For the artwork on Margo Price’s latest album, Hard Headed Woman, the typographic palette echoes the grit and charm of classic Americana. Her name appears in Ars Nova from PintassilgoPrints—a decorative, Art Nouveau-inspired display face whose bold, squarish forms instantly signal a sense of time and place. The album title is set in Cottonwood, an Adobe Originals typeface from 1991 inspired by 19th-century Western wood type, adding a rugged, frontier-style texture to the composition. Smaller supporting text uses News Gothic, a quintessential American sans serif designed by Morris Fuller Benton for American Type Founders in 1908.

The typographic mix feels rooted in time, and a little rebellious, by blending vintage influences with a modern confidence that mirrors Price’s own blend of country: true Americana and outlaw soul. The typography extends across the album packaging, the deluxe boxed set, and merchandise—giving the entire release a cohesive, unmistakably American voice.

[More info on Discogs]

On June 14th we embarked upon a kayaking adventure that would take us across the entire Deh Cho river (also known as the Mackenzie River) in the Canadian Northwest Territories. The river begins on the Western shore of Tucho (also known as the Great Slave Lake) and flows all the way up to the Beaufort Sea (which is a part of the Arctic Ocean).

Our journey began on the beaches by the small town Xátł’odehchee (also known as Hay River) and for 54 days we would make our way towards our goal, a small Inuvialuit hamlet known as Tuktoyaktuk. During our voyage we visited small communities along the way, such as Zhahti Kue, Tthek'éhdélį, Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́, Pehdzeh Ki, Tulita, Tłegǫ́hłı̨, Rádeyı̨lı̨kóé, Tsiigehtchic, Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk.

The area we crossed during those 54 days was vast – the Northwest Territories are approximately four times the size of our home country Finland, but hosts a population of merely 44.000. (It is estimated that bears outnumber humans in the NWT.) The people who live on the land we travelled through are to the most part First Nations: Dene, Gwich’in and Inuvialuit.

Wherever we landed, we were met with warmth and kindness, and there was not a moment we didn’t feel welcome on the land. We learned a lot from the people we met and the discussions we had helped us gain a better understanding of what life was like in these remote areas.

Along us we naturally also brought our adventure flag – the standard underneath which we felt our journey to be blessed.

The design of the flag, as the journey itself, was a collaborative effort. Alone we are nothing. Christoffer designed the flag, Viivi did the caribou illustration, and Haije served as our seamstress.

On the obverse side the Dene name for the river (Deh Cho) is spelled out along with the year of our expedition. On the reverse side the abbreviated version of Tuktoyaktuk is written on top of a caribou. (The name Tuktoyaktuk can be translated into ”looks like a caribou”.)

The typefaces on the flag are three digital revivals of type from the late 1800s/early 1900s. Mark Simonson’s Etna (a revival of Aetna, William Hamilton Page, 1871) is used for the words Deh Cho, with the year being ATF Wedding Gothic (originally released by ATF as Wedding Gothic in 1901), created by the design team at ATF, and the name Tuk is set in Cottonwood – based on Gothic Tuscan Italian, Wells & Webb 1854. Adobe’s version was designed by Barbara Lind, Joy Redick and Kim Buker Chansler.

The resulting flag brought a smile to the faces of everyone who saw it, and the people we encountered were clearly impressed by our humble effort. The first photo with our flag was taken just when we were about to cast away, the final one when we had reached the end of our journey. The pictures that are in-between these two shows the land we paddled through but they cannot begin to tell all the stories, encounters and events we experienced.

Whatever the photographs lack in artistic quality they more than make up for as memories of a summer well spent.

Apothecary 87 was rebranded for a premium packaging experience. 93ft worked with the natural skincare and grooming brand to elevate their existing range of products using impactful packaging design, typography and a new brand identity.

