La Malpensante Moda is a special annual print edition of the Colombian magazine El Malpensante, dedicated to exploring the intersection of fashion, architecture, design, and craftsmanship. It is not a fashion brand or a retail platform, but an editorial project.

The first issue of La Malpensante Moda was published in April 2020, during a particularly adverse global moment. Conceived as an editorial experiment with no precedent within the broader corpus of El Malpensante editions, it marked a significant expansion of the magazine’s scope. Five years later, the project remains active and firmly established within the publishing group.

In this first edition, the editorial direction was led by Rocío Arias Hoffman together with Karim Ganem. Art direction was carried out by George Anderson Lozano, with design assistance by Tom Deason.

Headlines are set in Ogg Display by Lucas Sharp, while body text and paratextual elements are composed in Hoefler Text by Jonathan Hoefler.

The edition examines the relationship between design, contemporary aesthetics, and artisanal tradition. It reflects on how individuals “inhabit space” – both their physical environments and their own bodies – through clothing, adornment, and material culture.

Motto by Hilton is a vibrant global hotel brand built for modern explorers who travel intentionally, live smart, and stay connected. Anchored in buzzy neighborhoods across some of the world’s most iconic cities, Motto appeals to travelers through modular room designs that enable flexible, personalized stays. For those seeking an experience-driven stay, the hotel is designed to be a launchpad for energetic neighborhood exploration and cultural immersion.

Watson led the brand’s strategy, positioning, and identity refresh, clarifying Motto’s voice and expression to deliver a cohesive vision—one defined by intentionality, ingenuity, and local connection.

To express Motto’s locally rooted approach to each hotel location, Watson developed a dynamic typographic system that captures the essence of each place through a corresponding typeface. Each hotel’s location logo lockup pairs the existing Motto wordmark with the city name, typeset in its selected typeface. Comprised of eight typefaces that are distinct in style yet unified in proportion, the system forms a cohesive library that reflects the hotel’s collection of unique destinations.

A clear methodology guides how each typeface is applied, ensuring it reflects the distinct energy and character of its neighborhood. An arts district like Chelsea in New York City features a typeface inspired by calligraphic letterforms, echoing its offbeat, idiosyncratic character. In contrast, a tourist hotspot like Times Square adopts a friendlier geometric sans serif to convey the destination’s broader, more universal appeal.

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.

Since 1958, Palm Springs Life has been Southern California’s premier source for arts, architecture and design, entertainment, fashion, society, and music in and around Greater Palm Springs.

The limited-edition cover for the February 2026 issue features an undated photo of Nelda Linsk on a daisy-dotted sofa, typeset in IvyBodoni Semi Bold Italic with swash capitals. The cover is available as poster from the magazine’s web shop. The magazine’s standard typeface is Brandon Grotesque, and the line at the bottom is set in italic caps from Mercury.

This image shows the name of the cover (top) compared to a resetting in IvyBodoni Semibold Italic with swash letters (center). For reference, the typeface is shown with standard caps below.

This photo is titled Poolside Gossip, with Nelda Linsk in yellow. It was taken by Slim Aarons, showing the modernistic Kaufmann Desert House designed by Richard Neutra.

Series of posters for Hotline, a succession of three events organized by Arte Faact and Combo Bongos at a local club in Nantes called Macadam. The identity had to be inspired by the retro flyers of sex chat line advertising, using a real phone number to give the practical informations for the event.

I used a mix of script fonts from different eras, as it was a good way to tell the story of a phone number quickly written on the napkin of a bar or a restaurant. The generously curved lines of West Cooper Nouveau Swash also provide a feeling of seduction and give coherence to the identity.

Risograph printed at Collectif Bonus.

As for our ad campaign we produced a set of some 25 posters, all predominately typographic in nature, all highlighting some aspect of the book. Out of these posters we made larger gallery versions as well as smaller ones for street distribution.

How do you begin to speak to the public about a book dealing with the relationship between religion, science and philosophy?

It’s not an easy task for sure, as the topic is a real minefield, whichever side of the theological fence you happen to stand on.

But despite its inherent difficulty, or perhaps because of it, this was the exact question we were faced with when looking into promoting our latest book called The Gloves Come Off! — the Philosophical Investigations of a Duck.

For those unfamiliar with our oeuvre one thing should be clarified: Mr. Duck is an alter-ego of Christoffer. And in this book he gets to perform an 800-plus page long monologue about topics that have preoccupied his little mind for the past decades.

One way to approach the question would have been to be subtle and unassuming as not to provoke any undue conflict. Our answer? Well no, that sounds boring. We’ll take a distinctly different path!

