From the MoMA Design Studio:

This exhibition features one of the last remaining capsules from the Nakagain Capsule Tower in Tokyo. The building, demolished in 2022, was an example of Metabolism—a Japanese architectural movement whose members believed that buildings could adapt over time.

MoMA’s capsule, A1305, anchors the exhibition and is visible to passersby on 53rd street. To pique their curiosity, we worked with the curatorial team to design a street-facing prompt that shares the history and significance of the capsule and invites them in with a question, “would you live here?”

Inside the museum, a bold title wall draws visitors in via a crowded lobby. The rounded typography is inspired by the capsule, and textured vinyl on the title wall directly references the capsule’s stucco-like exterior. Throughout the exhibition, the design balances English and Japanese titles as a respectful gesture to the building’s origin.

The exhibition’s signage combines Baste (from Lift Type) for the headlines with Source Han Sans for the Japanese text.

Visual artist James Jean 簡明 created the cover artwork for JJ Lin’s 20th anniversary album Happily, Painfully After. But I can’t say for sure that James also set the type. Discogs credits him with the album’s art direction and Yang Shi Ching 楊士慶 with the design.

The Chinese is set in Adobe’s Source Han Sans, specifically the Taiwan Traditional Chinese version. The English is set in DJR’s Megascope.

In particular, Megascope was expanded into several weights in the March 2023 installment of the Font of the Month Club. And shortly after, the album was revealed in early April 2023, which uses two weights of Megascope. A much heavier weight of Megascope was used in an ad campaign to the world live premiere of Happily, Painfully After.

This ad for Palmolive soap was published in the February 1928 issue of Photoplay magazine.

The tagline “Soap From Trees” is in Goudy Open. “Nature’s Gift to Beauty” is in ATF Garamond Italic, using the alternate swash N. Goudy Oldstyle is used for the body text. The subheadings use Cloister Italic.

ATF Garamond is also used for “Palmolive Radio Hour” and the following paragraph. The small text at the bottom right is in Goudy Italic.

Helfernetz.Bayern is a platform initiated by the Bavarian Red Cross for the seven aid and emergency response organizations engaged in civil protection. It connects active volunteers across organizations, allowing them to share personal stories and stay informed about ongoing missions and relevant news.

For space-efficient yet highly distinctive headlines, the website relies on Wood Bonnet Grotesque No.4 from astype, giving the platform a strong and recognizable typographic identity. Smaller text is rendered in Adobe’s Source Sans.

How can research findings, personal experiences, and complex ideas be translated into a concise visual identity?

45 Symbols—Clay to Code examines how emerging artists and designers develop systematic approaches to a visual language, inspired by one of the most enigmatic objects in media history: the 3,700-year-old, still-undeciphered Phaistos Disc, embossed with 45 distinct symbols. The works present a range from personal narratives to global themes and demonstrate how an original visual grammar can be constructed.

Over more than a decade, the internationally organized design seminar series The Phaistos Project—Forty-five Symbols has developed to a global community driven by open calls, workshops, exhibitions, and risograph publications. The present volume, 45 Symbols—Clay to Code, brings together over 2,000 symbols as the result of these joint efforts. It is not only a living archive of research inquiries but also a testament to collective experimentation, bold visions, and the expression of intercultural dialogue.

The book was edited and designed by Olivier Arcioli, Pascal Glissmann, and Andreas Henrich, and released by Slanted Publishers in January 2026. It has 320 pages measuring 21×28 cm and was offset printed on Munken Print White, 115 g/m². The Swiss brochure comes with flaps, black thread stitching and foil lamination. ISBN: 978-3-948440-95-4. Price: €32 (DE)

TEATRIP JAPAN is an invitation to immerse in the fascinating world of Japanese green tea. In Japan, tea is much more than just a beverage—it is a living expression of culture. For centuries, the tea ceremony has been practiced in Zen temples—a meditative moment of silence, mindfulness, and deep respect that once brought not only monks, but even samurai a sense of inner peace.

The editors take readers on a captivating journey to the roots of this cultural tradition. Along the way, they meet tea farmers, merchants, and ceramic artists—individuals whose passion for tea began in childhood and continues to shape their lives. The book offers insights into the tea ceremony and the intricate hand-rolling technique known as temomi, all accompanied by atmospheric photography from the tea-growing regions of Kagoshima, Uji, and Shizuoka. Green tea enthusiasts will discover fascinating facts about different varieties, production methods, and preparation techniques.

Japanese green tea delights with its gentle sweetness and refreshingly fruity notes—a true sensory experience. TEATRIP JAPAN is a visual and cultural celebration—a heartfelt homage to an ancient tradition.

