A Girl in Capri fragrance by French fashion house Lanvin conveys the carefree atmosphere of Mediterranean summer holidays. It’s the scent of playful, daring femininity, where citrus and bergamot reign supreme.

Golden Plains, created by BLKBK, used for both the bottle’s logo and packaging, beautifully reflects the essence of the fragrance. The font is defined by lighthearted strokes and imperfect contours, bringing to mind the authenticity of a handwritten note or a casual journal entry. This informal elegance tells the fragrance’s story – walking under the Capri sun, feeling the sea breeze, and reveling in the scent of fresh citrus fruits.

The pairing of Golden Plains with the modern sans-serif typography of the Lanvin logotype adds a layer of sophistication to the design. The script’s curves balance the more structured elements of the logo, emphasizing the fragrance’s dual nature: youthful spontaneity and quiet luxury.

In the fall of 2024, the film The Substance premiered worldwide, marking a significant milestone in the formation of feminist body horror as an independent genre. At the heart of the plot is Elizabeth Sparkle, a once-successful Hollywood actress. Pressured by societal expectations and unrealistic beauty standards, she turns to a dubious serum sourced from the black market, with catastrophic consequences. This Cronenberg-esque tale raises timeless questions about the perception of a woman while exposing the ills of a toxic system, reimagined for new times, with new “solutions”.

To create her show Sparkle Your Life with Elizabeth, the filmmakers selected Bee Four, URW’s digital version of Filmotype Gamma, and Flash Back by BLKBK, mimicking the 1980s VHS tape fitness aesthetic when shows like this were at their peak. Notably, the font used for the phrase “With Elizabeth” feels like an autograph, to show a personal touch to the branding. She is the host, the star of the show, and she invites the audience to the glamorous and dynamic world of aerobics.

Omchemy by Joanne van der Boon specializes in holistic coaching for well-being and offers a wide range of teachings in meditation, numerology and the yogic lifestyle. The branding was created by RAW Made, a design studio based in South Florida.

The Omchemy logo uses a bespoke version of Copanero by Azuliq Type, and the typeface’s regular style is used for headlines in the brand’s different touchpoints. For the full logo version a slogan in Commuters Sans by Dharma Type is added. On the website, these typefaces are supported by Victor Gaultney’s Gentium and BLKBK’s Beyond Infinity. The outcome is an inviting, modern, and organic brand.

Sheltr is a cohousing project offering private rooms with shared living spaces. The company wants to be the sustainable answer to traditional housing by reducing people’s footprint, spending less money and having more fun. An all-inclusive rate provides people with hotel-like amenities, so they can live worry-free.

We chose G2 Ciao as the brand typeface. This quirky details of this non-traditional face by Gruppo Due provides a unique character. The distinctive numerals were perfect to subtly incorporate the brand identity in Sheltr’s signage. This allowed us to create a typographic key addressing the various locations while retaining the privacy of their location.

Sheltr’s perky logo was created using the Gumball, giving it a warm and inviting vibe, without taking itself too seriously.

The handwriting typeface is Golden Plains.

When Rockstar Games released GTA Online in 2013, carnage ensued. The open-world game, opened further to the interactions of players, has been an enduring hit ever since, prompting Rockstar to release regular updates. In summer 2020, they released the Los Santos Summer Special, providing new missions, vehicles, play modes, and a race track creator.

The Grand Theft Auto series of sandbox games/bad behaviour simulators has featured in almost every gamer’s library since 1997. It’s the fourth best selling series of all time—Mario, Pokemon, and Tetris have all sold more, but none have racked up GTA’s property damage. The wide-open worlds, anything-goes play, witty writing, and style that references classic films have provided hours of fun for bored people who wish their lives were more like Casino or Menace II Society.

The referential style of a game channelling movies channelling the 1990s, calls for quality type. That’s why Rockstar used BLKBK’s High Voltage for the Los Santos Summer Special logo font. This font is BLKBK channelling the 1980s channelling the 1950s, in the form of neon signs. To emulate the round look and energy of hand-bent tubes of glass lit by plasma, the type is hand written with a round-tipped marker. The result is a lively and retro-feeling font with a consistent line weight, suitable for any logo between Whisky a Go Go and Hawthorn Grill.

Since GTA III, the game series’ logo is based on Pricedown, see the dedicated post for more details.

Sunflower seeds are tiny, not-even-bite-size capsules of food; a messy snack reserved for ball games, campfires, and whenever else we’re bored enough to daintily nibble a flower seed free from a woody husk. Point is: the reward-to-work ratio with sunflower seeds is notoriously low.

