Turnpike is a brand base in the Netherlands focused on selling barbecue tangent products: sauces, spice mixes, charcoal, etc. Agency Nattevingerwerk rebranded Turnpike mid 2025 and created a cohesive identity for their product line.

The logo is set in the textured brush script font Edo, echoing craft / grunge notes that are also present in the set of pig illustrations that serve as the backbone of the brand visual language. Then the whole languages uses the duo NaN Rage Poly and NaN Rage Slab in different weights and widths for all texts.

I have included a generative AI image created by the agency for their portfolio for the sake of documenting and archiving this use in the graphic design field today. Which leads to another question: are the pig illustrations maybe also generative AI?

Generative AI image created for the agency portfolio. Note the hallucinated brush script on the left character bra.

Ukrainian urban design agency Urban Reform organizes workshops and citizen consultations to shape the becoming of Ukrainian cities. One of those, which took place in Summer 2025 was centered around the city of Oleksandriia, in Kirovohrad Oblast, the central region of the country.

Urban Reform used graphic design as a mean of mediation before, during and after the event. The identity deployed mixes gradients using colours borrowed from the city and the region’s flag with black and white naive illustration and typography.

The font used for the project is NaN Metrify B, here seen for the first time in a primarily Cyrillic context. NaN Metrify B is a more restrained version of NaN Metrify A. This restrained, quasi geometric persona and the composition making a generous use of diagonals and circles could be recalling East-European constructivism.

Kugel und Niere is a podcast production company that operates from Munich, Germany, since 2017.

Studio Veh led the 2025 (re)branding of the company, with a highly typographic approach. From the case study:

With words being the brand’s most important asset, Studio Veh delivered a typographic solution: a flexible type system using a wide typeface that not only emphasises the larger-than-life stories, but also the impact of the podcasts’ conversations.

For the logo and titles, Veh went with Druk Wide. Then, contrasting in weight as well as structure and width, we have NaN Rage Beau Condensed Thin (mostly). NaN Rage Beau is used for secondary titles and contrast, when needed. On Kugel und Niere’s website, Neue Haas Unica is used for all body copy and sub-headings too, while NaN Rage is curiously absent.

For the fourth anniversary of their CGI practice Contramateria, Rolando Luther hired Sabbath to create a new visual identity for the studio. The roll-out – mostly on Instagram – takes the shape of a series of 3D renders of imaginary objects featuring the identity, as a kind of mise en abyme where the communication about the identity and the identity itself are indistinguishable. Funnily enough, no clear logo can be distinguished.

It features NaN Serf Display Light as the main font carrying the identity, accompanied by NaN Metrify A Compressed Black and General Grotesque Mono Light in places. The sleek, sharp and geometric style of NaN Serf echoes the vert digital undertones of Contraforma's CGI renders. General Grotesque Mono is used for fictional UI elements, as a coding font with a twist.

Quang San Art Museum is the first private art museum in Ho Chi Minh City dedicated exclusively to Vietnamese fine arts. With a growing collection of over 1,600 historically and culturally significant works, the museum offers a rare lens into the evolution of Vietnam’s artistic identity – from the beginning days of Indochine aesthetics to the dawn of contemporary expression.

M — N Associates, based in Ho Chi Minh City too, created the new identity of the museum in 2025. Their concept, “Layers of Contemplation”, draws inspiration from the structure of a painting itself – where canvas, frame, and gesture form a unified whole. For the purpose of the identity, they created a custom typeface, MN QSAM, a sans serif inspired by the museum’s signature architecture – where sharp structure meets quiet elegance. It features an extended set of alternates for its capital, showing interrupted strokes remembering of a painter brush strokes.

On top of their custom font, the identity features the type system NaN Serf Sans (primarily) and NaN Serf (more sporadically). The humanistic sans NaN Serf Sans, with its open counters and high legibility complements MN QSAM perfectly for all running texts, small signs, the website UI… This project shows M — N Associates coming back once more to NaN for fonts with a good support for the Vietnamese language out of the box.