Published by Slanted Publishers in November 2025, the 232-page hardcover (21.5×29 cm) features linen binding, thread-stitching, and shortened pages, with full-color offset printing by Druckerei Vogl on Lakepaper Blocker Perfect White and Gmund handmade paper. Edited by Christian Beck (text), Stefan Braun, Frank Haala, and Lars Harmsen, with photography by Stefan Braun and design by Melville Brand Design, Lars Harmsen (CD), Mara Morawitz (AD), and Vera Pappenberger, the German-language edition is available under ISBN 978-3-948440-93-0 at a price of €69.90.

Biergarten opened in 2016 as an inclusive neighbourhood space inspired by the communal spirit of traditional German biergartens. Over time, its culture became vibrant and loyal, but the brand’s expression didn’t keep pace. Ahead of national expansion, the identity needed to better reflect its fun, familiar personality. We refreshed the brand around its core truth, Biergarten as the familiar go-to place for connection, expressed through the idea of “Always Familiar.”

The brand palette draws from Germany’s Oktoberfest, pairing warm creams and mustards with playful light blues, all grounded by a unifying navy. Beer illustrations use smudged acrylic strokes to evoke blurry community memories. Each beer character is shaped by real stories overheard at Biergarten’s outlets, with small details that make them distinct and true to their backstories.

The brand’s type family is a reflection Biergarten heritage, familiar conversations, and functional needs. Bungee leads as the primary display face, reminiscent of the woodcut letters that were seen in some of the early Biergartens. It allows for versatile usage with various styles to create unique and dimensional displays, both horizontally and vertically. It is paired with P22 Underground, a geometric humanist workhorse for clarity and function across menus, wayfinding, and body copy. Good Dog is used sparingly for handwritten, conversational moments that inject warmth and personality. Together, the three form a layered system that balances heritage, utility, and friendliness in a premium-yet-inviting voice.

Every year, Biergarten Brewery & Kitchen celebrates the Karnataka Food Festival – a tribute to a state that’s a mosaic of accents, kitchens, playlists, and Friday-night pints. This year’s identity draws from the warmth of the Kowdhi quilt of North Karnataka; square patchworks of reused fabrics stitched into rhythmic geometry, paired with colours inspired by vibrant risograph inks and traditional quilts.

Tiny square illustrations echo Kowdhi’s pattern and pair seamlessly with Bungee, Biergarten’s primary typeface with its bold, structured form. Anek Kannada brings the regional script and language into the system, adding warmth through its semi-rounded forms and generous curves while maintaining clarity at every scale. The stacking of Bungee with Anek Kannada mirrors the layered patchwork of the quilts. P22 Underground anchors the typography with a clean, highly legible foundation for body copy and functional text.

Every year, Biergarten Brewery & Kitchen celebrates the Karnataka Food Festival by incorporating ingredients rooted in Kannada food culture. For 2024, a trip to Mysore led us to Rajamudi, a red rice once favoured by royalty, which became the inspiration for crafting a special Mysore Lager for the festival. The visual language draws from Mysore’s royal heritage, blending the vibrancy of palace interiors, vintage Kannada film posters, and old postal stamps into a lively colour palette that echoes both royal splendour and the state flag.

Expressing this cultural blend, we used Bungee, the brand’s primary display typeface, and anchored this in local context with Anek Kannada, for its semi-rounded, contemporary interpretation of the Kannada script. The softness and rhythmic curves of Anek Kannada offer a striking balance to Bungee’s rigid, modular forms, creating a dynamic typographic interplay across headlines, labels, and motion assets. P22 Underground is used as the supporting typeface, providing clean, legible structure for body copy and functional text.

The videography extends this typographic and visual sensibility into motion. Inspired by 1980s Sandalwood cinema, it features bold, stacked type treatments set against scenes from Mysore’s royalty.

WS Craft’s upright and italic styles are mixed by graphic designer Bernardo Berga in Jazz Kissa, a book about the culture of jazz listening bars in Japan, published by creative agency and publishing house ERG Media:

Immerse yourself in the soul of Japanese listening culture with Jazz Kissa, an expansive photographic exploration of Japan’s iconic jazz cafés, known as Jazz Kissa. The book is the result of over fifteen years of dedicated work by photographer and cultural historian Katsumasa Kusunose, who has meticulously documented these intimate spaces and the people who keep their spirit alive.

Printed on specially sourced Japanese paper inspired by the texture of Altec A7 speakers and wrapped in a traditional OBI strip, Jazz Kissa is both a cultural document and a beautiful object in its own right.

