Bella triste is a German literary magazine that showcases the work of emerging and established authors. The 65th issue explores the fusion of contemporary literature and minimalist aesthetics and indulges in a fairy-tale theme.

Designed by Handina Murandu and Vivien Sorrentino, the magazine uses Romie Regular and Italic (designed by Margot Lévêque). The title combines the sans serif ABC Monument Grotesk (designed by Larissa Kasper and Rosario Florio) with Dan Rhatigan’s Astloch. In the latter, the S was modified to be more symmetrical.

The issue number on the cover is based on UnifrakturMaguntia, with customized numerals. Inside the magazine, there’s also Spencerio (by Jérémie Hornus and Julie Soudanne), JAF Herb (by Tim Ahrens), as well as more of the other typefaces.

Back cover with the names of the contributing authors

Detail with bevelled golden caps from Romie

Editorial with a headline in Romie and a stray D from UnifrakturMaguntia. The initial is based on Astloch.

All-caps Romie with byline in Spencerio

Running titles (here “Libido Lucid”) are set in Monument Grotesk.

UnifrakturMaguntia and all-caps Spencerio, paired with Romie featuring a nested CI pair.

Outlined JAF Herb overlaps with negatively tracked Spencerio.

A title in Spencerio is combined with Romie and Astloch for the author’s name.

More Romie with interspersed caps from Astloch

Astloch, Romie, JAF Herb, and Monument Grotesk were also used for the merch items, a tote bag and a cap.

A poster with an enlarged version of the magazine cover, in front of the Bella triste office in Hildesheim

The cover features a grunged Fette Fraktur with a modified A for the title, Mesquite (Adobe) for the subtitle and Birch for the names of the editors. “Lemmy” is in Ironwood.

The Art Of Metal: Five Decades Of Heavy Metal Album Covers, Posters, T-Shirts And More is a book showcasing the finest examples of metal posters, cover and artwork. It was edited by Malcolm Dome and Martin Popoff with a foreword by Lemmy and published in 2013 by Omnibus Press in the UK and by Voyageur Press in the United States. Paul Palmer-Edwards of the award winning Grade Design in London provided the design of the book, including the cover illustration.

The book covers five decades of work and ten genres of metal displaying the diversity and similarity in design between the genres. Each chapter showcases a different display blackletter typeface. For chapter two A Gothique Time by Bonez Designz was selected. See the image captions for more fonts used in this publication.

Chapter 2, “New Wave Of British Heavy Metal”, in A Gothique Time

More A Gothique Time in chapter 2

The headline in A Gothique Time is paired with text in Trade Gothic.

Half-title page, featuring the grunged Fette Fraktur with the romanized A

Title page

Table of contents with Fette Fraktur and Trade Gothic

Chapter 1, “Origins: Traditional Metal”, ft. Bayreuth

Chapter 3, “Hair Metal”, in Kingthings Spike

Chapter 4, “Doom & Stoner Metal”, ft. Blackmoor

The Black School is an “experimental art school teaching radical black history”. Founded by Joseph Cuillier III and Shani Peters, this multifaceted school is building a community center, hosting festivals, running workshops, and more — all with the goal of creating agents of change. The founders are responsible for the org’s look, with help from Mitchell Reese Johnson and web designer Kacy George. Generously spaced ITC Honda serves as the brand's wordmark and headline type, balanced with Poppins for body copy. These two work well together to create a feeling of strength while remaining approachable.

From The Black School website:

The Black School brand identity is inspired by the history of independent community run schools throughout Black history. The visual identity is anchored with the recurring motif of composition notebooks to playfully reference a common experience for American school children. The brand was designed to unify a broad range of activities and initiatives by The Black School.

Ogg Display joins ITC Honda for event flyers.

Poppins serves as a secondary typeface for web buttons and text.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an action role-playing video game developed by Warhorse Studios and published by Deep Silver for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is set in the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia, an Imperial State of the Holy Roman Empire, with a focus on historically accurate content. It was released worldwide on 13 February 2018. — Wikipedia

The logo is in Rudolf Koch’s Maximilian. The blackletter face is accompanied by 1529 Champ Fleury, a crude roman digitized by Gilles Le Corre.