The website orakel-session.de introduces a playful coaching method and describes the entire process in a very comprehensible manner. Meanwhile it makes exclusively use of NaN Rage Soft (in ExtraLight, Medium, ExtraBold and Black) – a typeface that seems perfectly suited for the lovely hodgepodge.

Summer of Seum (seum is “anger” / “frustration” in French slang) is a micro music festival taking place in the summer of 2025 in Paris and its suburbs. It focuses on “evil songs, incontralble electronic musics, outsiders black metal, evil popstars, decaying post-punk…”.

Atelier AAAAA, also co-organisers of the event with their label Croux Records, designed electric posters featuring the faux-Asian font Chinese Dragon for the main title and for the first letter of most words, as a kind of funky capitalization. The rest of the text is set in the cousins NaN Rage Zipp and NaN Rage Poly. The pointiness of Zipp makes it a logical companion for the sharpness of Chinese Dragon, reminiscent of fictitious brush strokes. Fluo colours, glow effects, spiky fonts, the posters are a clear reflection of the aggressive and troubling nature of the musics played during the festival.

Viridian Ecosystems is an Oakland-based environmental services outfit specializing in data-driven land restoration and natural capital strategies.

The logo features a monochrome abstract sign figuring a kind of crossroads but also a zoomed-in typographic detail, where the bowl of a p and q meets the stem. The all-caps wordmark is set in a slightly modified American Grotesk Black, noticeable with its high-waist R and narrower N.

Study Hall chose the recently-released NaN Rage Beau as the main typeface for the identity, in two weights. The choice of a slab serif from titles to running text is a refreshing one in today’s landscape dominated by sleek sans serifs for corporate text fonts. Beau’s rounded terminal bring some warmth to the identity. Coupled with the beige and almost-black colours and the grain in the photos, it gives a nostalgic kodachrome-technicolour-era to the whole.

See the full case study.

The Scientist (born Hopeton Overton Brown) is one of the most influential figures in dub music, with over 60,000 recordings to his name. His contributions to the genre have spanned from Studio One to King Tubby’s, Channel One to Tuff Gong, and he pioneered recording techniques that elevated the dub mix to an art form.

Due to the Scientists’ distinctive process of creating dub records, we meticulously crafted the layout to encapsulate the essence of the direct-to-dub process.

Direct-To-Dub was released on Night Dreamer Records.

[More info on Discogs]

Pennsylvania born brand Saucony started a rebrand in 2024 which seems to still be slowly unvailing. Mainly known in the field of athletics, the brand appears to try to gain a wider reach amid the raise of running as a very mainstream sport and running shoes being more than ever a legitimate item to wear for every day life.

Saucony left their 2007 logo untouched but switched their main typeface to NaN Metrify A. They consistently use its Ultrawide Black Italic and Ultrawide Light Italic as titling fonts, in all caps, as an unsurprising take on the italics for sport / speed genre. Then, they also use Metrify’s Standard width for texts. On rare occasions such as their Run As One campaign, you can see them also using compressed styles of the font. In this particular case, one can spot the consistent italic angle across weights and widths. On their website, Displaay’s Matter features in many places for the UI.

The fonts can be seen used across their website and social media, but also for all the event-specific merch they create, like for the London 10km run in 2024.

Marylia Scott is an influencer who launched her eponymous cosmetics brand in 2024. Her first products were her signature waterproof faux freckles and brow gel. Scott states in one of her videos that she was an art director “in a previous life” and that she rebranded her whole company by herself.

The brand logo is set in Akzidenz-Grotesk Extended in all caps. The brand uses NaN’s Metrify A Gigawide Extrabold for all titles, always in all caps. To accompany it, Newglyph’s Crystal is used in lighter and not as wide styles. The brand employs quite a minimalist branding with hints of neon. The signature red of the logo plays a big role as recurrent accent colour.

It’s always interesting when brand spend the effort using their chosen fonts for the captions or titles of their videos on social media instead of the default app fonts.

