Details from recent rebrand for engineering design practice Ritchie+Daffin. Bitum by Brownfox in used in Regular and Italic across all materials.

Photography by Thomas Adank.

Трендвотчинг: аналитика подиума (“Trendwatching: Runway Analytics”) is a practical guide to trend research, made as student project at HSE Art and Design School in Saint Petersburg. The scope of a trend analyst’s work involves studying societal changes and identifying emerging needs. The author of this educational guide is Rosemary Thurman, a specialist in trend analysis and forecasting.

The typography is handled by the antique-style typeface Wermut by Brownfox. It is paired with the monospaced IBM Plex Mono by Mike Abbink and Bold Monday to maintain the serious tone of the educational materials.

Русские в Африке (“Russians in Africa”) is a book that explores — through art, poetry, and philosophy — how Soviet Russia of the mid-20th century tried to understand the culture of African countries. The book, published in 2023 by ABCDesign, was designed by Katya Yumasheva. The typography in the publication is executed using CSTM Xprmntl 02 Bold by CSTM Fonts and Geometria by Brownfox.

Cherry Creek Framing is a Denver-based company that was created in 2004. The new owner hired me for a brand refresh. Inspired by the block printing they would sometimes frame, I created an identity that feels classic, with room for experimentation and playfulness. As it is a field that does not evolve significantly over time, I drew inspiration from classic European typography and traditional printing methods.

Titled «Традиционный» музей и современные архитектурные практики (“‘Traditional’ Museum and Contemporary Architectural Practices”), this visual research by me, Veronika Pozdeeva, is part of a thesis project made at HSE Art and Design School. It explores the expansion of traditional museums and their impact on identity and the urban context. The study examines 43 unique cases of museum renovations, analyzing how these transformations shape cultural narratives and influence their surrounding environments.

The typography is serviced by Gerbera, designed by Brownfox, a neo-grotesque typeface that reinterprets archaic forms. This choice establishes a conceptual link to the subject matter, reflecting the interplay between historical museum architecture and contemporary extensions.

By investigating these museum expansions, the project aims to provide insights into how modern interventions reinterpret and redefine cultural heritage within evolving urban landscapes.

You can flip through the catalog on Calaméo.

Asphalt – Kollektiv für Architektur (Asphalt architecture collective) works between the fields of research, teaching and building practice. In their work, they question the status quo and develop new ideas, advocating a fairer change in architecture and the construction industry.

Women’s Memory of the GULAG / Женская память о ГУЛАГе is an exhibition curated by Irina Scherbakova, Irina Ostrovskaya, and Alena Kozlova. It was shown at the International Memorial in 2021. For more information about the exhibition, see the website of Memorial.

The catalog was designed by ABCDesign and Katya Yumasheva and published by Memorial in 2023.

Järjekord. Üks episood Tartu fotoloost / The Queue. An Episode in Tartu’s Photo History is an exhibition about an exhibition. The bilingual catalog (Estonian and English) with texts by Indrek Grigor, Adam Mazur, and Alise Tifentale was co-edited and designed by Alexey Murashko. It was published by Tartu Kunstimuuseum in 2023.

From art critic and co-author Indrek Grigor:

This book, which offers a glimpse into the photography of the 1980s in the Soviet Union, includes documents about the history of the exhibitions, a selection of works by Estonian photographers who participated in the Soviet Union-wide exhibition contest “Women in Photographic Art,” and a brief insight into the role of nudity in the Estonian media of the 1980s. The latter draws from the miraculously preserved archive of the “Edasi” newspaper’s “Summer Woman” photo contest.

The archival material compiled in the book is complemented by Indrek Grigor’s overview of the “Woma [sic!] in Photographic Art” exhibition series’ history, an article by Latvian photo historian Alise Tifentale that focuses on the 1977 exhibition of women photographers in Riga titled Women with Cameras, and an essay by Polish art historian Adam Mazur, which discusses the legendary exhibition series Venus in Krakow, which also inspired the Tartu exhibition.

On March 3, 1983, the Tartu Photography Club opened in Tartu Art House the first exhibition in the series Women in Photographic Art. It quickly became one of the most popular events in the history of exhibitions in Tartu, with a total of five episodes. Women in Photographic Art reached its peak popularity in 1989 when it was visited by 24,000 people over four weeks. The stories of the queues outside the Tartu Art House are the initial impetus for this book and the preceding exhibition.

Erotica was frowned upon in the public sphere of the Soviet Union, and organizing an exhibition featuring nudes required some political manoeuvring. In response to this, the political sentiment during the period of re-independence included a somewhat carnival-like opposition to the Soviet Union, including its puritanism. With the growth of media freedom, such as the publication of the Maaja magazine in 1989 and featuring nudity on the front page of the Edasi newspaper, the exhibition Woman in Photographic Art lost its value as a rarity, and it waned in the machinery of capitalism of the 1990s.

