A weekend of sound experiments: In 2023, musicians, tinkerers, and sound researchers gathered at the Rotunde Bochum for concerts, workshops, and discussions on ambient and drone music. A festival for open ears—and a place for exchange, networking, and new perspectives in electronic music. We developed a visual identity for the second edition of modus festival in collaboration with Eurorack Ruhr. With the exception of the pre-existing modus wordmark, all typography is in ABC Whyte.

TT Supermolot Neue is the signature font of SaiPa. From Wikipedia:

Saimaan Pallo (SaiPa) is an ice hockey team in the Finnish Liiga. They play their home games at Kisapuisto in Lappeenranta, Finland. SaiPa has many nicknames, such as “The Sputniks”, “Sputnik”, “Miracle of the East” and “Eastern Giant.”

The all-caps brush script seen in this application and the one shown below is Flood.

Northeast Airlines began service to Los Angeles on October 1, 1969. Los Angeles would remain the airline’s only west coast destination until it was acquired by Delta Airlines in 1972.

From the George M. Foster Timetable Collection at Northwestern University's Transportation Library.

The 71st Rencontres de Lure, titled “Lure et compagnie” (Lure and co.) was a tribute to the richness of the individual characters that make up an ensemble.

The programme was created fanzine-style to echo the idea of collective work, which was the central theme of last year’s session: copy machine look, rough hand-drawn letters, very simple hierarchy, a single font family (BTP from A is for fonts) and minimum size variation. However, since diversity and inclusivity were also a strong subject, several inclusive glyphs from various fonts can be found everywhere as little stickers stuck where needed in the text. The goal was to make them voluntarily visible and disruptive, as a mockery of criticism about their legibility or discretion in texts.

On the cover beautiful ribbons allowed people to draw their own glyph, sign or letter, acting as a metaphor of the bonds that binds us all together.

Moki by Benoît Bodhuin is used together with Agrandir by Pangram Pangram (Latin) and Kil Hyung-jin’s Pretendard (Hangul) for Disability Art Week.

From design studio Everyday Practice’s website:

Disability Art Week in Seoul is a laboratory for discursive exploration and a venue for theory-to-practice linkages that develops key themes and unique perspectives in contemporary disability art while building its own creative methodologies and aesthetics. This year’s event featured a diverse program of domestic and international lectures, round tables, workshops, and exhibitions under the theme of ‘Disability Art Manifesto’.

Everyday Practice strived to visualize the concept of ‘all’, encompassing disabled and non-disabled people, through the image of letters of different shapes and boldness gathering and dispersing to form a single sentence. The rather heavy title of ‘Manifesto’ was made more friendly and lighthearted by applying bright key colors.

The rather fine cover to the encyclopaedic bus and coach timetables for the GDR in winter 1964/65. It is very much in the style of Socialist Modernism. Produced in association with the railways, the Deutsche Reichsbahn, it was published by the “Buchdienst Berlin Versandbuchhandlung des Berliner Volksbuchhandels”.

Tucked into the Winter 1964/65 East German GDR bus and coach timetable is this fine atlas showing sectional maps of the country and the many bus and coach routes. As well as atlas pages there are occassional photographs and blank pages for notes.

The typography features all three geometric grotesks that were commonly available in the GDR: on the cover, “Fahrpläne” is set in caps from the schmalfett (bold condensed) style of Fundamental-Grotesk, designed by Arno Drescher and first cast by the Ludwig Wagner foundry in Leipzig. It’s paired with two weights from Super-Grotesk – which is also a design by Drescher, issued by Schriftguss in Dresden. The sans shown in the image below is probably the rarest of the trio: Rhythmus is a geometric sans produced in-house at Schelter & Giesecke in Leipzig. All three designs were first cast in the 1930s. After the war, they were continued by VEB Typoart.

The text shown on top the silhouette of East Germany is set in halbfett and fett styles from the Rhythmus family. Note the Ü with umlaut dots integrated into the cap height and the ch ligature in the first line.

The maps show the bus and coach routes as well as the national railway system. This page also has a photograph of “Tankstelle Sangerhausen” – the petrol station at Sangerhausen – with the caption set in Kurier, a brush script by Herbert Thannhaeuser. Like Rhythmus, it originated at Schelter & Giesecke in the 1930s.

