The Züri Notebook is much more than an ordinary travel guide. It is designed for incoming students at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) who are spending an exchange semester in Switzerland – serving as an inspiring guide, a heartfelt companion, and a creative resource.

How does Zurich work? What is there to see, experience, discover? From swimming in the Limmat or Lake Zurich, to hiking trails with breathtaking views, to clubs, art supply shops, and other hidden gems of the city – the Züri Notebook provides answers. It includes facts and figures about Switzerland, its culture, and the ZHdK, complemented by personal tips and recommendations. Recipes for Swiss classics like rösti, fondue and braided bread (Zopf) invite readers to cook for themselves, and a small glossary compares German, English, and Züritüütsch (Zurich dialect).

The book is enriched with personal “places to hang out” – our favourite spots and insider tips. Structured as a dialogue, the notebook features handwritten notes, drawings, and crossed-out comments left by the fictional previous owner, Max, addressed to Sophie, the new owner of the Züri Notebook. Combined with the Executive typeface by Optimo, this charming and personal narrative style lends the book a special depth.

​Khloé Kardashian has introduced Khloud Protein Popcorn, a new snack under her brand Khloud Foods.

The branding for Khloud Protein Popcorn is centered around a wordmark that features a slightly customized version of the CoFo Plusha typeface. CoFo Plusha’s soft, airy, and rounded letterforms contribute to a friendly and approachable brand image. The accompanying rounded sans is Optimo’s Hermes.

For HEAD Genève’s Welcome Week 2024/25, Swiss studio Trojans Collective designed the visual communication applied to posters, various digital formats and animations for social media, as well as content for campus screens. The design agency states:

We worked with a pale pink and black palette, using a typographic structure based on a pyramid-like composition.

The display font used is Baustraße designed by Fantasia Type and distributed by Future Fonts.

The accompanying sans is yet unidentified. The HEAD Genève logo uses the school’s standard typeface, Executive.

Cargo for Cargo: a flawless LTypI, spotted by Edgar Walthert in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

This year, the local Museum of Ethnography (MEN) presents an exhibition titled Cargo Cults Unlimited. From the museum’s website:

Cargo Cults Unlimited explores the complex theme of the globalized economy. Highly material, to the point of threatening to exhaust the earth’s resources, the economy is also composed of ethereal abstractions, prophetic discourses, mimetic behavior and bureaucratic protocols. The exhibition invites visitors to explore this complexity by drawing on images associated with the notion of the “cargo cult”.

The term refers to a set of millenarian rituals that appeared in Melanesia with colonization in the 19th century. Guided by charismatic leaders, followers imitate selected forms of Western behavior – arranging cut flowers, conducting military parades or constructing bamboo harbors and airstrips – with the apparent aim of capturing the wealth produced overseas and imported by boat or plane. As anthropologists have shown, the popularity of this term testifies above all to the ethnocentrism and paternalism of the colonizers faced with practices they deemed naïve or irrational.

Reversing the perspective, the exhibition questions whether the magical thinking once attributed to distant savages might not better characterize contemporary relationships with the globalized economy. Do we not find echoes of cargo cults in the fetishization of brands and external signs of wealth? In the more-or-less deliberate ignorance of the places and conditions under which clothes, food and electronics are produced? In the mimetic behavior observed on financial markets? In faith in a caste of experts who speak on behalf of supernatural entities known as growth or the market?

Gavillet & Rust’s Cargo (Optimo, 2003) is used on the exhibition poster, together with Chi-Long Trieu’s Basel Grotesk and Ian Party’s Antarctica. It also appears inside the exhibition, alongside other fonts. Cargo Cults Unlimited was designed by Curious Space. The scenography is by Anna Jones, Elfyn Round, and Raphaël von Allmen. Graziella Paiano worked on the graphics.

Brest Brest Brest / Rémy Poncet has designed the artwork for the record Il s’est passé quelque chose by French singer Auren. Headlines are composed in Signal Compressed (by Production Type) and texts in Hermes (by Optimo).

New visual identity for Le Train Théâtre. Design by the French studio Brest Brest Brest.
Logo and identity consist of Pimpit, designed by Benoît Bodhuin. Hermes by Optimo is used for text.

For over a decade, and almost in secret, Scott Avett has amassed an impressive body of artwork. Though known primarily as a member of The Avett Brothers, Scott’s formal training was in visual art. We designed and co-edited a monograph that catalogs his work and documents his creative process.

The typographic palette was carefully chosen to balance a host of tonal qualities and specific use cases. GT Super Display, a striking contemporary serif from Grilli Type, provides the lion’s share of typographic personality. Its sibling, GT Super Text, imparts an appropriate formal quality to the essays. With its simple, rounded, typewriter-esque forms, Optimo’s Hermes Condensed provides a stark counterpoint to GT Super’s razor sharp serifs. Dia, a blocky, quirky sans from Schick Toikka, is peppered throughout the book in titles and headings. Dia’s lighter weight is paired with GT Super Text in interviews to provide a visual tone-of-voice change from interviewer to respondent.

When the eco pioneers at outdoor apparel brand Patagonia approached us to design a printed guide to Boulder, Colorado, we knew we had an opportunity to push the sustainability envelope. The end result is an amusing yet handy pocket guide that’s also the world’s first use of algae-based offset ink.

Unsure of how the ink would perform on press when designing the piece (it ended up printing perfectly), we chose typefaces that would be forgiving under unforgiving conditions. Hermes Condensed is used for body with Whyte Inktrap for headings and titles (and a tiny bit of Stratos sprinkled in for diagram labels).