The typefaces used on the obi strip are Eiko and Source Han Sans for the Japanese title, “ジャズ喫茶”.

From Wikipedia:

Steal a Brainrot is a 2025 multiplayer video game developed by SpyderSammy and released on Roblox on May 16, 2025. In the game, players buy and steal Brainrots, characters based on the Italian brainrot meme, which generate income over time. Owned by DoBig Studios, Steal a Brainrot is the only Roblox game to have surpassed 25 million concurrent users (CCU) and is the second to have surpassed 20 million CCU, the first being Grow a Garden.

The purchase font is Comic Sans, and the brainrots names are in Source Sans. The names of the main game brainrots name is in Montserrat.

Transforming words into actions

The State of Illinois Department of Human Rights (IDHR) and the Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes (CDHC) launched a statewide service to support people targeted by hate. It had a phone number. What it lacked was the public’s awareness and trust. My team at Span was brought in to change that.

Working alongside UIC’s Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design (IHDD), we renamed, rebranded, and reintroduced the service to the public. The result was Help Stop Hate – a trauma-informed, multilingual, statewide service and campaign that reframed reporting not as retaliation, but as care in action.

Initially piloted as Illinois v. Hate, the helpline's name implied conflict and positioned the state as the protagonist. Moving away from tension to solidarity, the renamed service Help Stop Hate is a three-word promise. Help centers care. Stop signals urgency. Hate names the problem—without euphemism.

Three cuts of Grilli Type’s GT Planar were used, allowing ‘Help’ to lean forward into action, ‘Stop’ to lean back in urgency, and ‘Hate’ to sit still—unignorable. The visual language draws on civic forms: rigid diagonals, grounded color, modular composition. Designed to function everywhere from Chicago CTA ads to community newspapers and rural county billboards.

To reach survivors—not just residents—we kept the value proposition simple and kind. “Report hate, get support” is about access and letting people know: they are not alone.
This is where the secondary type Grenette come in with a quiet strength. Its rounded serifs and open forms contrast the sharpness of GT Planar, with enough tension to hold your attention. It reads almost tender, full of warmth and charm with a subtle nuance that feels hand-touched.

The Not in Our State campaign launched in the seven most spoken languages in Illinois: English, Spanish, Arabic, Polish, Hindi, Tagalog, and Mandarin. To complement the primary sans and serif styles of the identity, each language pairing used two typefaces. For Arabic, we selected Noto Sans Arabic and Noto Naskh Arabic. Hindi used Noto Sans Devanagari alongside Noto Serif Devanagari. Mandarin was set in Noto Sans SC (see Source Han Sans) and Noto Serif SC (see Source Han Serif).

The Slip by Miriam Webster is the first book to published by Aniko Press. The ten stories in this collection are dark, feral and completely unforgettable, full of strange encounters and big feelings. The vision for the design brief was to capture the author’s eye for the absurd and the surreal.

As with all the fiction covers I work on, I start by reading and taking notes of themes, key phrases and visual cues. These stories are great fun – weird, funny, dark, surprising – emotional and complex. In one story, the protagonist dreams of animals:

Black dogs and other beasts that stalked behind you on the back roads. Horses whinnying and bucking in the wind, synchronised and weirdly fluid, changing ways like schools of silver fish ... A nanny goat with two grey kids in tow, offering them her teats …

The dream is a premonition – there’s an escaped goat who has ‘chewed through her rope and fucked off up the hill somewhere’.

I interpret this as a symbol for freedom (perhaps incorrectly, but I’m prepared to run with it). I like freedom, I’m not sure I like goats but goats are pretty weird – they’re esoteric, surreal creatures (occult even!) – which seems a good fit for the collection. The power of the goat is calling.

After much trial and error, I eventually found the goat that might save my life. Tongue out – not too cute, not too ugly, just oddly charming enough, it’s chewing away in the high country. Being free, being chill, being weird. Being goat. Seems a nice vintage too, should contrast well with some garishly bright text – aiming for the sweet spot where the archaic (story telling; old as the hills) and the modern (the text often plays with form, while poking fun at its own metatextuality) meet. You know that spot, right? It’s a good place.

For the cover’s display type, I wanted something big and bold but with a certain softness and warmth – enter the rock-solid humanist sans serif with a hint of contemporary typographic finesse, P22 Underground. And okay, my handwriting sucks but I want something with a human hand behind it, so I turn to another literary surrealist – help me out, Franz? – the subtitle of ‘Stories’ is set in FF Mister K (a font based on Kafka’s handwriting).

