TT Tricks is part of the De Nieuwe Vorst identity, alongside Calps Sans and Mohr and an eclectic (and changing?) typographic palette. Design studio unknown, website developed by Visited.

De Nieuwe Vorst is a Dutch theater housed in a monumental villa built in 1870. It is a creative and vibrant meeting place in the heart of Tilburg, where art, culture, and tastes are awakened, stories come alive, and the senses are stimulated. The place is home to subcultures and expands the concept of theater. In every corner of the historic villa, the theater rooms, and the beautiful courtyard garden, guests are welcome to experiment, confuse, and give art a chance.

Spread from the book, highlighting the conceptual level of creative destruction through a cropped
satellite image (left), the cropped volcano database (center) and a fold-out legend (right).

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust explores the paradox of creative destruction in Earth’s calamitous yet regenerating and rejuvenating geophysical processes – volcanism.

Based upon the Smithsonian Institution’s main database of active volcanoes around the world, the broad variety of geographic as well as visual representations of this genuinely disastrous force are explored in an ever-changing but repeating framework of satellite data, topographic maps, 3D elevation models and tabulations.
As a conceptual disruption and visual reference to contour lines, spreads with white ink on black paper – an alphabetical list of all active volcanoes at this time – break the layout on a regular basis.

Tabular data: Global Volcanism Program (Smithsonian Institution)
Satellite data: NASA Landsat Program

Format: 329mm × 234mm
Scope: 150 pages
Paper: Metapher Rough (120g), Gmund Colors Matt (135g), Papyrus Rainbow Grey (270g)
Linen: Peyer Duchesse Neonorange
Made as Bachelor’s Thesis at the Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences.

Cover, spine and back.

True to scale photographic, cartographic and topographic overview of the individual volcano, its type, climate zone and location feature as well as short geological summary.

List of all volcano specific eruptions by date (start/stop), certainty, measure of explosiveness (VEI = volcanic explosivity index), evidence as well as visual sequence of the latest eruption.

True to scale, multi perspective terrain overview on height, width and overall surrounding.

Information on name, number, type, country, region, subregion, longitude / latitude, elevation in m,
date of eruption, evidence, as well as the population in various radii of all 1512 volcanoes.

A set of three infographics, examining a country's volcanic activity by quantity and type as well as its population at risk in relation to a) the total population of the continent and b) within various radii around the indvidual volcanoes.

Es Pop in Madrid describes itself as ‘an independent publisher specializing in topics related to popular culture.’ Among many topics, they published a pile of fine books on music stars, from Johnny Cash to Curtis Mayfield and from Lemmy to Kiss’s Paul Stanley. The covers, mostly designed by the in-house studio El Pulpo Design, radiate pure pleasure in translating a book’s content into a striking combination of typography, stylized images, and color.

Cowboy Song by Graeme Thomson is the 2016 biography of Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott. Es Pop Ediciones produced the Spanish translation the next year.

Lynott’s portrait was created by illustrator César Sebastián. The combination of typefaces is both loud and subtle. The title is set in Berlin Sans by David Berlow and Matthew Butterick, simultaneously published by FontFont and Font Bureau in 1992. The family was based on an extra-bold bold metal display font designed in Berlin, named with the Spanish word for ‘Black’ — Negro (1930). No racist meaning at the time.

The expressive headline font was combined with two versions of a contemporary typeface by Kimmy Kirkwood: Bourton Base and Burton Marquee.

The Advent Project is an online, multimedia advent calendar featuring 24 pieces of bite-sized art by different artists. Each day between December 1st and December 24th, users unlock a new, short piece of media — songs, illustrations, stories, crafts, jokes, and more. This year’s calendar benefits The Community Justice Exchange, a non-profit dedicated to building a community-centered vision of justice.

The brand identity relies on two font families: Duplicate Sans by Christian Schwartz for body text and headings, and Matthew Butterick’s Triplicate (particularly the italic, non-monospaced variant) for captions and other supplemental text.

Each year’s calendar features a completely new identity and site design. Further, each of the year's 24 artwork pages has its own color scheme, inspired by the tone and content of the piece. All of these pages are anchored by the same type — giving the site a consistent user experience, while pulling focus away from the project brand and on to the piece itself.

Designed and developed by Austin Heller and Tim Jacques; additional design and development by Emily Sanford and Lori Buchanan.