They selected two complimentary fonts which can be used across the brand. With a nod to a ‘vintage’ British aesthetic, F37 Beckett was chosen as the all-caps display font. The complimentary type for smaller sizes appears to be Trade Gothic Extended. The logo in Birch – with a custom moustached O – was carried over from the previous 1920s prohibition Peaky Blinders-style aesthetic.

Angled A set in Alterego Big Trap (designed by Pieter van Rosmalen and released by Bold Monday) at 1,700 pt on an Autumn Sunset background

FIBER FONTS A–Z is a personal project that focuses on intentionality, materiality, and typography. It was unveiled during the popular Instagram challenge, 36 Days of Type (2024).

The project illustrates the alphabet through 26 handmade punch needle rugs – each adhering to the rule that its chosen adjective, typeface, and yarn color all start with the letter depicted on it. To highlight the gender imbalance within typography, I challenged myself to select typefaces purposefully and to seek out those designed by female type designers. In total, 16 female designers and 16 male designers created the 26 typefaces featured in this alphabet.

To help amplify female voices in type, check out my research (Google Docs).
View the rest of the alphabet!

Backward B set in Binia (designed and released by Agnieszka Ewa Olszewska) at 1,690 pt on a Brights background

Cut pile C set in Cottonwood (designed by Barbara Lind, Joy Redick, and Kim Buker Chansler and released by Adobe) at 1,475 pt on a Citron background

Debossed D set in Daze Display (designed and released by Gemma Mahoney) at 950 pt on a Dark Ivory background

Embossed E set in VTC Eva Maria (designed by Tré Seals and released by Vocal Type) at 680 pt on an English Rose background

F set in GlyphWorld Forest (designed and released by Leah Maldonado) at 1,375 pt on a Fiesta background with Fringe

G set in Giana (designed by and available from Fanny Hamelin) at 845 pt on a Gradient Gravity background

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

I am a slow learner. This has its drawbacks, the most obvious one being that I am, well, a slow learner. But there are some upsides as well. For starters, I tend to remember the things I’ve learned quite well. The second upside, and the one more pertinent to the interest of the reader, is that I’m able to empathise with others who share my affliction. That is to say I understand where they’re standing, and what might benefit them.

In my youth I took a keen interest in what is known as Bhakti marga, or the path of devotion. It is a branch of Hinduism in which Krishna is seen as the origin of all and the main deity. But despite my attraction to the path of Bhakti I found myself struggling with the vocabulary.

Here was a tradition millennia old, born in a location distant from where I had taken birth in a cultural milieu far removed from anything familiar to me. On top of this the terminology was at times quite esoteric and steeped in layers of meaning. Add to this that almost all the words commonly used were in either Sanskrit or Bengali, and you can understand my plight.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

I have spoken thus far mostly about my shortcomings, but allow me to shift gears and speak about my superpowers. Or actually a superpower, singular, as I only have one. But it’s such a good one that it makes up for being the only one. You see, my superpower is that for one reason or another I have always had the good fortune of being surrounded by people much more accomplished and talented than myself. To make things even more fortunate for me these people have been willing to work on whatever hare-brained project I cooked up. So too this time.

My struggle with coming to terms with the terminology gave me an idea. It was perhaps neither an original nor an astounding idea, but nonetheless a very good one: why not create a small dictionary for persons like myself who need the occasional help in navigating the strange territory I found myself in?

The next step was to find someone to write the dictionary. And who would have been better suited for the job than my friend Dr Måns Broo, a university lecturer and Sanskrit scholar? I presented him with my idea, and without blinking an eye he told me he was onboard. In our discussions we quickly concluded that most dictionaries, as useful as they are, are also very, very boring. We wanted to make our small dictionary stand out from the crowd. To make it so pleasing in both form and content that even people with the mildest interest might pick it up.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

It is here that the third member or our team steps in. My partner Kaisa is known for her wonderful small unassuming illustrations and cartoons, and is able to catch the humorous essence in whatever topic she happens to be working on. It was decided that the contents of the book would follow a simple structure – the recto side would contain words and their explanation, whereas the verso side would host an illustration in which one of the words was depicted.