A very period offering this – a 1967 timetable leaflet for the X95 ‘express coach’ service almost linking both Newcastles (Upon Tyne and Under Lyme) but running from Tyneside to Hanley in a very ‘express’ eight hours! There was a pair of workings, Friday overnight and a daytime trip on Saturday, running via Durham, Darlington, Catterick, Leeming, Ripon, Harrogate, Leeds, Dewsbury, Barnsley, Bakewell, Buxton and Leek. The leaflet is issued on behalf of a long list of “Principal” operating companies that include orthern General Transport Co. Ltd., United Automobile Services, West Yorkshire Road Car, Yorkshire Woollen District, Yorkshire Traction, Lancashire United and Potteries Motor Traction; I can't for a moment image all 'helped out' but one suspects the licence received agreement from all the operating territories it passed through on this pre-Motorway jaunt.

The graphics are great; illustrations capturing the feel of both Tyneside and, of course, the Potteries who are represented not by stately landmarks but – pottery! The varying typefaces, including what appears to be Cooper Black, add to the contemporary feel. Smaller type is in Monotype Grotesque. The bold italic is probably lettering, with distant similarities to Charter Oak.

Poster for the exhibition Studio? Practices? (Arbeitstitel) at Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin, put on by the students of Olaf Nicolai’s class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Designed by Access All Areas Studio, Carina Güttler and Noëm Held and set in HAL Matex by HAL Typefaces (studio hanli), printed by Herr & Frau Rio.

For every season since 1999, the Festival Marsatac takes place in Marseille, France, during June. Shown here is the artistic direction for the 2022 edition, created by Bortkletlend. This cool and colored visual system is based on a pair of fonts, Bouuuuuh Carnage and Gustavo, both from lift-type.

This poster was designed for the Class for Performative Arts on the occasion of the yearly Rundgang exhibition at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig.

It functions as a timetable, showing the performances that were happening during these days. Here is how the performance class described their program called Reflectors Hub:

The class for performative arts of Prof. Isabel Lewis and Lissy Willberg invites you to linger, rest, and play, in and around the idea of the fountain to explore principles of publicness, community, and accessibility. How can the power structures and colonial inscriptions inherent in this form be questioned, rethought, and reflected upon artistically?

Reflectors Hub, like the fountain, is a place of encounter and communication between different beings. In live music sessions, performances, screenings, installations and guided body practices the fountain is evoked, tapped into, and reflected upon.

A collective movement piece moves fluidly and playfully through HGB. Bodies rise and fall together, ripple around in gentle waves and liquefy in constant motion. From time to time there is stillness to rest and gather strength to shoot up again. Moments of exchange are found. Bodies become a vibrating network in which each body is always aware of co-creation and co-existence. Sometimes our paths may cross and we merge into one big drop, and while we merge, we already separate again and perhaps become a fountain, a Reflectors Hub, an endless bubbling spring of variations.

These ideas also served as inspiration for the design. DaVinci stands for the liquidity, the movement, the playfulness. The background is extracted from a picture that shows the movement of a water surface, taken by Alexandra Möllner. It is combined with a technical drawing of a fountain. The two pictures merge together into one background that interacts with the typography on it.

Website for Global Angst designed by strobo B M using TWK Everett by Nolan Paparelli. Global Angst is a program in the framework of the Spielart Theaterfestival in Munich, Germany. More information on the Global Angst website.

Everett in use for the first TAAALKS event in 2018. From design studio Moby Digg:

TAAALKS is an event dedicated to exploring and exchanging developments in creative coding, branding, communication design, web design, and web development.

The conference has been held twice by now — first in Munich and online the following year. The format gives creative studios and individuals the opportunity to present innovative and unconventional projects that negotiate and navigate the borders between different fields of expertise.

Moby Digg developed a visual identity for the event that contains website and animations as well as posters, stickers, invitation cards, etc. The branding is characterized by the use of strong colors, contrasts, and moving shapes.

Exhibition graphic and book design for Perform2019: Linkin-Out at Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul.

Photography: Kim Kyoungtae
Design: Works Services
Types: Georgia Bold by Matthew Carter and Standard 80 by Benoît Bodhuin

Zephyr Italic is an all-caps typeface by Leonhard Laupichler.

Angewandte Festival is the annual festival of the University of Applied Arts Vienna (“Die Angewandte”). This year’s visuals pair the school’s house typeface Delphia with a number of more expressive typefaces, including Zephyr, GlyphWorld Desert, and Zorn. The concept and the design of the “AInimals” were developed by Pauline Louise Noemi Jocher, Marlene Kager, Maris Nisu, and Maximilian Prag. From the festival website:

The University of Applied Arts Vienna is committed to counteracting the production conditions in the arts and cultural sectors, which are massively restricted by the current situation. The Angewandte Festival 2020 will therefore take place and focus on alternative exhibition venues in digital and public space. Even if students, teachers and members of the university cannot, as usual, exhibit their works in the university buildings and invite participants to join discussions, debates and celebrations, we want to use the end of this challenging semester as an opportunity to produce new works and projects to be exhibited and discussed publicly. By moving this year’s Angewandte Festival into virtual spaces, we do not intend to proclaim a brave new digital world, but to react critically, awake and curious to the current situation.