Thus we chose to go all out with strong typography, witty copywriting, striking photography, and a strict black and white color scheme. Our aim was to make an impression, using a blend of bold graphics and humor. Our goal – to startle people, amuse them, and make them think about the topics presented without providing a definite answer one way or the other.

The fonts chosen for this task were the same ones employed in the book itself (to be featured in an upcoming post). Our picks this time were Knockout by Jonathan Hoefler and Zuzana Licko’s interpretation of Bodoni, Filosofia, and finally Trade Gothic for some of the smaller text.

Our approach was three-pronged – a street campaign consisting of a set of 25 different posters, a social media campaign consisting of cool and at times self-depreciating photography and illustrations, and finally a snail mail campaign for the media with a mix of different things, such as press releases, photos, stickers and an invitation to the publication party.

In our estimation we did well, but as always with matters concerning taste, opinions may vary. Did we pull it off? You decide.

We made three posters in the vein of protest posters. The first is a translation of the opening verse of the Vedanta Sutra, which in transliterated Sanskrit reads as “Athāto brahma jijñāsā”.

The caption on the second poster is lifted from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Finally our third protest poster asks the viewer not, it should be noted, necessarily to buy the book, but to read it.

Then one day the streets of Helsinki were flooded by our posters. Note that the posters themselves were done in black and white, and the red was stamped on, as can be seen by the varying positions of the added information.

As we love snail mail we also sent out invitations on paper. They featured, well, obviously, the invitations, our portraits and presentations, as well as a letter of endorsements.

As for our online campaign, we made a set of cool teasers, two of which we’ll share here. Take notice of the pure joy of the proud parents!

T-shirts as well! After all, we had to have something to wear for the party.

Our campaign was quite successful, as is evident from the photos, and we feel confident to state that few books of philosophy and theology have received as warm of a welcome!

After escaping to Australia from the Vietnam War, Thi Le became an extraordinary chef and restaurant owner. This book tells her story, that of an innovative chef navigating two cultural worlds. We wanted the design to celebrate her vision and reflect her strength and gritty resilience, as well as her joyful energy and experimental passion.

Thi is very urban and contemporary, with a strong sense of design. Her minimalist restaurant interiors frame the colour and zing of the Vietnamese food, and we wanted the book to do the same.

The palette of colour pops – acid yellow, flag red, cobalt blue – evokes the hues of a Vietnamese produce market, set against the cooler Melbourne tones. The small design icons are used almost like ephemera, reminding us of the heritage of the food – shiso leaf, lotus, paper-fan. The photography is real and unadorned, almost photojournalistic, with black-and-white incidentals woven through the full-colour to bring a reflective quality. The styling is unpretentious and utilitarian, framing the beauty of the recipes. The sans-serif typography brings a sense of disciplined design and construction, aligning with Thi’s food as intelligent and artfully considered.

The cover captures the edgier, urban-professional version of Thi Le. This documentary-style portrait promises a personal story and a behind-the-scenes peek. It positions the book as more than just a collection of recipes – it feels embedded in the life of a professional restaurateur, offering insights and revelations. This mix of grit and poetry, heritage and urban edge, is what makes the project so distinct.

Trajan is the title font for Hamilton: An American Musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

“An American Musical” is set in caps from Gotham Condensed.

Header image on the official website

Hamilton at the CIBC Theater, Chicago, July 2018

Atlantic Records released a recording in 2015. This four-LP box set followed in 2016. [More info on Discogs]

Trajan in use for the credits in the souvenir program booklet

For other text, the souvenir program booklet uses a different serif in all caps: it’s Requiem.

Requiem, stacked and justified

Joey Zen is a Raleigh-based artist and rapper who’s been active in the North Carolina music scene since 2019. “The Valero Pharaoh” was a single off of his tape You Would Hate To See Me Try. The track, like the album it’s featured on, is no longer on streaming platforms, but the video still exists on YouTube. The title card for the video is done in a compressed edit of Tungsten, the small text is in Alte Haas Grotesk.

The cover typography features both weights of Grand Central, Bold and Light.

LTypI is a moniker for the act of picking a typeface because its name matches the content. Some cases have little to do with an actual lack of typographic imagination, and rather are just wonderfully topical. This book is such an example. Authored by Anthony W. Robbins and the New York Transit Museum, it was published in 2013 to celebrate the centennial of New York’s Grand Central Terminal.