As for the form of the book we wanted to make it as cute and easily approachable as possible. For us this meant a small book with quirky rather than solemn typography to go along with it. And the printing color should not be black, but something softer. We opted for a dark brown tone that nicely complemented the bright yellow cloth-bound covers.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

After trying out many classics, such as Caslon, Garamond, and many, many others, the typeface I landed on for this particular book was Lexon by František Štorm. It had just the personality and color I was looking for. That the bold cut suddenly turns into a sans serif just made it better in my estimation.

In this regard I do have minor indiscretion to confess to, asking for forgiveness now many years later. When transliterating terms from Sanskrit to the Latin alphabet a basic character set just doesn’t cut it. I needed an array of diacritic marks. Turning to an acquaintance, I had him produce the needed additions.

My only defence is that I acted with no ill will and perhaps that the crime has already expired. I really hope it has, because my admiration for Štorm’s typefaces knows no bounds, and I would hate having him be angry with me. (It was only much later I learned that Štorm has at least some affinity or at least an interest in Hindu cosmology, as he makes reference to the our current epoch known as Kali-yuga in an interview conducted by Irina Smirnova published in Typotheque’s book 158 Answers, published in 2011.)

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

The typeface I complemented Lexon with was Zebrawood by Carl Crossgrove, Carol Twombly, and Kim Buker Chansler. It had just the right kind of boldness and audacity that I was looking for for the chapter beginnings.

The third typeface (or actually a dingbat) is present only in one character throughout the book, but then it is present several times on each text page. It is of course the pilcrow found in ITC Zapf Dingbats. The reason for going to another typeface altogether for a pilcrow was that Zapf Dingbats had a funky attitude that I didn’t quite find in Lexon’s own character equivalent.

We published the Little Book of Bhakti-Yoga back in 2006 and it was a great surprise to us how warm a welcome our small book got. We had countless people confess to us that they were really not that interested in the subject matter, but that the book just spoke to them in such a way that they had to purchase it. Thus this is one of our many books that soon sold out. Some years ago I found a box that we had missed, but even those are gone by now.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

I have for years been pestering my friend Dr Broo that we should do a free-standing sequel for the book containing 108 questions and answers about bhakti, but so far I have been unsuccessful in my attempts. I know he’s busy with so many other books, but I am hoping that this post just might compel him to think otherwise!

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Gyllene Tider is the previous Swedish band by Per Gessle of Roxette. Gyllene called it quits in 2019. They wanted to quit while they were ahead. Please note that the band officially ended in 1985, the year before Roxette started, but they have been on several very successful tours since 1996. Anyway, the Corona pandemic came and they thought things over. Wouldn’t it be nice to do something after Corona? Said and done. They recorded the album Hux Flux (“wham Bam”, sort of) – released on CD and a few differently colored vinyls – and did another successful tour in 2023.

The album sleeve, designed by Pär Wickholm as per usual, uses a ton of different fonts. The titles all have their own font, while the “normal” texts on the sleeve and in the booklet are set in New Frank Regular and Noir Medium.

The Gyllene Tider logo is based on Palace Script. It was originally made in 1979, using dry transfer type.

[More info on Discogs]

Sida A: 1 Verlag Bold Condensed / 2 Marquee Moon / 3 Rosewood Fill / 4 NT Josefine / 5 Intro Black Inline
Sida B: 1 Charcuterie Cursive / 2 Poster Bodoni / 3 RTCO Flinton Texture / 4 Neue Metana / 5 Pretorian / 6 ITC Blair
The numbers are from Noir, the credit line is in New Frank.

Last year my youngest son was in a circus class. I am normally happy to volunteer for anything as long as it is not graphic design. This time, to my surprise, I heard myself casually offering to design the poster of the annual final performance, named Droomwandelaar (“dreamwalker”).

