An adorable butter alien from another planet set the stage for a brand story like no other.
Butter Baby, a brave explorer from the paradise planet Butterlandia, travelled through space to save his home. He discovered weird and wonderful worlds before eventually crash-landing on Earth, where he found rich, abundant butter and friendly humans, or as he called them ‘humblabubs’. Captivated, he decided to stay and share his traditional Butterlandia treats from his humble store in Blok M, Jakarta.

Our task was to take our client’s initial narrative, build in lore, craft the Butter Baby character, and transform it into a distinctive and out-of-this-world brand identity. Butter Baby’s hero typeface is OZIK Soft, a playful display font that feels expressive without tipping into childish. Its rounded forms feel contemporary while also nodding to Butter Baby’s own soft, rounded character. Our supporting typeface is Söhne. It is functional, highly legible, and provides balance to the more expressive display.

Rugs Unplugged is a live music series based in Utah, United States, dedicated to showcasing diverse and exceptional musical talent. The series offers a unique platform for artists to perform in an intimate, unfiltered setting, giving audiences an authentic musical experience.

The design approach for the Rugs Unplugged logo draws inspiration from their passion for music and the vibrant community they've fostered through it. We crafted a mascot resembling three dancing figures that capture the dynamic energy and groove we feel when experiencing music. Upon closer inspection, the mascot incorporates musical elements, such as notes, a vinyl record, and an unplugged jack.

For the T-shirt design, we creatively reimagined the brand name by blending the concepts of ‘rugs’ and ‘unplugged’. We transformed the lines of a musical staff into a graphic that resembles a rug, with an unplugged jack cable woven through them. This design approach reflects the brand's passion for music while highlighting its deep connection to our lives and the raw, authentic energy of live performances.

Mexican Seoul is a Korean-Mexican feel-good street food brand launched during lockdown.

Duzi Studio created the visual identity of Mexican Seoul using Monopol by Nguyen Gobber combined with ABC Gravity and ABC Whyte by Dinamo, plus Rollerscript by G-Type. The font used for Korean text is yet unidentified. Duzi describes their identity project as follows:

To capture their rebellious character, we’re serving an identity that’s as bold as the bites. Dig into a feast of hot pink, culture collision and nostalgic sticker packs, topped with a dash of Asian spice and a sprinkling of Mexican flair.

Coasters

“Seouls of Mischief” additionally uses BRZO.

Toronto-based branding studio newkid designed an identity for Quagga, a brand of self-assembly platform beds.

The logo is designed in Ozik (from Nuform Type). A pair of secondary typefaces, Gustavo (from Lift Type) and System Mono (from Frost Type), complete the typographic system.

In a feature by The Brand Identity, newkid commented on the typographic choices:

“As we explored the brand and the typography, we quickly realised that a ‘standard’ typeface wasn’t going to cut it. In the spirit of the brand, something quirky and playful was required,” shares Co-founder & Design Director Rich Brown. The studio found the perfect answer to the problem in Ozik by Nuform Type. “The letter forms (particularly the lowercase) are not only wonderfully weird, but the squared, angular edges feel reminiscent of the wooden components that the Quagga beds are built from,” adds Brown. In an apt nod to how the wooden blocks of the bed can be fitted together, the team imagined each letter as a singular component that could be animated to “slot” together, forming the completed wordmark. The final piece of the puzzle was a pair of secondary typefaces – Gustavo Bold by Lift Type and Frost Type’s System Mono – that combined boldness, with an inviting and playful tone.

Visual identity, accompanying the release of the album Bonhommes by MPL. Designed by Super Terrain, who use BRZO and ToY throughout.

Front and back cover of the Chansonnier booklet

Spread from the Chansonnier booklet

Spread from the Chansonnier booklet

Album cover

Album cover with vinyl record

Front and back cover of the CD edition

BRZO Chrome Away in early use on the label for Sticky Sticky, a double dry hopped wheat IPA with 6.2% ABV, brewed by Five Boroughs Brewing Co. in collaboration with Twin Elephant Brewing. A beta of the shiny display italic was made available on Future Fonts in February 2021. Nuform released the final version of the family this month, in November 2022.

On the seemingly sticker-covered label, The Collected Works paired Brzo with a number of other typefaces, including PDU Stencil and Helsinki, the brewery’s standard typefaces.

The swishy-swashy Viktor Script has labeled many a beverage — from milk alternatives to beer — but perhaps its first drink, at age two, was fermented fruit.

Founded in Mexico City in 2013, Hard Frescos Brewing Co. launched their first alcoholic aqua fresco in 2015. The initial bottle and can designs featured a somewhat illegible and uninspired block sans, but sometime in 2017 they rebranded with Viktor Script, which was fairly new at the time. The typeface, by San Franciscans Erik Marinovich and James Edmondson, was somewhat of a local choice as Hard Frescos has an office in the city. In designing Viktor Script, Marinovich was also inspired by the hand-painted signs of the Mexican-American Mission district, so there’s a connection to the company founders’ homeland too.

The supplementary sans in the most recent branding is the Latin American Alegreya Sans.

The website (currently offline) and print material were created by Knockout Design. It’s not clear if they were also responsible for the logo and packaging.