The approach to the design of the book could be described as a retrospective speculation on Estonian visual aesthetics of the late Soviet era combining both affective and decadent modernist type with noticeable traces of the broad nib pen, very present in Estonian graphic design during the second half of the 20th century, and the rationality and at the same time poor naïveté of the geometric modular faces of the late 1980s. It is very peculiar how two typefaces (Tercia and Platelet) created in absolutely different cultural and geographical contexts could complement each other and the graphical composition of the cover so well.

The book interior features two more families used for body setting and captions (Atlas Grotesk), and for marginalia and running headers (Arnold), both supporting the Cyrillic script occasionally appearing in the publication along with the main text in Estonian and English. All four corners of the book were rounded matching the features of the Platelet and the cover’s pattern.

Website for INDEX Berlin including lots of filters, personal favorites and a customizable tourplan. Designed by Büro Bum Bum using Formular from Brownfox throughout. From the About page:

INDEX is a bimonthly exhibition listings calendar for contemporary art in galleries, institutions and project spaces, published and edited by Kirsa Geiser since 2002. The printed edition of the listings calendar is available at all participating venues in Berlin as a fold-out pamphlet, while the continually updated online version of INDEX can be consulted at indexberlin.com. The idea behind INDEX is to provide a clearly organised selection of the most important contemporary art exhibitions in Berlin in a compact format for professionals and the gallery-going public. The selection of exhibition venues is determined by the editor together with a jury.

Various features available on the mobile and desktop versions of the website are likewise intended to help you plan your visits to exhibitions throughout Berlin according to your own wishes and schedule. The content is sorted by three lists: exhibitions, venues and artists. You can choose from a range of elements via the Filter to costumize these according to your interests, such as special dates, opening hours, districts, venues-types. INDEX helps you planing a tour with the feature Tourplan as well as putting your selection into Favorites.

Leeners Biotech excels in transforming innovative ideas into fully operational biopharmaceutical technologies, inspired by nature and life. Their medicines represent modern, effective solutions in the field. The brand’s visual identity features a container-molecule icon, reflecting elements of DNA and the end product—a medicinal pill. The corporate pattern narrates the brand’s approach to molecular-level problem-solving through systematic sequences and connections in development. The visual play of gradients symbolizes the natural inspiration, while cool, pure colors depict human control over chaos, aiming to achieve specific goals.

The brand font is Coil, designed by Vyacheslav Kirilenko and Gayaneh Bagdasaryan in 2020–21 at Brownfox. In the Leeners logo, the glyphs for E, N and R were modified.

ALEA was made by Polina Ovchinnikova as a student project at HSE Art and Design School. The project addresses the so-called aleatoric music (also aleatory music), a technique used by some composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. In aleatory pieces, some elements of the musical score – notes, pauses, tempo – are left to chance, changing in the process of composition as well as during the performance.

The book’s headers, subheaders, and page headers use Rene by Fedor Abroskin, now available from tomorrow’s storefront; body text is typeset in Bitum designed by Gayaneh Bagdasaryan and Vyacheslav Kirilenko.

Волхонка. Неторопливая прогулка (English: Volkhonka. The Unhurried Walk) is a book about the history and architecture of Volkhonka, one of the oldest streets in Moscow situated near the Kremlin. Written by architectural historian Federica Rossi, the book is something more than an ordinary guidebook. A big historical and archival research preceded the writing of the book. Written in an easy manner the book opens new pages of thrilling history of the district. It is richly illustrated with both modern and historical materials, many of which are published for the first time.

The book was designed by and for White City Project Foundation, with art direction by Ivan Aleksandrov and graphic design by Ekaterina Yumasheva and Elena Byalaya. The typography uses Geometria (Brownfox) and Gauge (Alexander Tarbeev). It won several awards, including Red Dot (“Best of the best” nomination, Winner 2020), European Design Awards (Silver, 2020), and Zharkniga (Grand prix, 2020).

For more info and images, see Behance.

On the cover, “ИЛИОН” is in Antonym, with the Latin “ILIOS” added in Bitum and the Greek “ΗΛΙΟΣ” in what appears to be a custom derivation thereof.

One of the most legendary archeological discoveries made by Heinrich Schliemann is described in this book titled Илион. Город и страна троянцев (Ilion. Gorod i strana troyantsev, English: Ilios. City and Country of the Trojans). It was made by Diana Zinchenko as a student project at Moscow Polytechnic University, using Antonym and Bitum. From Diana’s Behance page:

Excavations of Troy, its treasures and myths around this place even in 150 years are thrilling and famous among professional community and amateurs. The publication is supplemented by quotes from Homer's Ilias, which was a key source during Schliemann’s searchings. Different number of blue lines of poem with markers on the edge of page create a dynamic rhythm on every spread.

