Together, the combination honored Chicano typographic lineage without imitating it, giving the full civic-scale identity a grounded, expressive backbone.

Design direction and design by Nick Adam at Span, with design and animation by Kevin Moreland and illustration by Alec Hudson. Curatorial work by Lauren M. Pacheco, Peter Kepha, and Edward Magico Calderon. 2025 Day of Photographers: Ferny Ruiz, Alfonso Monroy, Carmen Ordoñez, and Melissa Reyes. Design media photography by Edward Magico Calderon, Max Herman, Nick Lipton, Katrina Nelken, and Mike Pocious

The fourth edition of BoCA (Biennial of Contemporary Arts) took place in 2023. Lisbon and Faro were the cities hosting a new and effervescent program from 2 September to 15 October.

Between commissions, world and national premieres by both established and emerging artists, performing in their own language or taking risks to create for other registers, BoCA built its 4th edition on the idea of “Invisible Present”.

Always aware of the current times – cultural/artistic, social and political – artistic director John Romão said he ‘wants to give visibility to living things that are not seen, either because of social, political, cultural, economic, legal or technological conditioning, or because we premeditatedly don't want to recognise the existence of otherness, to validate identities that inhabit the margins’. It is with this desire that the program reflected on issues related to the migrant crisis or gender identity, claiming the physical presence of what is not seen.

BoCA 2023 used two primary colors, gray and yellow, throughout its identity. It used one primary typeface within its permanent, geometric and mutable logo: Neureal by Laura Csocsán (released on ECAL Typefaces) – including for titles and descriptions. LL Replica by Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs (released with Lineto) was used for displaying longer texts within the newsprint pamphlet and for smaller information.

Since 2010, the AUTO MATIC OPEN has been an annual open air festival for electronic music in Augsburg, Germany. For the 2022 edition, MMW Studios created a black-and-white identity based on patterns and referencing gritty ’90s rave parties visuals. The b&w aesthetics is reminiscent of cheap photocopied flyers.

The typographic choice reinforces the ’90s techno scene references with Eurostile and Forward used in tandem, always in all cap. Both fonts share very square curves, even if Eurostile does it in a way subtler way than Forward with its straight sides. Forward is often used in a dazzling pattern-in/pattern-out way. MMW created a monogram used almost like a logo composed from the three initials, with the A and the M embracing the upper curve of the rotated O.

If you zoom in on the attendants’ wrists, you can see the custom wristbands featuring the fonts.

6th printing

Seymour Chwast’s Blimp was available from Photo-Lettering in three variants. Blimp A – featuring letterforms filled with a gradient of stripes – was used for a paperback edition of The Invisible Man. The cover art is by Alex Gnidziejko.

5th printing, 1970

UENO a.k.a. Maurizio Mazzenga is a Rome-based multi-instrumental, music composer
who moves through electronic music, audio/video projects, soundscapes and
soundtracks. He’s also a member of Mokadelic with whom he composes music for international movies, TV series (Gomorrah) and commercials (for Volkswagen and Bottega Veneta).

D.C.M.P. (Dancefloor Cleaning Maintenance Program) (Absolute Records, May 2023) was the first release – a 6 tracks EP written, recorded and produced by UENO. Made with few and relatively simple sonic elements, the album wants to be a post pandemic dynamic booster with a bidimensional feel. Reset and restart.

Crosby Studio is a branding and design company based in New York City. In 2022, Crosby was given a fresh look and rebrand designed by Cul De Sac.

The logotype uses the Black weight of Central Type’s Deacon. It’s set in all caps aside from the modified lowercase y.

Headlines are set in both Editorial New as well as various other weights of Deacon. The Crosby Studio website utilizes Simon Mono for body type and other small details.

The main headline is a layered combination of Puffin Arcade Liquid, Nerf, Wipe, and Loadout.

Dutch type designer Pieter van Rosmalen has shown a long-time fascination with pixels and modular display fonts. His BlahBlah (2000–2021) is a brick-by-brick interpretation of the American Gothic. Quokka (2019–2021) “took shape by duplicating and layering the same bitmap letters in Adobe Photoshop”. Both are available from CakeType, a boutique label for distributing some of his early typefaces. Alterego, started in 2001 and released in 2018 with Bold Monday, is another design that evolved from layering bitmap letters on top of each other and subsequently playing with transparency and layer sequence.

Van Rosmalen’s most extensive series of bitmap fonts to date is Puffin Arcade (2012–2021). Its twelve members are based on the heaviest weight of Puffin Display Soft, which in turn is a spinoff of Puffin (a revision and extension of the earlier Pinup). With the exception of Foozle, all individual styles can be combined in layers for chromatic effect.