The lack of a clear briefing, storyline or professional photos was easily made up for by infectious enthusiasm and besides: designing the poster offered a chance to finally play around with some fonts that had been sitting on my computer for ages, patiently waiting to be put to use.

The fonts of The Pyte Foundry's one-release-a-week year (2016) generally had a compact character set, but often enough the fonts included an extra surprise. In the all-caps Dosage, for example, the uppercase characters are of a bolder weight than the ones found in the lowercase. It also includes a funky manicule, but the stylish pointing hand on this poster can be found in Alcove, Mortar, Galore, Plakat, and Prhyme. The frames behind “Ticket Sales” are from QFWFQ. A ready-made boxed font like Granblue is harder to fit on a curve than I thought; the pre-existent logo is set in Rosewood Fill.

The cover features a grunged Fette Fraktur with a modified A for the title, Mesquite (Adobe) for the subtitle and Birch for the names of the editors. “Lemmy” is in Ironwood.

The Art Of Metal: Five Decades Of Heavy Metal Album Covers, Posters, T-Shirts And More is a book showcasing the finest examples of metal posters, cover and artwork. It was edited by Malcolm Dome and Martin Popoff with a foreword by Lemmy and published in 2013 by Omnibus Press in the UK and by Voyageur Press in the United States. Paul Palmer-Edwards of the award winning Grade Design in London provided the design of the book, including the cover illustration.

The book covers five decades of work and ten genres of metal displaying the diversity and similarity in design between the genres. Each chapter showcases a different display blackletter typeface. For chapter two A Gothique Time by Bonez Designz was selected. See the image captions for more fonts used in this publication.

Chapter 2, “New Wave Of British Heavy Metal”, in A Gothique Time

More A Gothique Time in chapter 2

The headline in A Gothique Time is paired with text in Trade Gothic.

Half-title page, featuring the grunged Fette Fraktur with the romanized A

Title page

Table of contents with Fette Fraktur and Trade Gothic

Chapter 1, “Origins: Traditional Metal”, ft. Bayreuth

Chapter 3, “Hair Metal”, in Kingthings Spike

Chapter 4, “Doom & Stoner Metal”, ft. Blackmoor

Volume 1, 1992

Creole Kings of New Orleans is a compilation of 1950s rhythm and blues music by New Orleans artists like Lloyd Price, Clifton Chenier, and Art Neville, from the archives of the record labels Regal, Specialty, and Ebb. It was published in 1992 and 1993 in two volumes, by Specialty Records in the US and by Ace Records in the UK.

The purely typographic covers feature a range of expressive typefaces, including three of Adobe’s early 1990s wood type revivals, Barbara Lind’s Poplar, Joy Redick’s Blackoak, and Kim Buker Chansler’s Birch, complemented by stars and manicules from Adobe Wood Type Ornaments.

[More info on Discogs]

Volume 2, 1993

Front cover of Channel 1, released June 2000

Channel is a series of leftfield, electro and electroclash music compilation mixes released between 2000 to 2005. The channels range from one to four and feature a roster of British and international artists in a tracklist of 10 to 15 tracks, including Yello, LCD Soundsystem, Lopazz, and others.

Trevor Jackson, the founder of the now-defunct “highly acclaimed” Output Recordings (1996–2006), was known for designing the covers himself in the independent label’s art director role.

The first in this installment (released in June 2000) features a hot pink background (except fluorescent orange in the 2005 copies, not pictured) and text set in Berthold’s Akzidenz-Grotesk Bold, which was also used for the CD-R version (not pictured) released with Source UK, a tradename of the French label Source, but in a background of silver filled on the cover and the text being aligned on the centre above.

However, from Channel 2 to Channel 4, the band names on the front and track names on the back are a circus maelstrom of fonts with various backgrounds, including monochrome in two variants (one being white and black, the second being black on white) and metallic gold (pictured) and metallic silver (not pictured).