A spirit-lifting, soul-stirring devotional that effortlessly unites house, funk, soul, r’n’b and hip-hop influences, Things Are Getting Better hears the LA-based vocal group reach new heights to spread a message of faith and togetherness in troubled times. Things Are Getting Better is that invocation to believe. Where their Mario Caldato-produced debut How Good It Is captured the raw power of the choir and channelled their irrepressible live energy on record, Things Are Getting Better introduces a more crafted studio sound to the arrangements. An evolution rather than a reinvention, this is the gospel of Jimetta, delivering “new mantras and new prayers for this new day that we find ourselves in that is so stark between the dark and the light.”

A prolific vocalist and collaborator with the likes of Anderson. Paak, Carlos Niño and Angel Bat Dawid, this time Jimetta leads from the front, bringing in instrumentalists Isaiah Collier, Ryan Porter and V.C.R. to create a fuller, more diverse palette. Recorded at Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles alongside fellow producers and choir members Jack Maeby, Allakoi Peete, and mixed by Ben Baptie (whose credits include Sault, Little Simz and Cleo Sol), the resulting album encapsulates Jimetta’s vision for a “Black spiritual classical music.”

“We’re here now and who knows where we’re going,” Jimetta says. Music, faith, community. The Voices of Creation are living their purpose and things are only going to get better.

Sleeve design by Kai Damian Matthiesen, with photography by Ethan DeLorenzo. The album was released by Day Dreamer in 2024.

[More info on Discogs]

Recorded direct-to-disc at Artone Studio, with a stellar cast of European musicians, new album Penta fizzes and sparks with the ingenuity of Ronald Snijders’ flute chops, tight interplay and a palette that spans synths, clavinet, Fender Rhodes, electric bass and sax. A seamless fusion of rhythms, influences and improvisation, Penta has the class of a golden-era jazz-funk record, with the energy and verve of an in-the-pocket live band.

An exposition of Snijders’ virtuosic range and beguiling compositional prowess, Penta traces musical trajectories from Suriname to Europe and back again to fuse a sound that is both timeless and original in equal measure.

Photography by Londonmancer

[More info on Discogs]

Project Space Festival is a yearly event dedicated to self-organized art spaces in Berlin. Art spaces that stand at the intersection between where art is made and where art is shown. The festival was started in 2014 but paused in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID pandemic.

For its 10-year anniversary edition in 2024, PSF deployed a duotone identity developed by designer and visual artist Erin Mitchell. Mitchell created a logo made of the name of the festival with every letter written in a circle and each word written on a curved line. This oversized “logo” then served as the main visual for the whole communication of the festival. The font used throughout the 2024 edition is NaN’s open-source Unbounded, recognizable from the folded/broken stems in some of its letters.

Fitbit Ace LTE is a connected smartwatch from the connected tech giant Fitbit in partnership with Google and targeted to a younger audience (and their parents). The case study and ads insist on the counterintuitive take that the watch (a screen) is designed to encourage kids to move more. In the tradition of Fitbit’s products, it's packed with trackers (GPS, heartbeat, accelerometer…), whereas this time the end user (the kid) is not the one having the main access to the data but their parents.

Studio Koto created the dedicated identity and campaign for this new product and worked with NaN to create a headline font based on a bolder and wider weight of NaN Metrify to carry their brand values. The rounded squircle shape of the watch was the inspiration into rounding Metrify in its inside corners. The watch UI uses the same font as most other Fitbit watches since 2015: Seville is a custom version of Atipo’s rounded sans Bariol.

See the launch campaign featuring both the UI and hero fonts:

Visit Koto’s case study for more animated examples.

An overview of the parent app on their smartphone, showing the loved feature of tracking the kid's position at anytime.

A wall inscription that could be seen during the Fitbit Ace LTE launch even in the New York Google Store

Sciences Po, also known as the Paris Institute of Political Studies is a research university located in Paris, France. They have their own publishing house, mostly publishing essays from researchers. They are now launching a bi-annual magazine focusing on the actuality of research, with a political angle. The first issue, released in April 2024, is titled “Une Europe fragmentée ?” which translates to “A Fragmented Europe?”. The many illustrations opening most articles are by Félix de Combat.

The whole first issue of Comprendre son temps is freely accessible as a PDF.