That’s exactly what Julika Altmann, designer at DIE ZEIT, did for an article by Florian Eichel that celebrates forty years of (Super) Mario. Each of the multicolor headlines is rendered in four of eight styles from Puffin Arcade: Regular, Chrome, Dither, Liquid, Loadout, Nerf, Warp, and Wipe. This was done by including the text four times, positioning the elements on top of each other via CSS, and hiding the decorative duplicates via the aria-hidden attribute from the accessibility API (think screenreaders and other assistive technology).

Puffin Arcade Regular also serves for secondary single-color headings and for the scores of the interactive mini games included in the article. The text typefaces are Jakob Runge’s Franziska and TypeTogether’s Tablet Gothic, used for the online edition of the newspaper since 2014.

An overview of Puffin Arcade’s style range from the printed specimen booklet by Bold Monday

Jump menu to the three sections, or levels, of the article

Puffin Arcade Regular, Nerf, Chrome, and Loadout for “Der Retter”

“How many coins can you collect in 5 seconds?”

“Der Held” combines Puffin Arcade Regular, Nerf, Warp, and Loadout.

“Der Wandelbare” combines Puffin Arcade Regular, Nerf, Dither, and Loadout.

“Test your reaction time ”

The style range of Puffin Arcade as presented on the Fontstand website

The Family in the White House by William Hirsch and Maurine Dawson is a comedy album released in 1963 on Kent Records. It is not a historical account of a specific family residing in the White House, but rather a record of comedic material.

[More info on Discogs]

For Glasgow’s TRNSMT 2025, Alias Ano is used for the logotype and Instagram-friendly graphic posters. Ano is also used across the website and social media.

DJ Charlie Hedges

In 1968, Collier Books commissioned Seymour Chwast with the cover design for an edition that brings together the two famous works by Henry David Thoreau, his memoir Walden (1854) and the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (1849).

Chwast chose to depict a scene from life in the woods, or rather, life at the pond: it prominently features one of the bullfrogs, who, as mentioned in chapter V on solitude, “trump to usher in the night.”

For the typography, he specified an all-caps setting of Halftone for “Walden”. This typeface was shown in the 1893 specimen of Marder, Luse & Co., a type foundry based in Chicago. Originally evenly distributed, the horizontal shading here tapers out towards the top. The sturdy serif with the dark caps is Consort’s Bold Condensed style.

Thoreau was born on this day in 1817. Two hundred eight years later, civil disobedience is still urgently called for.

Jeff Klak is an independent magazine published annually in France since 2014. Each issue is dedicated to a different topic, which follows the verses of the popular French nursery rhyme “Trois Petits Chats”. Each verse of the song is interpreted in a manner that is both free and not entirely illogical.

For its ninth issue, the chosen theme was “Lait de Vache” (cow milk). The articles in the magazine were thus dedicated to the notions of ingestion, digestion, assimilation (of food or knowledge), excretion, and related topics. Some articles talked more directly about cows, milk or lactation.

For this issue of the magazine, two custom typefaces were designed by Ariel Martín Pérez, of which the prototypes can be seen on the cover and on the inside pages: Azabache and Tanklager (by now published by Tunera Type Foundry as open-source fonts). As the typefaces were designed at the same time as the layout, the effects on the page of any change could be seen quite easily.

The Tanklager typeface was modified with a Python filter called Microbe (published by NaN) and a rounding filter in Glyphs. This allowed the designers to select a range of increasingly degraded versions of Tanklager from InDesign’s font menu, that represent the letters being digested and disaggregated into particles, and which allowed to create gradients on the page without overlaying any pattern on the typeface.

Several modified versions of the letter H in “LAIT DE VACHE” were also created so the title printed on the upper corner of the magazine would create a flipbook animation effect (the bar of the letter H extends and coils like an intestine).

Other typefaces used on this issue are Archivo Narrow by Omnibus-Type and Miller Text, a clean, readable typeface by Matthew Carter which is perfect for setting long texts). Sligoil Micro (also designed by Ariel Martín Pérez and published by Velvetyne Type Foundry) was used for some key information.

Front cover

Wasp is a science fiction novel by British author Eric Frank Russell, originally published in 1957. The edition here was published in 1971 by Bantam Books. The cover artwork is by Gene Szafran.

The title and author’s name use Benguiat Laurent with a Psychemat effect. Anzeigen-Grotesk is used for the words “SCIENCE FICTION BY” and the tagline on the back cover. The tagline on the front cover, and the synopsis on the back cover, use News Gothic Condensed.

[More info on ISFDB]

Back cover