For the cover, contents, and chapter titles, Topos Graphics opted for Grand Central. What else would have been more appropriate? Tobias Frere-Jones designed this all-caps typeface in the mid-1990s when the station underwent a full renovation. Two Twelve hired him “to design a typeface in Grand Central’s distinct Beaux-Arts style”, to “keep new locator maps and signage in harmony with the old lettering.” [Frere-Jones Type] When the station was built in the 1910s, signpainters used “an American take” on the so-called “French Oldstyle”, a genre that goes back to French printer Louis Perrin and his mid-19th century reinterpretation of ancient Roman lettering, the Caractères Augustaux. The characteristic R with its curved and pointed leg can also be found in the tile lettering for the subway sign.

In 2018, Frere-Jones together with Nina Stössinger revisited the theme, then with lowercase characters and as a six-weight family with italics. The resulting typeface, Empirica, happens to be used on the Grand Central Terminal’s website.

Colophon and contents

Detail from the table of contents

Grand Central is also used for chapter titles.

The typeface used for body copy, captions and running titles is Sentinel.

Klipp og Lim has made a series of activity booklets for children, families, and school classes visiting Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway. Each booklet in the Oppdag Nidarosdomen (“Discover the Nidaros Cathedral”) series has ten tasks with things to discover, and each booklet has a specific theme.

The title font is Ode by Supertype. Satyr by Monokrom Skriftforlag is used for body text, and Hoefler & Co.’s Verlag Compressed for the numbers.

Plantas Legendarias is a book published by Rey Naranjo Editores that seeks to preserve the botanical memory of our planet. Written by Stephen Harris and published in English as 50 Plants that Changed the World (and previously as What have Plants Ever Done for Us?), it explores 50 plant species that have played a crucial role in the story of human civilization. From natural rubber – which helped launch the automotive industry – to maize, potatoes, and coffee – staples that have shaped global diets – these plants nourish us, heal us, power our world, and give us the very air we breathe.

For millennia, plants have been vital companions to humankind, shaping our lives in ways both profound and unexpected.

Designed by Raúl Zea and Juliana Salazar, the book is set in Hoefler Text, Hoefler Titling, and Bickham Script – a typographic palette chosen to reflect the classical beauty and cultural depth of the stories it tells.

Paperback book cover design for the novel The Most by Jessica Anthony, published by Little, Brown and Company in July 2024.

The cover was designed by Kirin Diemont, Associate Art Director at Hachette Book Group. Cover art is by creative stock agency Arcangel.

I was immediately drawn to this cover by the bold typeface for the title and author. Both are set in Bean, a unique display serif created by Eotype Studio, an independent digital type foundry based in Bandung, Indonesia. The blurb at the bottom right is also set in Bean, who's funky letters come to life in all-caps. The quote is paired with Knockout for the speaker attribution line. The author supporting line at the top also seems to be set in all-caps Knockout, No. 51 Middleweight.

I personally love the red title color that plays off of the woman’s red swimsuit, a key object in the text, according to the synopsis. The woman’s gaze, although we can’t see her face, leads the viewer directly back to the title, and the tension with the edge of the cover, especially the knee, makes it feel like she is about to float away off-frame. Great design, superbly cropped.

Located in a historic district within Fremont, California, Fremont Springs Conference Center is a modern facility for churches to conduct conferences and regional events. After the property was purchased and renovations to the existing building were nearing completion, they recognized the need for a logo and identity to properly represent the conference center. Fremont Springs partnered with Eric Axelson Studio to develop a visual identity system to help the facility come alive.

The visual identity was thoughtfully crafted after extensive research into the history of the city of Fremont, particularly the Warm Springs district. We soon discovered that it was once home to renowned hot springs, which quickly became the conference center’s theme. In the 1800s, many flocked to the springs to bathe in the healing waters to find rest and relief. Our hope was that the center would also carry the same sentiment.

Springs are also significant in the Bible and are used as a metaphor to represent salvation, satisfaction, and refreshment. John 4:14 says, “But whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall by no means thirst forever, but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into eternal life.” With all of this before us, we knew this would be an integral part of the center’s visual identity.

In addition, we found that some of the city’s most important landmarks are trees cultivated by its early pioneers, including the olive trees that lived near the conference center. These trees provide a rich heritage and a vital link to the city’s past. They reference a point in time, especially for the younger generation, on “where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.” Today, these trees play a significant role in providing and maintaining a future identity with the community, making it an appropriate and fitting direction for the logo.

After hundreds of sketches, we landed on a simple yet iconic design concept that pointed to the name – a tree representing the city of Fremont and the depiction of water portraying a spring.

Two typefaces were selected for the brand – Verlag and Archer (not shown here). Verlag is a friendly and approachable sans serif that retains some of the same organic shapes found in the logomark, making it a suitable complement. Archer’s rolling ball terminals lend the typeface much warmth and character.