Formular was used by Natasha Agapova for designing two books that look back at the exhibitions organized by the START Platform for Young Art, an initiative of the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow.

About the START project:

An arrangement of a personal exhibition is one of the best ways for a young artist to declare about himself. Every month the START project contributes to support one artist to display his/her exhibition at Winzavod CCA. The aim of the project – to discover new names in Russian contemporary art.

Hole is a gay hook-up app. Indgila Samad Ali and Shuka worked on the identity design and conceptualized the mobile design, using Aeroport by Brownfox.

Through the Social Life of the Sea-Shell is a publication by Delphine Lejeune, a visual designer and material researcher based in Amsterdam. It was made in collaboration with writer Esteban Gómez-Rosselli and printed by Raddraaier SSP. Lejeune writes:

Looking at nature is a critical moment of self discovery. The sea-shell has historically been part of this practice, which now hides behind the banality of its displaced context as souvenir.

This journey to re-evaluate the sea-shell through the practices of observing, collecting, describing, classifying, and manipulating a visual digital archive to reclaim its condition, first as a natural object, as a speculative object that has been central to mythic and scientific fascination, and as the unit of a wide constellation of value circulation. Through design research, it aims to salvage the inner world of coquillage.

Antonym is used throughout, including for the 3D printed sand case.

​​HAK Studios is “a multidisciplinary, concept driven design studio, working with leather, textiles and ceramics”. Based in Greece and launched by designer Alex K., the company produces handcrafted pieces: HAK is short for “Handcrafted by Alex K”. which are sold in selected stores in Greece – and New York City.

In collaboration with the founder, Semiotik Design developed the naming and visual identity. The corporate image is built around photographs that show intimate combinations of bodies and HAK Studios pieces, and typography set in Activist and Formular from Brownfox.

Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Alta is the title of Ukraine’s contribution to the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. From the website of artist Pavlo Makov:

The Pavilion exhibits the works of Pavlo Makov, whose artistic practices in the early 1990s focused on exploring the parallels between the human body and urban space and have since then largely shifted to elaborating the theme of “the world without us”. The artwork Fountain of Exhaustion is a serene and reflective project, which serves as a conscious extension of the original story of Fountain of Exhaustion (at once providing for the particularities of the exhibition location) and comes as a natural response to the theme Milk of Dreams.

Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, the Pavilion was curated by co-founders of The Naked Room, Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko, and chief editor of IST Publishing, Borys Filonenko. The visual identity was designed by Ukrainian studio 3Z, using Aeroport Mono by Brownfox and SangBleu Versailles by Swiss Typefaces.

IST Publishing on the catalog:

The 2022 Arsenale di Venezia exhibition is the first time Fountain of Exhaustion has ever been displayed as a fully-functional art object with a steady water supply, even though its original conception dates back to 1995 and was initially occasioned by a local context of Kharkiv, a large city in the east of Ukraine. The book features a comprehensive chronological account of the Fountain’s development in the years 1995–2022 as well as a careful selection of archive materials, illustrating the work’s evolution over the last 25 years.

It also provides additional textual commentary by various authors, exploring Makov’s artistic practices and the spatio-temporal connotations of Fountain of Exhaustion as an art object all the while reflecting on water, rivers, and channels, overflow and desolation, personally landscapes and the pressing global issues of the day.

CoFo Robert from Contrast Foundry and Aeroport from Brownfox in use on the cover and in the interior of Зачем люди танцуют (“Why do people dance”) by Irina Sirotkina. Illustrated by Maria Titova, and designed by publisher Ad Marginem who write (translated from Russian):

Why did ballerinas stand on pointe shoes in the nineteenth century, and changed to sneakers in the twentieth century? What is “modern” in modern dance and what is the difference between modern and postmodern dance? And – most importantly – why have people been dancing for as long as they can remember?

(...) Irina Sirotkina is a renowned researcher of dance and movement culture, a PhD candidate in psychology at Moscow State University and a PhD candidate at Manchester University. Why Do People Dance? is her first children’s book. The fact that for twenty years Irina has not only studied dance, but also dances herself helped her to write it: she practices free dance and “musical movement” - a local version of Isadora Duncan’s dance.

The Execution is a 2021 Russian mystery thriller film directed by Lado Kvataniya.

The posters were made by the artist Igor Klepnev. The font he used for the logo/titles is SovMod by type designer Stanislav Chiganov. It’s a humanistic grotesk with a Soviet 1960s vibe. SovMod is supported by Brownfox’s Aeroport.