The interior is primarily typeset in Garamond Premier and Underground (with a few wingdings and emojis for good measure). One story, ‘New Directions’ (which contains the titular story – ‘The Slip’ – in a metatextual way) required a very detailed setting; conveying multiple voices: author, confidant, publisher, analyst, patient – and an eel(!) – with the voices often switching between one another mid-sentence (very slippery indeed).

Providing sufficient visual difference between each voice, while keeping an elegant and cohesive overall, was quite a challenge. The story utilises varying degrees of indentation, all-caps, small-caps, italics, reverse slant, underline – and detailed spacing (the eel is getting high, getting loose, mind and text fragmenting). The result is best experienced in print, of course. On that note, do go buy the book, it’s very, very fun.

The Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon, or TriMet, is a transit agency that serves most of the Oregon section of the Portland metropolitan area: Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas County.

TriMet provides various services, including the TriMet MAX light rail, WES Commuter Rail, and bus services.

TriMet’s third-phase logo, which came out in 2002, features TheMix in a bold weight and all-capital letters. Their slogan and much of their branding use Source Sans. On the website, Source Sans is paired with Zilla Slab for headings.

The TriMet logo on the new MAX car design introduced in 2015. Station signs use TheMix as well.

Timeline of the TriMet story featuring the original logo with hyphen. The website typography pairs Source Sans and Zilla Slab.

Polly Sellers Photography is a creative photography business based in Columbus, Ohio. Founded by Polly Sellers, the studio specializes in capturing authentic, vibrant, and timeless imagery across various genres, including weddings, engagements, senior portraits, families, concerts, and branding sessions.

The branding for Polly Sellers Creative, designed by Janna K Creative, features Orange Squash from Pixesia Studio as the core typeface for the logo and primary headlines. Bitter by Huerta Tipográfica is utilized for the navigation elements, while Adobe’s Source Code is used for the text buttons.

RUG by Gerard & Kelly presents eleven performance scores on loose leafs in a binder, published by Three Star Books. The typography uses Klod by edition.studio for headlines, in combination with texts set in a yet unidentified sans and serif. From the publisher:

RUG is a performance score that unfolds across eleven tactile spreads, where texture and narrative dissolve the boundaries between architecture, cinema, choreography, and art. Drawing from Gerard & Kelly’s film “E for Eileen”, shot in Eileen Gray’s modernist villa E-1027 in the south of France, RUG reflects on the legacy of this singular architect and designer while presenting a manifesto for interdisciplinary art-making.

The eleven signatures, each named after one of Gray’s iconic rugs, bring together stills from Gerard & Kelly’s film, deconstructed rug patterns, and original plans of the E-1027 house and furniture. A poem written by the artists unfolds across the eleven spreads in hand-stenciled text. All of these elements are meticulously arranged for maximum resonance, serving as notations for choreography and musical improvisation.

RUG expands the artists’ trajectory, which often flows from scores to performances to films to objects. Here, the book is a prelude to yet-unrealized performances. The result is a layered, looping conversation between past and future, creation and reinterpretation.

As with Gray’s own work, the materiality of RUG is paramount. Printed on Oyster paper, which has a pearlescent surface evoking seashells from the Mediterranean Sea near E-1027, the colors are applied using stencils with gouache, echoing Gray’s artisanal methods. Film stills are printed via an HP Indigo press, their precision offset by the irregularity of the hand-stenciled designs. A contemporary stencil font, KLOD by Adrien Menard—with its clean lines recalling Gray’s typographic experiments at E-1027—deepens the dialogue between eras.

Presented in a silkscreened folder tied shut with fabric ribbons, RUG recalls the portfolios architects once carried—plans neatly bound yet filled with latent possibilities. The ribbons nod to Eileen Gray’s and Jean Badovici’s “Maison en bord de mer” portfolio from 1929, binding the project in a shared language of craft and utility.

A hand-drawn Filmotype Mason with alternates and added inline and drop shadow, for the cover of an album by the King Family. The album was released with a different cover by Warner Bros in 1966. The shown release by Light Records is undated.

According to Discogs, the King Family was an –

American pop group, centered around a female vocal quartet, The King Sisters, that had first gained popularity in the 1940s, and included big band leader and guitar virtuoso Alvino Rey and 32 sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, aunts, uncles and children that made up their extended musical family. Originally christened “America’s First Family of Song”, The King Family catapulted to fame following just two dazzling appearances on ABC-TV’s The Hollywood Palace to become one of the most popular and beloved television, recording, and concert acts of the 1960s and 1970s.