These fonts include classics from the metal type era as well as the 1970s/80s dry-transfer and phototypesetting years (including designs by ITC, Letraset, Mecanorma, VGC, Fotostar/Fascimile Fonts, and Photo-Lettering) in the styles of Art Deco, Victorian, Art Nouveau, geometric, etc. Note especially the early use of Tank by Canadian type designer Ray Larabie (in the 2004 compilation cover which by the way was possibly inspired by ITC Machine from 1970) and Boback from Nathan Williams’ Baseline Fonts foundry (not released until 2006) [edit: it’s probably the earlier Serifedsans].

Back cover, in left-aligned text and two columns

Channel Two, released April 2003: Centaur (Bruce Rogers, Monotype, 1928), Cooper Black (Oswald Bruce Cooper, Barnhart Brothers and Spindler, 1922), ITC Symbol (Aldo Novarese, 1984), Abbot Old Style (Joseph W. Phinney, ATF, 1901), Albertus (Berthold Wolpe, Monotype, 1936), Cottonwood (Barbara Lind et al., Adobe, 1989), Old English (Monotype, an adaptation of ATF Cloister Black, 1904), Memphis Bold (Rudolf Wolf, 1931), Studio (Dick Dooijes and Dolf Overbeek, Amsterdam Type Foundry, 1946), Too Much Shadow (Bill Seifert, VGC, 1974), Karnak Bold Condensed (Robert Hunter Middleton, Ludlow, 1931), Boback (Baseline Fonts, released ca. 2006, documented early use of an Alternate Gothic with serifs on the bottom) [edit: it’s probably the earlier Serifedsans], Helvetica Condensed (outlined, Stempel/Linotype), ITC Avant Garde Gothic (Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase, 1970) and Hamilton (Font Bureau, 1993).

Back cover

Channel 3, released in June 2004 (pictured behind is the pink cover): Agraphicus (VGC before 1982, digitized by WSI in 1996 as Arruba), Tank (Ray Larabie of Typodermic, 2004 – the year this album was released in), ITC Busorama (Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase, the creators of Avant Garde Gothic, 1970), Buxom (Bob Trogman of Fotostar/Fascimile, 1975), ITC Pioneer (Ronné Bonder, 1970), ITC Serif Gothic (Herb Lubalin and Tony Di Spigna, 1972), a condensed sans (probably a bolder style of FF Meta or similar), Shatter (Vic Carless, Letraset, 1973), Futura Black (Paul Renner, Bauer, 1929), Clarendon (Hermann Eidenbenz, Haas, 1953), Umbra (Robert H. Middleton, Ludlow, 1932), ITC American Typewriter Light (Tony Stan and Joel Kaden, 1974), and Raphael (Central Type Foundry, 1885)

Back cover with copyright and remix text in Helvetica (Max Miedinger, Haas, 1957)

Example spread of booklet that comes with the tracklist

Channel 4, released in September 2005: Fiorello (Photo-Lettering Inc., before 1965), Futura Light (Paul Renner, Bauer, 1927), Blackline (Wolf Magin, Berthold, 1973), Shotgun (J. Looney, VGC, 1972), ITC Busorama (see Channel 3 for info, here used with the asymmetrical A), ITC Zapf International (Hermann Zapf, 1977), Isabella (Herman Ihlenburg; MacKellar, Smiths and Jordan; 1892), Novel Gothic (shaded variant as seen in Solotype’s 3-D and Shaded Alphabets; Charles H. Becker and Morris F. Benton, ATF, 1928), Crypt, Sauce (unknown), University Roman (Letraset, 1972), Cooper Black (outlined variant) and ITC Serif Gothic Bold.