Phoebe Poole, 18, who was holding a placard saying “never gonna give EU up” in reference to a song by 1980s popstar Rick Astley, wasn’t old enough to vote in the 2016 referendum.

“We have come here today because we feel like our future has been stolen from us. It is our generation that is going to have to live with the consequences of this disaster,” she told Reuters. — independent.ie

The photo was taken by Angela Christofilou at today’s “Put it to the People” march in London. The shown placard uses caps from Berlin Sans Demi Bold, stacked and staggered. Font Bureau’s revival of a 1920s typeface by Lucian Bernhard is among the fonts that come bundled with Microsoft Office software. Berlin Sans is a splendid choice for the application: it’s loud and clear, and more affectionate than, say, Impact or Haettenschweiler.

I don’t know whether the placard is the one by Phoebe Poole mentioned in the Reuters article. The Rickrolling meme referenced in the slogan has been associated with Anti-Brexit protests since April 2016. Just after the Pro-Brexit campaign had announced “Vote Leave” as their motto, Mario Van Poppel registered several web addresses similar to the official one. As a result, voteleave.net, voteleave.org, voteleave.com and voteleave.co.uk all directed link clickers to the infamous song by Rick Astley.

Via Stef Dickers, Special Collections and Archives Manager of Bishopsgate Institute:

To those marching today, please save placards, ephemera and anything you consider important and donate to #archives @BishopsgateInst. Make sure history knows why we marched!

Super-Sonic Jazz is an initiative by Paradiso Amsterdam. It presents exciting and innovative artists who blend together diverse musical influences with a jazz approach; from electronics to African grooves, classical, soul and hip hop.

From 9 to 19 November, this year’s edition of Super-Sonic Jazz Festival features artists like Moses Sumney, Hieroglyphic Being, Sarathy Korwar, Shabaka Hutching and Zara McFarlane in four special locations across Amsterdam — De Vondelkerk, De Duif, Amstelkerk and Paradiso.

The festival posters were created by Machine. So was the general visual identity that extends to other events as well as a record label. The identity “is loosely based on the idea of connections, similar as in the music featured, where various styles and periods connect and reconnect.”

Following the slogan “jazz in four churches”, the design references stained glass windows. The fonts are the three lighter weights of Berlin Sans by David Berlow and Matthew Butterick, used exclusively in caps.

“Good to Go is relevant ministry video training for church volunteers on safety, leadership skills, discipline, hospitality, learning styles, teaching…”

Unimev is an organization for the meeting industry in France.

Opening title set in Horizon, the original Star Trek typeface

Main Titles: Andrew Kramer of Kelvin Optical
End Titles: Ben Schoen and Josh Schoen of Scarlet Letters
Production Design: Scott Chambliss

Promotional poster

Hospital sign set in Berlin Sans. (Thanks to AJ Kandy for the ID.)

Intertitles set in Futura

Medical unit display set in ITC Avant Garde Gothic

Subtitles set in Bank Gothic

Starship external markings set in United Sans

Starship displays set in Changeling Neo

Other ship signs set in United Sans

End titles set in Bank Gothic

Vox is the Norwegian Agency for Lifelong Learning and belongs to the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.

Layout by Nick Sherman, “Mercury” painting by Pascale Gueracague. Released in 2012 by Little Black Cloud Records.

Super simple one-page website for Product Club, an LA initiative to promote the local product scene with free office space and networking. Alix FB, designed by likewise Los Angeles based Matthew Butterick, has the talent to make even the most basic text look interesting, especially the italics. Bonus points for combining it with Nobel (which seems to be a popular type combination these days, but happened entirely without knowing. :)

When the FontFeed featured a brief review of “Typography for Lawyers” a couple of days ago I finally felt encouraged enough to ask about something that puzzled me ever since I first saw the book. Matthew Butterick’s desk reference is commendable when it comes to mission, structure, content and style of writing. However, as a book designer (as well as a teacher), I have ambivalent feelings about the vast choice of typefaces applied throughout the volume. Butterick uses no fewer than eight type families, namely:

• Lyon Text roman, italic, bold and small caps for body copy and subheads
• Arno Display for chapter headings
• Quadraat Sans on the cover and inside for tips, tables and info-boxes
• Cheltenham for subchapter headings
• Verlag Book and Black for cross headings, captions and marginalia
• Alix for monospaced text
• Amira Bold caps for captions to examples
• Whitney Index White Round for enumeration
• plus more typefaces in samples which I will not list here

And again different typefaces on the website (via @font-face):

• Concourse for headings (a new sans-serif by Butterick in progress)
• Charter for Text

Six of eight families in the picture above, Arno for the headline, Cheltenham Bold Condensed in the margin, Lyon for body copy and Lyon Italic for subheads in the margin, Verlag for marginalia and in all caps for cross headings, Quadraat in the “How to” tips, Amira all caps as caption to samples. Click any images to enlarge.