Read more about the design and algae ink at Cast Iron Design.

The Wire 373, March 2015

The Wire is an independent, monthly music magazine covering a wide range of alternative, underground and non-mainstream musics. The Wire celebrates and interrogates the most visionary and inspiring, subversive and radical, marginalised and undervalued musicians on the planet, past and present. Art direction by Ben Weaver who has been working with the following designers over the years: Patrick Ward, Mads Freund Brunse and Gareth Lindsay.

The Wire 386, April 2016

The Wire 370, December 2014

The Wire 372, February 2015

The Wire 383, January 2016

The Wire 382, December 2015

The Wire 376, June 2015

The Wire 392, October 2016

The Wire 388, June 2016

The Wire 414, August 2018

Footnotes is a type design periodical published yearly by La Police. The second issue opens with the 2nd part of an article by Brigitte Schuster about The Haas Typefoundry Ltd. initiated in issue A. Following this link with the first issue, issue B includes contributions by Optimo, François Rappo, Christian Mengelt, Adrien Vasquez, Frank Grießhammer, Alice Savoie, Dorine Sauzet & Sébastien Morlighem.

In order for the reader to discover the typeface(s) presented in each contribution, every essay is typeset with the related typeface(s). Some are unreleased, here’s their detailed list in order of appearance:
LP Jung is a still-in-progress typeface by La Police.
Detroit was available at Optimo between 1998 and 2000 in MM format.
Swiss Gothic is an unreleased revival of Gerstner/Mengelt’s Programm by François Rappo.
Antique is a private version of Helvetica by François Rappo.
Theinhardt Mono is an in-progress variation of the Theinhardt family by François Rappo to be released by Optimo.
AA Files Display Initials are a mix of styles drawn by Adrien Vasquez for the layout of the AA Files magazine.

Detail from page 57: “Sans Plomb” by Optimo, set in Detroit.

Detail from page 62: “The 2002 Typographic Agenda” by François Rappo, featuring Antique, Theinhardt, Plain, Apax, Theinhardt Mono, and Swiss Gothic.

Detail from page 68: “Typeface Redesign” by Christian Mengelt, pairing Mengelt Basel Antiqua (body text) with Sinova (captions).

Detail from page 71: “A Note on the AA Files Display Initials” by Adrien Vasquez, set in Arnhem Fine and Arnhem.

Detail from page 77: “Cogitating Vectors: The Hershey Fonts” by Frank Grießhammer, featuring Minotaur Beef, Minotaur Sans, and Minotaur.

Detail from page 85: “Everyday type” by Alice Savoie, Dorine Sauzet & Sébastien Morlighem, set in Minuscule 6.

Brest Brest Brest designed the program of the Berlioz Festival with the typefaces Plaak and Alcala, created by Damien Gautier.

La Lettre du Musée is edited by the Museum of printing and graphic communication in Lyon. Available as PDF.

Catalog accompanying the exhibition of Czech artist Miroslav Tichý at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 25 June – 22 September 2008:

Only recently discovered, his work reveals the distinctive talent of a marginal and somewhat monomaniacal figure who steadfastly refused the social, political and personal values of the Communist period, form its beginning in 1948 to its end in the late 1980s. Tichý took up photography in the mid-1950s, reinventing it as it were from scratch and building his own cameras and enlargers from shoe-boxes, tin cans, recycled glass and other waste materials. His timeless and uncategorizable images, shot instinctively or carelessly on handmade cameras with makeshift optics, offer an extraordinary vision of a fantastical, eroticised reality, half real, half dream. Women on the TV screen: these are his single, obsessional subject. Rescued from neglect by his neighbour, the film director Roman Buxbaum, in 1989, Tichý's work was first shown at the Sevilla Biennale in 2004. This exhibition at the Centre Pompidou brings together a number of cameras and some hundred photographs, mostly from the Foundation Tichý Ocean.

The typeface is Hermes (Optimo, 2002) with the alternate ‘i’.

The Curatorial Conundrum. What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice?
Edited by Paul O'Neill, Mick Wilson and Lucy Steeds

As part of an entire rebrand of leading Scottish architects JAMstudio, we wanted to present bold, confident messaging. The typeface we chose to carry this weight was Hermes – a clean and modern reinterpretation of the type from the Hermes 3000, a typewriter from 1966. A time when architecture, design, writing and photography were synonymous with character and a timeless style. Hermes worked well at small sizes where its clear geometric shapes allowed for easy readability. At larger sizes, its uniques character and visual quirks helped support a specific tone of voice for the JAMstudio brand.

Cover

Landmark book about the Swiss contemporary art scene by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Author) and Lionel Bovier (Editor). Awarded at "The Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2001" competition.

Utilises Index Bold for cover and all headlines, a typeface that was created bespoke for this book. The Bold is the only weight. It was subsequently released by Optimo in 2003.

Book and typeface designed by Swiss studio Gavillet & Rust.

Inner spread, contents

Inner spread

The Wire magazine cover, issue 346, December 2012

The Wire magazine cover, issue 345, November 2012

The Wire magazine cover, issue 348, February 2013

The Wire magazine, January 2013 spread

The Wire magazine, January 2013 spread

The Wire magazine, January 2013 single page

Mobile. In Touch with Digital Creation is a programme initiated by Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council.

http://www.prohelvetia.ch/mobile/