Back cover

Spine

Since 2006, the Grupo Maria Cutia is based in Belo Horizonte and is dedicated to research on street theater. To celebrate the group's 10th anniversary, we created a visual identity inspired by popular urban posters. Similar to these media, the work consisted of a diverse typographic composition, creating a texture of juxtaposed information.

Another important aspect of the project is its vibrant orange Pantone color. In addition to posters and flyers, the group distributed a free commemorative newspaper composed of images and texts that narrate the company's trajectory.

The number 10 uses Rosewood minus the ornamentation.

RAUW – Club Night Amsterdam / Utrecht 2003–2016. The branding of the RAUW club night was created using a huge mix of different types of fonts on flyers and posters. After 13 year the end of the club night was celebrated with the RAUW BOOK, printed in a single black colour.

Golden Burgers is a catering service best known for its red food truck that can regularly be spotted in the streets of Berlin. The golden letters in the logo are from Susa, a low-contrast script typeface by Hubert Jocham. In addition to more than fifty typeface families, the Allgäu-based designer has created quite a number of custom logos, too, including many for food brands. Still rather unusual for script fonts, Susa comes in five weights. The stylized in-use suggestions on Jocham’s website incidentally show a script logo on a truck, among other applications.

The secondary typeface used for the web address and the slogan “We give a Truck” is another informal connected script with unmodulated strokes, Vernon Adams’s Pacifico.

In 2014, the lettering on the truck used Rosewood. Adobe’s revival of a 19th century decorated wood typeface is still used for the website.

The Cadillac Bar & Grill in the Civic Center of San Francisco offers Mexican delicacies like Fajitas, Enchiladas and puffy (can’t-get-enuffy) Tacos – but the true jewel is the Margaritas Menu. Every Margarita’s unique flavor is represented with a unique typeface! A feast for the eyes (and taste buds)!

The font selection is interesting: some obvious defaults and system fonts (Copperplate, Rosewood, Gill Kayo) are mixed in with less-often seen typefaces (Rage Italic – perhaps more appropriate for the California Margarita).

The ones most difficult to identify were Doghouse (Spicy Pineapple Margarita) from the House Industries General Collection, and Morteza, from the now-defunct Bright Ideas foundry. (Thanks to Nancy Windesheim, the designer for helping me figure those out!)

Artwork for the album Brasil Afora by the band Os Paralamas do Sucesso, using several Brazilian fonts inspired by vernacular lettering, including Suburbana, a freebie available from Dafont. Read more about the project at Tecnopop.com.br.

Laser engraved maple wood skateboards by Old Skateboards, with a combination of different fonts, 1800s style. Creative Direction: RM Sulzbach, Michael Frick. Text: Tom Zeller

Toy and book store in Zurich. That handsome slab serif paired with Reporter is Rosewood Fill! But I still don't know why Mr. Pinocchio’s eyes turn black when his nose grows.

Tales on Moon Lane is a children’s bookshop on 25 Half Moon Lane, London.

Fremde Federn (‘borrowed plumes’) by Element of Crime is a compilation of 20 cover songs recorded between 1989 and 2009. For the album cover, the band went with a purely typographic design in strong colors. Various weights both of posh Bodoni and pavonine Avant Garde (complete with ST ligatures) have been mixed with steady Rockwell and Antique Olive. The result is an all-caps potpourri of worn classics that references type catalogs of the 1970s or 1980s. Or rather, the typeface menu in one of these copy shops where you can get 100 business cards for five bucks. Rosewood is a little different, as its digital incarnation is from a later decade. However, having been a bundled font for many years now, it is similar in its ubiquity and, in consequence, the perceived cheesiness.

See also: The Specimen: from Type Catalog to Design Meme

“To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Posada's death, A Century of Skeletons collects nearly 1,000 reproductions of original prints, including dozens of engravings never before published. Over the last century, Posada's satirical illustrations with their signature ‘calaveras,’ or skeletons, have become synonymous with the imagery of Mexico's Day of the Dead celebrations.” — RM/BBVA