Outrider Beer Company, a brewpub in Amesbury, Massachusetts, is dedicated to crafting excellent food and beer for their community. When asked to design a merchandise item for them, I aimed to capture a rebellious, motorcycle-inspired vibe without coming across as overly serious or aggressively tough. The photo I selected, sourced from the Austrian National Library, perfectly embodies the company's spirit. This collaboration was a big success.

In the summer of 2021, a total of one hundred multidisciplinary, artistic-creative interventions took place in Dortmund under the title Jahr100Sommer. Things, images, musicians and artists appeared and disappeared again. The city was transformed into a space of art and experience. The result is a visual identity to take along. Cubes can be easily transported as stools, tables or decoration, flags mark the event from afar. The bright yellow, as well as the round and angular dots stand out from the urban space. Elena Schneider’s Konsole nestles to the geometric design language. In addition, an extensive documentation has been created.

In the Ruhr region of modernism, numerous urban buildings were realized not only to provide impulses for new urbanity, but also to serve as projection sites for a new urban society. From 2019 to 2022, the research and mediation project of the Technical University of Dortmund, the Baukunstarchiv NRW and the Museum Folkwang, was dedicated to the question of how certain building tasks in the Ruhr region contributed to the formation of identity, based on the holdings of the Baukunstarchiv NRW.

The digital exhibition StadtBautenRuhr allows a look at the “hidden treasures” of the Baukunstarchiv NRW, whose holdings have been processed under various questions. Plans, sketches, models and photographs provide impressions of the history of planning and building. New photographs taken as part of the research project give an impression of the buildings and their urban surroundings.

Elena Schneider's Konsole has already been used in the accompanying three-volume book series. Its clarity combines perfectly with the mindset of the architects and its technical appearance reflects the requirements of the time.

From the website of illustrator/designer Ing Lee (with added links):

Official poster for Korean-American band Japanese Breakfast featuring Built to Spill, for their shows in Portland and Seattle.

They left me very free with the work, so I was inspired by one of their songs that left an impression on me in their performance of “Paprika” at Primavera Sound São Paulo. I went to research more about her inspirations for the song and she mentioned one of my favorite animations, also called Paprika (2006) by Satoshi Kon. This and her photo shoot with Korean masks 탈 were my main references, as I wanted to bring an interpretation with Korean elements of Kon’s parade scene. The illustration was made to be printed in risography in the colors paprika (yes!!), hunter green, bisque, sunflower and mint.

Olivita with its soft curves and quirky italics was used for the headlines and New Zen for dates and location.

Birra Bruin is the typeface chosen for the identity of Ausome Hoops, a basketball program specifically designed for young people with autism.

​In 2022, Ausome Hoops revamped its visual identity. The star of the game is Birra Bruin. Bruin takes to the court with its semi-slab uppercase, while its blackletter-inspired lowercase is mostly kept on the sidelines. It can be seen scoring in social media posts and the website (assist: Montserrat). For the logo, the letterforms were drawn bolder, with rounded terminals, set on an arch and spruced up with outline and shadow effects. On the jerseys, the oblique glyphs were slanted back to make them stand upright. Purists may cry fould play, but we give three points – go Hoops!

Founded in 2019, Ausome Hoops organizes school holiday camps and weekly programs for kids on the autism spectrum in the area of Melbourne, Australia, “providing a safe, inclusive space where they can learn how to play basketball free from the judgement from others”.

Birra Bruin was designed by Elena Schneider and released as the Medium Italic in Darden Studio’s Birra Flight of fonts, a diverse family with styles created separately by various guest designers. Like all Birra fonts – five at the time of writing – it’s available free of charge.

The website pairs headings in all-caps Birra Bruin, with text rendered in Montserrat.

Eventually, Birra Bruin’s lowercase get some time on the court, too: it’s used for the titles in the merch shop.

Isaiah: A Revised Translation with Explanatory Notes is a Czech translation of The Book of Isaiah that comes with detailed commentary and “aims to be a study aid based on the current state of biblical scholarship.” It was designed by typographic design studio Stará škola, and published by Česká biblická společnost, or the Czech Bible Society.

The body copy and headlines are typeset in Eskorte while all margin notes and footnotes, as well as some titles, are set in Gitan; both typefaces are published by Rosetta. Parts of the front cover are also typeset in Questa Grande, published by The Questa Project. The Hebrew type in the third image is typeset in Adobe Hebrew.

“El Clásico” is the name for the matches between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona in Spain’s highest soccer league. El Clásico is one of the most watched league matches, with about 650 million viewers worldwide. For years, the game was not only a league match between two teams but also a clash between the two best football players of their time: Cristiano Ronaldo (Real Madrid) and Lionel Messi (FC Barcelona). From 2009 to 2018, both played in LaLiga, and this year marks the first edition of the classic in 16 years with neither of the two stars under contract in Spain.

A month ahead of the first 2021 edition, LaLiga announced that from this year’s edition onward, the match is branded as a product: “The world’s most iconic club match will now have its own logo and visual identity. Rivalry, strength, passion, technology, innovation, dynamism, entertainment and globality are among this new image’s main attributes.”