While all of the above are excellent typefaces, each of them suitable for a whole publication like this, I see no real need to combine them all in one book. Why not pick just two or three of them and make use of their full range of variants, styles and weights?

I tried to list the typefaces in order of appearance which usually resembles the hierarchy roughly but couldn’t clearly make it out. At some point a too diverse typography can also lead to confusion rather than guidance. What kind of text am I reading? What belongs together? Differentiation of various types of texts and structures is necessary but shouldn’t feel arbitrary.

So I asked the author and designer of the book, and got a wonderful report about dauntless eclecticism, orchestrating typefaces, and what happens when you work on a project over a long period of time (which I should know all too well). Now I feel like an academic party pooper. Matthew writes:

That’s an interesting story (I mean, if you like fonts) —

While writing the book, I tried to find a balance in tone between 1) authoritative and useful, and 2) approachable and relaxed. While designing the book — which I did in parallel with the writing — I wanted that tone to carry through visually. I wanted readers to open the book to any page and say “oh, this looks interesting” and not “oh, this looks like a homework assignment.” In other words, make it read more like a magazine than a dictionary.

That was fine by me, because my favorite typography has always been the serious-but-eclectic American magazine, starting with Spy in the ’80s and currently best represented by The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine (which is absolutely my favorite thing to read every week).

My affinity for this approach is also probably traceable to my original typographic training, which was in a small letterpress shop. The essence of letterpress work is making do with what you’ve got and finding novel ways to combine things. It’s an eclecticism borne from necessity and limited choice (which is different than eclecticism borne from unlimited choice).

Early designs of the book used fewer families. I took my own advice and started by choosing a body-text font. My first choice was Sabon, but I wanted to give a push to a current type designer, so I discovered Lyon and went with that. The sidebars needed to contrast with the main text. Metro is one of my favorites, but it hasn’t aged well, so I used the Metro-influenced Verlag.

Nearly everything in the book was Lyon or Verlag at some point. For certain elements, functional and visual considerations dictated otherwise. For instance, the section headings in the margins were originally Lyon Bold. But late in the design, I had to make those margins a pica narrower, and Lyon Bold didn’t fit enough text. So I switched to FB Cheltenham.

A similar story for the technical instructions. At legible point sizes, Lyon and Verlag took up too much vertical space. So I went with FF Quadraat Sans italic, which is quite condensed but not steeply angled, and has a color and texture that blends smoothly with Lyon.

Arno Display, used for chapter headings in the book, was originally the font on the home page of the TFL website, so that was a nod to visual continuity. For monospaced text, of course I used my own design, FB Alix. As for Whitney Index, I would’ve used Verlag Index if it had existed, but it didn’t, so I went with the next best thing. (There’s that letterpress resourcefulness at work.) And Amira — I just happen to like it a lot and wanted to find a place for it. So that’s some gratuitous eclecticism.

In his article, Yves suggested a font superfamily. They have their place, but I have mixed feelings about them. First, a lot of superfamilies have a great sans and a not-so-super serif, or vice versa. Second, and more importantly, superfamilies can match a little too well, creating a somewhat relentless consistency from page to page.

I think about it like the difference between a song played live by a full band, where everyone puts emphasis in slightly different places, versus a recording where all the parts are played by one musician with a multitrack recorder. True, I do recommend in the book that mixing fonts by the same designer can work well. But ordinarily, I prefer to mix fonts from different designers, for that “full band” feel. — Matthew Butterick

“Less is more” — Butterick on mixing fonts in “Typography for Lawyers”. “Most documents can tolerate a second font; many fewer can tolerate a third; almost none can tolerate four or more.” Click to enlarge.

 

Chapter on system fonts with a warning in Helvetica condensed (right): “This chart is offered as a harm-reduction device.” Click to enlarge.