Web graphic presenting a map, books and other fan merchandise.

In-game graphics with stats and menu in 1529 Champ Fleury.

Packaging of the Special Edition for PlayStation 4.

For the Russian website, 1529 Champ Fleury was replaced with Mikadan, see comments.

Source: collindfletcher.tumblr.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Poster designed by Collin Fletcher for Rabit’s Communion Tour MMXV (2015), featuring Modern Blackletter, Helvetica and Times.

today I wake up to see OVO has redone one of my 2015 tour posters designed by @collindfletcher for Drake's new single. Poor Collin is always having his style stolen?lol BUT I love being part of a team that's so creative and iconic???? #drake #ovo #rat #roach #simp - *Rabit - Les Fleurs Du Mail available now* - Rabit, 20 Jan 2018, Instagram

And so began the first type controversy of 2018, a story of appropriation, subversion and theft. You might not have heard of Rabit, a fantastic Texan electronic musician who works in the loose context of what people have began to call “deconstructed/experimental club”. Silly as semantics can be, the artists included under this umbrella make some of the most exciting sounds to emerge in a long time, questioning the both rigid, codified rhythms of dance music, while at the same time returning it to a politicized, often queer form. Aesthetically transgressive, these artists “pioneered” the visual post-default technopunk that has since experienced a commodification by the global style of contemporary “street”wear and its proponents.

Source: genius.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Cover for Drake’s Scary Days single (2018), designer unknown, for OVO. Features OldHaroldRee and a yet unidentified sans serif.

With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that we find ourselves in a place where mega popstar Drake starts of the year by dropping a single so explicitly appropriating an obscure, 2015 gig-poster. Collin Fletcher’s original design is one I very much enjoy, a dynamic composition that in many ways crystalizes the aesthetic tropes referenced above. We have the use of repetition — propelled into the mainstream by Kayne West’s Life of Pablo —, an exploration of system fonts (such as Times for Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN.) and the stiff all caps setting of (early) digital Helvetica. Herein lies the main feature of the work: A superimposition of this towering grotesque with the comparatively sleek and grace fraktur. The prime mover of post-war modernity, violently pitted against a transgressive memory of the past.

Neither Drake nor his record label OVO commented on the matter. According to Pitchfork “OVO did not commission the artwork; the source says it was presented to them along with other pieces to choose from.” Who designed it we might never know, was it homage or just a semi-lazy attempt to get the job? (There is a quote about great artists stealing in here somewhere.) What we do know is that our anonymous creator changed the type, swapping the partly romanized fraktur forms of the obscure Modern Blackletter for the equally arcane OldHaroldRee, a clumsily drawn interpretation of an Old English (compare the fluid, snake-like character of the former to the stricter geometry of the latter). Do note the faceted treatment of the yet unidentfied (custom?) sans serif — a nice touch.

What can we learn from all of this? Probably a lot, but I’ll let our OG victim Fletcher do the endnotes.

This is a story that too many artists, musicians, and designers identify with. Hopefully this results in a larger conversation about popular culture’s relationship to underground artists.

Source: taylorswift.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Album cover. Photography by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott

“I’m sorry, but the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, ’cause she’s dead.”

So ends single “Look What You Made Me Do”, the first to come out of pop queen Taylor Swift's 2017 album Reputation. In keeping with these times of constant rebranding, the image of former Myspace moonshot has been retweaked into something far more edgy, urban and contemporary.

As with the release of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. earlier the same, it was the cover more than anything that sparked great internet reaction. Opinion seemed to have been split by those proclaiming horror by the “trend of bad design”, while others fell in claims of Swift ripping Kanye West.

Comparison: Fonts In Use. License: All Rights Reserved.

Top: the original title artwork as posted by Taylor Swift to Instagram. Bottom: Engravers’ Old English BT

The title is in a slightly modified Engravers’ Old English, with the left parts of the base strokes (sloppily) clipped. This typeface was probably chosen to resemble the logos of newspapers and more specifically that of The New York Times, most recently redrawn by Matthew Carter for the 2015 relaunch.