Not with BIGS seeds. BIGS promises the biggest seeds—roasted over real American fires—for a BIG food payout. And they've partnered with BIG flavor providers to offer the biggest flavors, from classics, like Vlassic Dill Pickle, to the avant garde, like Taco Bell Supreme.

BIGS is serious about providing big, bold flavor, from all over the earth. That commitment is why they use BLKBK’s font Earth Rich on their packaging and in advertising. Whether you’re looking for Buffalo Wing or the Zesty Ranch to dip it in, you’ll find those flavors labelled with big, bold BLKBK lettering. Earth Rich was painted with a well-used and slightly dry brush—some might call it seasoned. The result is a zesty all-caps type, deep in flavor and variety.

Earth Rich is paired with various sans serifs, including one that’s similar to Kapra Neue. The BIGS logotype appears to be custom drawn.

Ave & You founder Franziska once faced a problem many of us can relate to: she had skin. As people who have skin know, it’s a temperamental organ, as prone to breaking out, flaking, or excreting too much oil as it is to keeping blood in. The key to good skincare, then, is to develop personalized skincare for each of us. With an assist from AI, this is exactly what Ave & You does.

To typographically express the individuality of their products, each Ave & You container of personalized skincare products includes the user’s name, apparently written in blue ballpoint. The truth is, it’s BLKBK’s Run Wild typeface. We painted Run Wild with a brush, building personality through unconventional subtleties: a printed uppercase, an irregular wobble to brush strokes, and a flowing, yet angular, lowercase. The result is a modern cursive that exchanges convention for personality—just like Ave & You. The typeface used for product information is Gill Sans.

Megan Thee Stallion came to rap fame back in 2016 when she ran roughshod over a Houston cypher in a viral video. In 2019, she made XXL’s freshman class, and it’s been all success and accolades since. Known for her saucy lyrics, and as thee Hot Girl who brings thee heat, it was only a matter of time before someone put together marketing magic and slathered that saucy heat all over some hot, fried meat.

That someone was Popeyes, the famously confusing purveyors of fried chicken and never tinned spinach. In October 2021, Stallion and Popeyes released the explicitly flavoured Hottie Sauce. The marketing for Hottie Sauce included a fiery redesign of Megan Thee Stallion’s signature tongue logo. With a signature logo, signature sauce, signature chicken sandwich, and signature sound, they lacked only one signature: the non-adjectival type. For Megan Thee Stallion’s signature on Popeyes Hottie Sauce advertising, they used BLKBK’s font Flash Back.

Flash Back is a lighter-weight script, hand drawn with a brush-tip marker. Like Megan’s bars, its strokes are swift yet structured—dense between breaths. Like Hottie Sauce on Popeyes chicken, its motions burst with sizzling flavour. This ’80s throwback font has the timeless quality to make it universal, and the pop of personality to make it perfect for the Hot Girl signature.

The bold script used on the sauce packages is Fineday with modifications. The bold inclined caps used for “Hottie Sauce” in the ads are either custom drawn or from an unidentified typeface.

Big Liquor benefits from one of the happiest relationships in sales: the more we drink, the higher our alcohol tolerance. It is, therefore, their prerogative to get drinkers drinking, early and often—anywhere left of equilibrium alcohol-tolerance/insulin-sensitivity is, laws permitting, their target market. Understanding this, Big Liquor moved aggressively into Big Soda territory. Rivers ran candy coloured with alcopop.

But you already know that. What you may not know is that in an effort to reach a new generation of drinkers, Diageo launched Smirnoff Pink in spring 2021. “It’s the pink you’ve been waiting for”, they say. And how. Their ads feature the classic Missy Elliot track, “Get Your Freak On”, modified so that “Freak” becomes “Pink”. Whatever the word, Mme. Misdemeanour is implying the same thing: this is a beverage you can screw your tongue into like a light socket.

That’s why Smirnoff chose BLKBK’s font High Voltage for use in the Pink logo and elsewhere in advertisements. Written with a round-tip marker, with a fine finish and easy curves, this neon sign font flows, electric and smooth. It packs the flavour to make up for taste, stamina for years, and an easy appeal—perfect for the Smirnoff Pink logo font.

West of Dead brings Ron Pearlman to afterlife as a dead cowboy with a burning head. He also has burning issues with the various demons that inhabit Purgatory, Wisconsin. They lurk in the shadows; you, as the player, have to bring them to the light. Then shoot them extra dead.