The Angewandte Festival will take place 23–26 June, 2020, in digital as well as public spaces and will present the manifold activities of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Desert is one of the nine styles of Leah Maldonado’s GlyphWorld series.

Zorn is an all-lowercase typeface by Laura Csocsán.

Booklet cover (back and front). The text on the back is set in caps from Charlotte Rohde’s Serifbabe.

Booklet spread with text in Light and Wide Ultra Light styles from David Einwaller’s Delphia. The ampersand and the rotated heading are in James Edmondson’s Eckmannpsych. URLs (bottom left) in GlyphWorld Desert, signature in Nicole Fally’s Pinyon Script, column heading (right) in Zephyr.

Booklet spread ft. headings in Moritz Esch’s Wagemut and Janik Sandbothe’s Euphoria.

Booklet spread with more GlyphWorld Desert and Zorn.

Booklet spread with Eckmannpsych and Wagemut Ephemer, a distorted variant of Wagemut.

Timetable poster (front).

Timetable poster (back). Dates and intro text in Serifbabe, headings in GlyphWorld Desert, descriptions in Delphia. Pinyon Script is used for the URL.

Singapore’s history comes to life in a different way with The Future of Our Pasts Festival (TFOOPFest), a month-long festival exploring lesser-known stories of communities and places of the past and present, reimagined through artistic mediums.—The Future of our Pasts

Alias Elephant is used for the logotype.

XOXO Festival is a four-day conference and festival about independently-produced art and technology in Portland, Oregon, gathering “people using the Internet and technology to bypass the established, big business ways of doing things and pursue their creative passions.” The event was founded in 2012 by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan.

For the 2018 edition, Jen Wick was in charge of designing the print material (badges, signage, schedule pocketbook, etc.) and chose Syne, Bonjour Monde’s open-source type family with an unusual italic in a handwritten style. The website was designed by Paulo Pereira.

Luggage label using Pembroke and Aspect (with its swash Q)

Eurostar is a high-speed railway service connecting London with Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, Avignon, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, and Paris. The channel tunnel opened on 6 May 1994 and the Eurostar service began on 14 November 1994. The brand identity has used Aspect for many years. From 2014 onwards, Eurostar added Pembroke to their palette.

Eurostar’s magazine Metropolitan. The swash forms for M and R are included in Aspect as alternate glyphs.

Eurostar magazine with Aspect as headline and Pembroke for body text

Eurostar magazine with Aspect and Pembroke

Service timetable

Train monitor

Ephemera – safety card

Illuminated panel

Illuminated panel

UK version of the Eurostar website. Aspect is used for headings, Pembroke for all smaller text.

French version of the website

Dutch version of the website

Program booklet for the 11th Festival Estival de Paris, which found place in the summer of 1976. On the cover we see a phototype version of Helvetica breitfett, with customisations (see e.g. the r which might have been derived from an n). Among digital versions, Nimbus Sans Black Extended comes close.

The inside of the program is set in various weights of Helvetica. The back cover uses ITC Souvenir for the titles and Times for the main text.

The signature on the cover tells us the design is by painter and graphic designer Raymond Pagès (1923–2014). He designed for several editions of this festival, see e.g. 1974 or 1983. Pagès also designed multiple posters commissioned by Air France — who participated in the festival — in the 1970s.

Milhões de Festa is all about music, partying hard either by the pool or deep into the night with electrifying music and genre-defying sounds. Milhões de Festa has been building a reputation as the truly alternative festival in Portugal, and deservedly gathering attention throughout Europe.

A great design of the website and the communication by Sérgio Couto, Serafim Mendes and Cátia Laranjeira, based on a mix of Brutal and Gosha Sans.

Design Summit 2018 is a three-day conference organized by Adobe. The event in San Francisco is “largest-ever gathering of designers from throughout the company, along with our key business partners and stakeholders. […] This year’s theme is Perspective.”

The typography pairs Bely Display (Roxane Gataud) and FF Basic Gothic (Hannes von Döhren, Livius Dietzel).