KTF Compact is featured on the cover Achille Mbembe's book Brutalizm. Originally published in French as Brutalisme (Éditions de la Découverte, 2020), the Polish edition was issued by Wydawnictwo Karakter, in a translation by Oskar Hedemann.

Brutalizm offers an original diagnosis of contemporary times from an African perspective, combining elements of critical theory, postcolonial thought, and psychoanalysis. The brutalism of the title is a metaphor for our era, in which rapacious capitalism increasingly ruthlessly crushes, splits, and drains both the planet and human bodies.

Joseph-Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian historian and political theorist. He is well known for his writings on colonialism and its consequences and is a leading figure in new wave French critical theory. Cover designer Przemek Dębowski used URW Franklin Gothic for the author and the publisher, with Knockout for the translator, Oskar Hedemann.

Ghost Whisperer is an American TV show by Paramount Network Television which ran from 2005 to 2010. The show follows Melinda Gordon (played by Jennifer Love Hewitt). Melinda is a woman with an extraordinary ability: she can see and communicate with earthbound spirits – the souls of the dead who haven’t crossed over, trapped by unfinished business on earth. Is it a gift or a curse? All Melinda knows is that she can talk to the dead.

The show logo was created by using Jonathan Hoefler’s Requiem with the letter O turned into the shape of a moon. The same typeface is used for all the credits in title sequences which were designed and animated by Ben Campanaro.

Querido muerto mío is a novel by Felipe Núñez Mestre, published by Rey Naranjo Editores, that delves into the complexity of the willingness to go to war and the fragility of bodies shaped for combat, set in an opaque Caribbean with shifting borders and a threatening sea. The story contrasts the weight of a childhood among corpses, a furious adolescence, and an adult life trying to find meaning amid the military, the pursuit of fortune, and death. The book’s visual concept was created by Raúl Zea, Isabella Viracachá, and Isabella Barajas as part of the Rey Naranjo Editores design team.

Alta Fidelidad is a book collection from the Colombian publisher Rey Naranjo, paying tribute to the transformative power of music. Each title revives the passion for the artists and sounds that have shaped generations, becoming the soundtrack of pivotal moments in our lives. Every book explores how an iconic album influenced the life and work of Colombian writers, creating a bridge between music and literature.

The design, led by Raúl Zea and Isabella Viracachá, evokes the aesthetic of the blank cassette tapes from the 1980s, the ones used for creating mixtapes. Typography plays a key role: Basalte for the titles, Mercury for the body text, and a mix of Aperçu and Aperçu Mono for the details, creating a visual atmosphere that complements the energy of the music. Edited by Alberto Dominguez, Alta Fidelidad is not just a book collection, but a sensory journey that explores how sounds and words intertwine to transform our lives.

From Wikipedia:

Poodle Hat is the eleventh studio album by the American parody musician “Weird Al” Yankovic, released on May 20, 2003. It was the fifth studio album self-produced by Yankovic. The musical styles on the album are built around parodies and pastiches of pop of the early-2000s.

Cheltenham Bold Extra Condensed is used for the artist’s name. The album title is set in circled caps from the Demi weight of ITC Franklin Gothic, in reference to the New York City subway system. Art direction by Jackie Murphy and Nick Gamma, with photography by Mark Seliger.

[More info on Discogs]

The track listing on the back cover likewise uses Cheltenham. The bold sans is Champion Gothic.

Holyburger is a 340-page international anthology featuring contributions from ten extraordinary comic artists.

Designed by AA, Anja Delbello & Aljaž Vesel, a design duo from Ljubljana, the accompanying text is written by Domen Finžgar and it was printed by Tiskarna Medium. The book was published by Stripburger Comix the 6th of February 2025 after nine years of work. Ten visionary comic artists each crafted a chapter, blending the origins of past and present, sacred rituals, divine poems, prophets, and the unknown into a book that walks the fine line between truth and myth. The book was printed in dark violet Pantone color, with texts in English and Slovene.

Holy comics by: L.L. de Mars (FR), Matej Kocjan – Koco (SI), Anke Feuchtenberger (DE), Malcy Duff (SCT), Domen Finžgar (SI/SCT), Jorge Quien (AR), Jakob Klemenčič (SI), Rikke Villadsen (DK), Lukas Verstraete (BE), Marcel Ruijters (NL)

Stripburger is a publishing pioneer of independent comics in Slovenia. Since 1992, it publishes a renowned international comics magazine dedicated to showcasing the work of contemporary comics artists with personal styles and stories.