Branding agency Vasava removed the wordspace from the match name, making it hashtag-ready. For the typography, two contrasting typefaces were chosen that both started out on Future Fonts. The angular Halunke by Elena Schneider is used for the logo, with a few modifications. Its corners were trimmed, the C was flipped and the Á is a custom design. All information is set in Pacaembu, a football-inspired typeface family by Álvaro Franca and Felipe Casaprima, avialable from their type foundry Naipe. Álvaro is also one of the graphic designers who worked on this project.

Watch and read an presentation of the new design on the website of Vasava (in Spanish).

Karavaan is a café and restaurant in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Their sleek identity was developed by Larissa Wiens’ design studio, and features Halunke by Elena Schneider. The logomark can be found throughout the interior space and thoughtfully placed on items like espresso cups and reservation cards.

Halunke is paired with Karben 205 Mono by Adrian Talbot and Quickbrush by Laura Condouris.

For most people cultural buildings quite simply form an integral part of a city. Since the 19th century museums, theatres, and opera houses have been prominent and prestigious construction projects for urban architecture. Internationally highly-rated cultural buildings such as the Musiktheater im Revier (district music theater) in Gelsenkirchen, the Folkwang Museum or the Aalto Theatre in Essen, the Quadrat Museum in Bottrop are witnesses of the rebirth of the cities and at the same time have written their history.

The publication tells of a Ruhr District that is re-inventing itself constantly, far from its industrial past. A district of ideas, discussions and decisions that still continue to have an effect on architecture and urban debvelopment today. With the help of plans, models, photographs, correspondence, printed material and other documents, the biographies of some of these buildings are being retraced.

The book alternately introduces individual buildings, interspersed with general scientific specifications. It invites the reader to turn the pages both forward and back. To a walk through the city. Each topic is introduced by a picture section inviting the observer to use his head and discover its content. The large type size allows the shape of the letters of Konsole to stand out clearly. This robust, linear typeface family comes in varying widths, making up the individual chapters.

Birra Bruin is the typeface chosen to promote this year’s Kærleikskúlan. The Christmas bauble for 2020 was created by Finnbogi Pétursson and is titled ÞÖGN (“Silence”).

The blackletter-inspired shapes of Birra Bruin add a festive, slightly arcane tone to the web posters. Designer Erla Anna says she chose the typeface because it reminded her “of old Icelandic calligraphy pages and has a great personality and warmth”. The single-weight italic was designed by Elena Schneider and released as the second installment in the Birra Flight of fonts. Like all Birra fonts, it’s available free of charge from Darden Studio.

Kærleikskúlan (“Ball of Love”) is an initiative by the Icelandic Association of the Paralyzed and Disabled. Each year, the non-profit organization invites an artist to design a special jólakúlur, or Christmas bauble. Many people love to collect the Kærleikskúlurnar. They come in a limited edition which is sold during the Advent season, with all proceeds going to the benefit of disabled children and young people.

Artist Finnbogi Pétursson explains the idea behind his glass bauble:

The love ball contains one meter of audio tape, which is the equivalent of one second of silence. The recording was made at Arnarstapi in the summer of 1986 between three and four o’clock at night. There I met the moment when everything was silent; the birds, the sea, the wind, the rolls – the flies. The moment when nature resets itself, there will be sound and a new day will dawn.

Birra Bruin not only supports Extended Latin including the characters needed for typesetting Icelandic, it also “speaks” Vietnamese.

Halyard by Darden Studio was chosen for the visual identity of Common Cause.

The website features several styles from the Grotesque family. The vigorous Halyard Display is used for headlines, in all caps, with a red marker effect for extra emphasis. Smaller items — menus, decks, and body copy — are in Halyard Text, the variant optimized for medium text sizes, with more generous spacing. Both subfamilies appear in regular and bold weights. Halyard is accompanied by Eskorte (Rosetta) for serif headings. The Common Case logo is in Work Sans ExtraBold (Wei Huang).

Cover of “The Art of the Lie”, a report on “Trump’s Historic First Year Failure on Government Integrity and Accountability Issues.”

The Common Cause website was designed by Wide Eye Creative.

The “Democracy Wire” news section pairs Eskorte Semibold for headings with Halyard Text for body copy.

Campaign graphics used on social media channels.

For ATAF, a small Polish distributor of personal medical/healthcare products we developed a corporate identity and website, where the overall minimalistic and austere design is contrasted by the use of two lively and inviting typefaces: Eskorte and Ideal Sans.

While the primary typeface Eskorte conveys a more serious tone in text sizes, it subtly echoes the soft and rounded feel of the logo when used in larger sizes. In contrast, Ideal Sans (used for headlines, captions, highlighted texts etc.) offers a more humanist feeling.

In Arabic, the letter kaf (ك) is the only difference between here (huna) and there (hunak). The Arabic Culture Festival huna/k defines itself — quite literally — as a bridge between the Arab “there” and the “here” of the Western world. This transgression is visualized in the editorial design: the flyers, programs and posters are interlinked, once you put them side by side. The principle of merging “here” and “there” is also reflected in the mirror symmetry of the design, which always provides bilingual information: When turned upside down, the program can be read in the other language, and the pages browsed in the usual direction; from right to left in Arabic, or from left to right in German. Printed with silver spot color. Made in cooperation with Fadi Abdelnour.

“A Line of Sight is a compelling whodunnit woven through a story of community, family, and an extraordinary eight-year-old boy.” — Adrienne Jansen

Designed by Sarah Maxey for Escalator Press.