2017 logo.

This Saturday Austria’s music scene got together for a big concert in support of the people of Ukraine. More than a dozen bands and artists followed the organizer’s call, for a twelve-hour lineup including Mavi Phoenix, Bilderbuch, and Wanda. Vienna’s Ernst-Happel-Stadion sold out in no time, and almost 45,000 people attended the event. For those who didn’t get a ticket, Radio FM4 and other broadcasters offered a live video stream. All proceeds were donated to charities that help the people affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The typeface used for the visual identity is OZIK. Designed by Erik Marinovich, this family was released just a few weeks ago via Erik’s newly launched Nuform. Ozik is used in several of its four weights, and exclusively in lowercase letters featuring the quirky a and e. The peace dove used as key visual was likewise drawn by Erik, and shown on his social media channels in March 2022, together with related graphics. At the concert, two big birds framed the stage, carrying a musical note in their beaks.

Eazy in concert

Make amore, not war – Wanda live on stage

Blommm is a (web)shop for locally grown ecological flowers and other products, based in Ghent, Belgium.

The logo is set in slightly altered characters from Diamonds by HvD Fonts. Two brackets let the logo contain things like a bouquet of flowers or text.

Elmhurst 1925 is a brand of non-dairy plant milk. It uses Viktor Script in their logo to evoke a fresh, modern, yet nostalgic look. Most typography on the packaging uses Alergia Grotesk.

I wanted to make a post about the excellent craft beer brewer Berliner Berg’s use of Viktor Script by Erik Marinovich for OH no Type Co. I took pictures of their van yesterday and thought, “I’ll go home and take some screenshots of their website! I bet they use Viktor Script there, too.” Well they don’t. Only seems to be on a few of their Instagram graphics, as far as I could tell. So sad! The font is rad AF.

Berliner Berg Brauerei use a custom typeface for their logo and most other purposes. The all-caps grotesk is named Schlossberg and was designed by Aurelia Markwalder in 2015.

Another car from the brewery’s fleet, from February 2019.

These shorts, involving Jack Stratton of Vulfpeck being filmed and interviewed by designer Rob Stenson, give me more joy than any large scale fonts usage ever will. Each of the videos presents creative use of type, video editing, and various effects to tell the story. Although the series largely receives recognition because of Stratton’s encyclopedic knowledge of funk and pop tunes from sixties through the eighties, Stenson’s typographic explorations in the interview format are often overlooked. He fearlessly combines typefaces that have no obvious relationship, creating compositions that work surprisingly well. My only hope is that this series lives on forever.

When asked about his process for working with type in his videos, Rob Stenson had this to say:

To be honest I just love looking at typefaces and buying them from small, independent foundries, and I love the historic context around each one. I think the basic process is, for a given moment in the video, I can narrow the face choice pretty quickly to something tangentially related to what’s being talked about (people say art history degrees are useless but I’ve found it great for coming up with “reasons” for picking typefaces), and then from there I almost always go with a modern face referencing the past (if I can find one), rather than a strict digital version of an actual face from the past. Hobeaux being a perfect example, and Forma’s another one, and Trianon Caption — they evoke the past but are true digitals, much like the music of Vulfpeck or the videos themselves, which use digital recreations of film stock and VHS tapes for color. One foot in the past, one in the present. Other than that I’ll just look for excuses to use typefaces I really like a lot. Jaakko’s a great example of that — I might’ve come up with a reason for using it at the time, but really it’s just awesome, and I feel like video is such a liberal medium in terms of what’s allowable typographically that I can really go for broke all the time. Webpages are tougher since viewers get the opportunity to stare at the design for so long, which I’ve found to be a bummer.

At the the time of this writing, there are three video installments of the Holy Trinities series: Tambourine, Guitar, and Minimalist Funk Arrangers.

A selection of stills featuring the eclectic typography is shown below.

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Trianon Italic is used for the facts about Norman Whitfield, Hobeaux and Hobeaux Rococeaux Sherman for the faux record label. Additional lettering by OH no Type Co., riffing on the original “Gordy” logotype.

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The title for the “Guitar” episode pairs Goudy Text with the solid Background style of Hobeaux Rococeaux.

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Vulfpeck is set in Vulf Mono, of course – the typeface was originally designed for the band’s identity.

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More Hobeaux, set on a circle. The tight spacing with overlapping letters cleverly minimizes the gaps without fanning or distorting the glyphs.

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The engaging Forma DJR, set on an angle …

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… vs. the minimalist Times New Roman

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Sano kyllä Jaakkoon!

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“Minimalist Funk Arrangers” starts off with a nod to Woody Allen.

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Ringlet: square deal.

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The illustration for Wardell Quezergue AKA “Creole Beethoven” is complemented by Eubie Script.

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The “Tambourine” episode ends on a high note with Viktor Script.

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I was one of a handful of lucky individuals who received these wonderful buttons featuring a pair of thoroughly hashtagable Trumpisms. The buttons were designed by Theresa Dela Cruz using Erik Marinovich’s tasty Viktor Script.

Web version of illustration, published Dec. 29, 2015.

Print version of illustration, published Jan. 3, 2016.