[More info on Discogs]

Description of the exhibition by the Center for Craft:

Something earned, Something left behind is a group exhibition concerned with reconciling a history of craft and exclusion of POC narratives and displacement. It centers on artists working with cultural traditions at the forefront of their practice to engage conversations of identity, healing, and reconnection. This show gives reverence to ancestral homelands, hyphenated identity markers, expectations to assimilate, and the pressure to give up parts of oneself in order to fit a new identity.

Few objects in the world are apolitical in their historical affiliations. How have the cultural, political, and economic decidedness of objects impacted their meaning and worth? These works on view investigate and analyze the transactional and political languages of objects.

The introductory exhibition text is printed on chiffon, while the eight-page gallery guide is Risograph-printed in three colors—black, light lime, and mint—by Woolly Press. Color separations for the cover image were made using the Spectrolite app, developed by Amelia Greenhall and Adam Greenhall.

Several diacritics—ư, ơ, à, ầ—were cobbled together manually for the exhibition materials, as they do not exist in the Migra glyph set. There's one instance of the Cherokee language used in the gallery guide’s land acknowledgment, which is set in Galvji. You can see other recommended Cherokee fonts on the Cherokee Nation's official website.

Something earned, Something left behind was curated by Kehayr Brown-Ransaw, a 2023 Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Craft. Exhibition management by Sarah Darro, Lisette Gallaher, and Marilyn Zapf. Installation by Ian Brownlee, Carrie Helmkamp, Lauren Roquemore, and Devyn Vasquez. Edited by Liz Carleton. Exhibition graphic design by Erik Pedersen / History of Salad.

The Sorani Kurdish text uses the Kurdo-Arabic alphabet, a modified Perso-Arabic script, and appears to be set in Simplified Arabic (as included in Arial).

30,000 on the Hoof is a Western novel by Zane Grey (1872–1939), published posthumously in 1940. Shown here is the first-edition cover by Grosset & Dunlap.

The title typeface, an all-caps roman with flare serifs and inline effect, is Atrax. “Thirty thousand” is written as a number. This way, we get to see Atrax’ numerals, which exhibit diagonal contrast – unlike the letters, which are drawn around a vertical contrast axis. With all weight apportioned to the bottom left, the zero almost looks like a dimensional ball.

If you try to learn about the origins of Atrax from a font marketplace like Monotype’s MyFonts, you’ll find that it was designed by “URW Design Staff” and that the design is owned by URW Type Foundry (a publisher acquired by Monotype in 2020). The tags hint at a date in the 1990s. That’s misleading at best, and only relates to one of the digitizations.

In fact, Atrax is a design by Heinrich Jost (1889–1948), a student of Paul Renner and Emil Preetorius. From 1923 until his premature death, Jost served as the art director for Bauer, during the type foundry’s most successful years, overlooking the release of his former teacher’s Futura. Issued in 1926, Atrax was Jost’s first published type design of his own. It was followed by Beton and Bauer Bodoni, among others.

The name of the author is added in all-caps Futura fett.

On the title page, the book’s title is set in Goudy Open. The designer apparently didn’t like this typeface’s zero, which is a monolinear circle, and used the lowercase letter o instead (in his own book, Goudy agreed).

Most of the smaller text is set in Janson, apparently using the version by Mergenthaler Linotype. Judging from the narrower Z in “ZANE”, the heading at the top of the left page is set in Monotype Janson, though. The publisher’s name at the bottom right looks like it’s Mergenthaler Linotype’s Garamond (No. 1), a design based on Stempel Garamond.

Tom Clancy’s The Division is an online action role-playing video game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft, released on March 8th 2016. The game takes place in an alternate near-future, also known as 2015 where a viral epidemic has spread worldwide, causing untold casualties and widespread chaos. In order to restore law and order, the United States Government activates sleeper agents working for the Strategic Homeland Division.

Ignoring the whiplash of memories I got from stepping into yet another global epidemic, this game is much more futuristic than it wants to admit thanks to the advanced SHD tech, and the UI reflects this. Borda, unapologetically futuristic is the sole typeface used for the UI. With a little help from modding tools, the game is specifically using the regular, demi-bold and bold weight. Borda continues to be used as the branding typeface for The Division sub-series.

As for other typefaces, Helvetica Black is used in the game’s logo for “The Division”, whereas “Tom Clancy” is likely custom made. Source Sans is used for the game’s chat window.

Main menu

Settings menu

In-game HUD. The game heavily utilises in-world HUD elements to mark locations. Whether or not the agents actually see it is a bit of a mystery.

Pause menu

Upgrading a section of the James A. Farley Building, used as the main lobby of the game

Inventory menu

Modding a gun