The magazine features a changing typographic cocktail, bringing new titling fonts for each issue while keeping Tekst A and NaN Metrify A (mostly in its Wide subfamily) for texts and sub-headings for all issues. A duo of contrasting sans serifs is sharing the spotlight for this first issue. Bureau Brut's Ostia Antica, in all caps, shows its very classical proportions inspired by monumental inscriptions while Brieface's Falser Grotesk appears very geometric and modern in comparison. The difference of proportion between the very wide round letters in Ostia Antica and quite narrow in Falser, is quite startling.

NaN Metrify is mostly used in its wider versions for all introductory paragraphs and recurring info, grounding the layout with subtle confidence. Teskt, in it A version (for Analog), the only serif of the four typefaces, strikes by its very organic, soft and calligraphic influences in comparison with the three sans serifs. As the text duo, Metrify and Tekst are opposite in their construction, contrast amount, but also in proportions, AAAAA using Metrify in its Wide subfamily while Tekst sports a quite narrow fit.

Brazilian legend Gilberto Gil’s debut 1962 recordings “Desicão” / “Vem Colombina” restored and reissued on 7″ vinyl for the first time by Day Dreamer Records:

Released in 1962, these two songs are the foreword, the preface and the introduction all rolled into one. They are short, but they contain a huge amount of compressed energy, the seed of something more to come. The following year, Gil met Caetano Veloso and the rest we now know.

To hear the name Gilberto Gil in 1962, simple and unadorned, is to hear it without the glittering coat of MPB, Tropicália, social activism, political struggle and cultural leadership that it came to wear. To listen to “Vem Colombina” in 2022, is to hear no more or less than the first steps of a young man from Bahia, who might go on to become one of the greatest musicians Brazil, and the world, has ever known.

[More info on Discogs]

UK charity Barnardo’s unveiled their new brand identity, designed by The Clearing, two weeks ago. Barnardo’s has been supporting children, young people and their families for 150 years. From Wikipedia:

Barnado’s founded by Thomas John Barnardo in 1866, to care for vulnerable children. As of 2013, it raised and spent around £200 million each year running around 900 local services, aimed at helping these same groups. It is the largest children's charity in the UK in terms of charitable expenditure.

The charity is a significant part of the UK’s culture, with 600+ high-street charity shops, 800+ specialist services in communities across all four nations and influence in the rooms where national decisions are made.

The Clearing created a brand where every child could feel like they belong with the logo being a visual metaphor for a safe space where everyone can express whatever they’re feeling. Each letter captures a different emotion, held within the ‘safe space’ of the holding device. NaN contributed to this project with a custom cut of their NaN Metrify family, including the many alternates imagined together by Barnado’s children and employees. The customized cut appears to also be slightly rounder and friendlier than its retail counterpart

The Next F1 Race is a website created by Savas Labs that—you guessed it!—counts down to the next Formula 1 race.

It’s a simple idea, executed beautifully. Nickel Gothic’s expansive variable width axis is used to great effect, and the name of each country dynamically scales to reveal a diagram of the circuit. This animation is implemented as you scroll through or click around the list of races—it’s a simple effect, but makes the website feel so engaging and immersive.

Meanwhile, Figtree is used for labels and meta information, and Unbounded is used when high-impact numerals are required.

Salford Council’s Rediscovering Salford arts festival highlights green spaces and makes art more accessible. Partisan studio was responsible for the visual identity and were inspired by Henri Matisse's cut-out designs. About the design they write the following on their website:

Our inspiration came from the artist Henri Matisse.
Matisse embraced cut-outs as his medium in his final years, from the late 1940s onwards.
These bold, colourful and contrasting shapes maximised the impact of simple forms.
Adopting this concept, we designed large, simple coloured leaf forms that would work as a running theme throughout the promotional material for the festival.

The use of Gitan for all text is a natural fit with its many cuts and hearty design that harmonises well with the colourful and spirited identity design. Partisan studio took advantage of the versatility of the Gitan typeface family by employing various weights (Regular plus Italic, Medium and Bold) in their designs, making use of Gitan’s OpenType-features such as small caps and capital figures and symbols.