While the interplay of light and dark is key to your survival, developer Upstream Arcade leaned into the aesthetic. West of Dead is a cell-shaded western shoot ‘em up. When environments and monsters aren’t shrouded in a darkness as deep and real as Ron Pearlman’s voice, they exude endless style: a classic western dragged to hell and back.

To express this style in the West of Dead logo and marketing materials, publisher Raw Fury needed a rugged western font. They found it in BLKBK’s typeface Diamond Creek, a slab-serif, wild-west font, inspired by woodblock printed WANTED posters. BLKBK drew Diamond Creek freehand, sculpting the outline with a thin-tip marker like a sheriff would have carved woodblock with a Bowie knife, before inking it in. The result is gritty as sand in skulls—perfect for the West of Dead.

The Karate Kid – a classic piece of Americana – has ensconced Danny LaRusso alongside other coming-of-age icons like Holden Caulfield and Huckleberry Finn. After crane kicking the irredeemably douchey bully, Johnny, out of the All Valley Karate Championships, Danny would go on two more karate related adventures. His trainer, the legendary Mr. Miyagi, would even go on to train future Million Dollar Baby, Hillary Swank. But the last we saw of Johnny, he was a victim of a brutal assault at the hands of his own sensei, Kreese, of the villainous Cobra Kai dojo. An entire generation grew up wondering, what happened to that guy?

Cobra Kai has the answer: not much. The show, originally created for YouTube but now available on Netflix, introduces us to Johnny 34 years later, washed up, out of luck, and desperately clinging to relics of his ’80s cool: hair metal, a Pontiac Firebird, and his trademark golden locks. Karate is no longer part of his life, until one night he dusts off his skills defending a kid from bullies, and the show is off running. Johnny is unquestionably still douchey, but now he’s redeemable – by karate.

In choosing the Cobra Kai title font, Sony Pictures Television needed something that captured that lost ’80s cool – a font that could pack all the action and adventure of the Reagan era into two words. They needed a font with the balance, flow of moment, and mastered aggression of a black belt in karate. They needed BLKBK’s Dead Stock.

Like Okinawan calligraphy, Dead Stock is written with a brush and ink. Its movements are carefully plotted and practised, yet finish with shouts of aggression. Like the best karateka, poised to strike, the font remains loose yet perfectly balanced. In execution, it displays a variety of forms and motions, lifting from the page with the speed and grace to elude the fight that brought it there. True to Cobra Kai, it strikes hard, strikes first, and shows no mercy.

Netflix poster. “Now streaming” is in Netflix Sans.

Title screen from episode 1

ShopRite’s Fresh to Table concept stores are store-within-a-store solutions where customers can find fresh and balanced meal solutions in a variety of flexible grab-and-go formats or easy-to-prepare lunches.

Brand strategy agency Lippincott not only came up with the concept and brand positioning but also designed the visual identity going along with the stores. They used SangBleu OG Sans as the main typeface, signaling shop sections and addressing direct quotes to the customer. It is combined either with Interstate or Benton Sans depending on the situation. Script typeface Beyond Infinity, echoing the style of Shoprite’s logo, is sometimes used to add a bit of manual flavour to the composition.

SangBleu OG Sans is part of the SangBleu OG typeface, available from Swiss Typefaces.

Exhibea’s identity for Kristofer Buckle stays true to the brand’s playful principles. Kristofer Buckle is committed to creating unique, beautiful and playful beauty products whilst thriving in simplicity. Founded on the mantra, “Why be beautiful when you can be anything?”, Kristofer Buckle created his namesake makeup line to encourage individuality through the transformative power of makeup.

The founder of the brand has Irish heritage and was born in Edinburgh, so we turned to sans-serif Founders Grotesk, due to the fact that it is inspired by the work of the 20th century Edinburgh-based type foundry, Miller & Richard. On the surface, the font appears quite serious and authoritative, but on closer look it reveals a cheeky smile, on homage to the playful nature of makeup.

The website uses Founders Grotesk in Light, Regular and Medium styles.

The Kristofer Buckle logo is based on caps from Quiche Sans Medium.

Additional fonts used in packaging designs include Stay Rad and Futura.

Web shop detail.

Third Rail (BLKBK) and Knight Brush (Hendra Pratama) in use in an illustration for a T-shirt by Ivyfay. “Chilly Down” is inspired by the song of the same name, written by David Bowie for the soundtrack for the film Labyrinth (1986).

When the sun goes down And the bands are back to back. The brothers come round, I get out of my dirty bed. I shake my pretty little head. Tap my pretty little feet. Feelin’ brighter than sunlight. Louder than thunder. Dancin’ like a yo-yo.