Source: taylorswift.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Stills from the animation on Taylor Swift’s website

Consider it aesthetically pleasing or not, it does spotlight many of the current trends in graphic design: repetition, use of system fonts and general typographic irony framed in a layered newsclip composition. It all makes a bit more sense when seen in an animated version on her official website, which feature anti-design favorite Times New Roman far more prominently. This clip also includes some Cheltenham and Franklin Gothic – two typefaces that both play a major role in the visual identity of The New York Times, next to Abril Text, a typeface which has been employed for various newspapers.

Source: taylorswift.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: taylorswift.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: taylorswift.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Animated clips announcing the single Look What You Made Me Do, again using a customized Engravers’ Old English. The hairline strokes texturing the capitals as well as the dangling descender in ‘h’ have been eliminated. ‘Y’ was given a completely new, romanized form, which comes remarkably close to the ‘Y’ found in Nemek Gothic, one the fonts modeled after the same iron-on gothic letters as seen in the “I Feel Like Pablo” merch designed by Joe Perez & Mark Seekings for Donda/Kanye West, based on original artwork by Cali Thornhill DeWitt AKA Caramel Bobby.

Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The seriffed caps that appear in the announcement graphics are from Kepler Display Semicondensed.

New labels for five beer varieties in historic brewing bottles for the Kummert brewery in Amberg, Bavaria. In addition to the three labels (belly, back, temple), we designed six-packs, beer glasses, and beermats. The fonts in use are Eveleth, Guillemet, and Sancoale. The brewerey’s logo is in Fette Fraktur with a romanized ‘K’.

Design: Büro Wilhelm
Creative Director and Designer: Manfred Wilhelm
Photos: Marcus Rebmann

“The album’s cover art was painted by Sam Spratt and features Logic’s family, friends, associates, people involved with the album and more. It was modeled after ‘The Wedding at Cana’ by Paolo Veronese painting.” — Genius See it in detail on Sam Spratt’s website.

Artwork for Logic’s upcoming album Everybody as well as the for first two singles, “Everybody” and “Black SpiderMan”.

The recurring fonts are Guillemet, a modernized gothic by Johan Mossé, and Kabel Black in all caps, with a stemless initial ‘E’. The notes accompanying the singles appear to use a condensed (custom?) variation of Fette Fraktur (cf. Schmalfette Fraktur) with some romanized glyphs [edit: It’s Luxus Gothic, see comment by Riley], paired with a yet unidentified sans serif.

Track list

The title track was released as the lead single on March 31, 2017.

“Black SpiderMan”, featuring Damian Lemar Hudson, was released as the album’s second single on April 13, 2017.

Jonathan Cape, London 1978. Cover design by Raymond Hawkey, with centered caps from Windsor Elongated (and Times New Roman for the stamp).

This post provides a broad overview over the diverse cover designs for some of the editions of Len Deighton’s alternative history novel SS-GB, set in a United Kingdom conquered and occupied by Germany during World War II.

The first edition was published by Jonathan Cape in 1978, with a cover design by Raymond Hawkey (1930–2010), who was a friend and fellow art school graduate of Deighton. In an obituary for Hawkey, Rob Mallows quotes Len Deighton about Hawkey’s dedicated approach:

For SS-GB, […] Ray produced a book of British stamps complete with Hitler's head that stamp collectors cherish. He also had the photographer Adrian Flowers make a photo of Whitehall that could be exactly matched with a parade in Berlin to make a fake postcard of Hitler in London taking the salute of a march past.

This photo appears on the back of the dust cover.

Red and black is a recurrent theme. Unsurprisingly, several of the typographic choices are either decidedly British (Windsor!), or stereotypically (Nazi-)German, i.e. blackletter in general and schaftstiefelgrotesk in particular, see the Harper edition at the end of this post, as well as the title sequence for the current BBC series.

The title page seems to show the letters ‘SS-GB’ in Fette Fraktur, but what we actually are looking at is a fantasy ‘S’ (presumably built from other glyph parts), a modified ‘G’ (with the top right borrowed from ‘E’), and the letter ‘V’ standing in for ‘B’. The real fraktur thing was apparently deemed too difficult to decipher for the English readership.

Panther, 1979. While the ‘SS’ part resembles Futura Condensed Extrabold, ‘GB’ and the author’s name are in an unidentified heavy grotesque more in line with the English models, featuring caps of regular widths and a very closed and round ‘G’ with spur. The smaller text is probably Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed.

Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. The curly letterforms rather say 1900s (or, well, 1970s) than 1940s. They are probably custom drawn, and not from a typeface.

Coleccion Naranja, Bruguera, Barcelona, 1980. Banco has been chosen to approximate the angular SS runes.
The illustration shows jackboots (in German: Schaftstiefel) stomping over the Union Jack. This kind of boot gave its name to the derogatory term for the simplified gotisch typefaces that mushroomed in the first years of Nazi Germany.

Harper, 2009. The letterforms for the author’s name seem to be adopted directly from the Panther edition shown above. The first name was made a tad longer by means of stretching. Tannenberg (1934) is used for the title.

An instantly recognizable metaphor – pixels replacing print – for a book about the changing news industry. It works.

But a little more about the type: A typical newspaper design is replicated with the kind of blackletter commonly used in American news nameplates. Florian identified it as “Old English with circumcised ‘h’ and ‘g’ and custom ‘i’ dot. The ‘W’ is from Goudy Text, with the ‘H’ built from its ‘N’.” I think that ‘H’ came out a tad too wide – there’s a lot of empty space between those stems.

I also wonder if that romanization of the ‘H’ was really necessary. In context, I think most English readers would have no trouble recognizing a Textura ‘H’, such as that from Old English or Goudy Text. It isn’t a character that is misinterpreted as often as the long ‘s’. But I suppose the title on a book cover is a place where most publishers don’t want to take any chances.

American ad for North German Lloyd’s transatlantic sea passages from 1936, in Element schmalfett (1934). While there apparently was the desire to convey a deliberate teutonic look by using one of the new streamlined texturas which mushroomed in the first years of the Third Reich, Element’s gotisch H was considered to be too much, and illegible to American eyes: It got replaced by a romanized creation with a clunky foot swash. The “long s” (ſ) has been foregone, too.

The shaded upright script provides a classy contrast, and likely is not a font. On a related note to the altered H, the final letter with straight descender in the script would probably pass for a g only in the US, cf. the Berghoff sign.

Robert Priest and Grace Lee play off the ecclesiastical nature of their names for their Priest + Grace studio logo. One wise modification was made to Fette Fraktur’s ‘G’, giving it a beard so it would be more easily recognized by an audience unaccustomed to the ornamental Blackletter style.

Nina posted this on Twitter before: The new owner of Basel-based confectionery Läckerli-Huus apparently found the fraktur ‘H’ unacceptable. It got replaced with a dumb and unskilled hybrid form in the new logo. The ‘s’ lost its fine top swash, and the ‘l’ was messed with, too. Also, the (double) hyphen had to go.

This is not the first time that blackletter peculiarities were sacrificed: In the 1990s, the logo still proudly featured a ‘ck’ ligature. When the ligature was dissolved, the new ‘k’ kept its very tiny and high loop — and got an enormous leg (see images below).

All logo versions are related to the model of Fette Fraktur. The newest one is derived directly from a digitally available font. By the way, Linotype’s Fette Fraktur has the “romanized” ‘k’ as included in the Läckerli Huus logo, while URW++ and E+F offer the font with the original fraktur ‘k’.

Apple’s newly announced iOS 7 brings a long-rumored “flatness” to the homescreen. The most visible typographic change is a lighter and more tightly spaced Neue Helvetica, a move that I’ll cover in more detail later. But first, a couple bits that noticeably depart from Helvetication: the Camera app and the Newsstand icon. The new look for Apple’s magazine and newspaper app emulates a group of publications, each with nameplates, making this icon stand out from the simple pictograms of the other system apps.

I cannot positively identify the “News” type, but it appears to be based on Friedrich Bauer’s 19th-century Gotisch. The Apple designers didn’t seem to be happy with the unfamiliar Fraktur ‘w’: they replaced it with a rotated ‘m’ — a thing they are known to do.

Other than the Calendar, Clock, and Maps apps, Newsstand is the only icon with type and a consipucuous showcase of multiple typefaces.

The icon as shown in the iOS 7 intro video, along with the underlying design grid for all the app icons.