The book contains a reproduction of the marriage dossier of Rosalía de Castro and Manuel Murguía, two significant figures in Galician history and literature. The dossier was discovered by the researcher Sagrario Abelleira in February 2021. The publication starts with a short essay and reproduces 43 handwritten sheets, dated from 1851 to 1858, along with their transcriptions.

The typography pairs Quinn Text with Job Clarendon.

Cute mascots. Saccharine do-gooders. Utopian futures. There’s a huge gap between what sustainable brands promise and the gritty reality of making real impact. Bettr is a B Corp coffee brand that doesn’t shy away from the grit, sweat and tears; its new brand system celebrates the work of doing good in all its messy imperfect glory.

The Bettr style blends a loose-edged illustration style for its characters with a bold unfussed wordmark set in a customised version of Italian Plate No1. The pairing creates a world that’s unfiltered, rough around the edges, and very much a “work-in-progress”. Job Clarendon by David Jonathan Ross was used for the headline typeface to convey the feeling of letterpress posters, which highlight the brand’s social advocacy ethos. Paired with Agipo by Radim Peško for a playful touch.

Christoffer Leka & Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

As wonderful as it is to work in a field such as design there will inevitably be times when it all becomes a bit overwhelming. What just a moment ago felt like the most rewarding endeavor transitions little by little into an increasingly heavy burden. And with such a burden the colors begin to wash out of life, only to be replaced by a drab grayness.

When such thoughts make themselves known there is but one way out — what is needed is an escape! And as generations before us have all known, there is a destination for such a perfect escape that trumps all others. Yes, the open seas, with their promise of sweet eventlessness interspersed with moments of absolute terror!

There’s really nothing like sitting in a small plastic vessel paddle in hand in the middle of a storming sea to take the thoughts away from that unfortunate kerning mistake. Out at sea mistakes are rewarded with far more severe repercussions than the scolding words from an ununderstanding boss. When combating waves trying to tip you over into the freezing cold sea typographic concerns will seem increasingly distant.

And isn’t that what a vacation in the end is all about — a time when preoccupation with work details is dispersed into thin air like morning mist?

Christoffer Leka & Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

But before we’re allowed to forget about design we must do design! For no graphic artist worth their salt is willing to venture out to sea without a flag to identify themselves by. (Or, in the most unfortunate of circumstances, a flag to wrap around the lifeless corpse of a sailor embarking on their final voyage.)

Fortunately, our ships were allowed to sail under less hazardous conditions, which is why we can now speak about our flag and its design.

We’ll begin with a small language lesson: The text on the flag reads as ”Vida Vyer”, which is Swedish for ”open horizons”. (Actually Wide Vistas might be even a more accurate translation, but I feel open horizons captures the meaning better in this case.)

”But why Swedish?” you ask, ”I thought you were Finnish.” To which I reply with a (very) short history lesson: In Finland there are two main linguistic groups, the majority whose first language is (unsurprisingly) Finnish and a five-percent minority who speak Swedish as their first language. (I happen to belong to this minority.) Traditionally the Swedish-speaking minority has lived by the coast, and many of them have in one way or another earned their livelihood from the sea.

Another aspect of the Finnish Swedes relevant to the design assignment under discussion is that the colors of their (our) unofficial flag are red and yellow (as compared to the Finnish flag in blue and white). Which is why our flag too is red and yellow! You see, it’s all coming together.

Christoffer Leka & Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

And now for the moment you have all been waiting for – the typography! This time we went with two separate but at least chronologically somewhat related typefaces. The side of the flag that says ”Vida Vyer” is set (sewn?) in Rockwell Condensed, whereas the side stating the year of the great escape is in Job Clarendon. The seamstress behind all of our flags, this one included, is of course the multi-talented designer Anna-Leena Kirves.

The even more important question that remains unanswered is: did it work? Did our worries get blown away by the cool breeze of the Baltic Sea? Did we forget about file formats and passwords? Unanimously yes! Our seven weeks out at sea (or actually six weeks out at sea and one week stranded on a most remote island due to a prolonged storm) was just what the doctor ordered, should doctors order kayaking trips (which of course they should!).

During our time away from the office we had the good fortune of visiting five lighthouses, encountering an array of seals, and napped on the shores of uninhabited islands. And there you have it, our perfect escape. And should the stress of modern life become too much for you to bear, then the solution is just a couple of paddle strokes away.

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Christoffer Leka & Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka & Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka & Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Christoffer Leka & Kaisa Leka. License: All Rights Reserved.

Kinoto Studio created the identity for Club de cine (Film club), a cinematic space for non-commercial films that aims to promote diversity and inclusion. The club is run by Colectivo de Cineastas, a non-profit association of directors, producers, technicians, students, and journalists that celebrates film in Argentina.

I couldn’t be happier with how Kinoto Studio put Job Clarendon to use in big, bold headlines, set alongside supporting text in JetBrains Mono. The designers chose this typographic palette to evoke the visual language of old local movie advertisements.

The type is playfully arranged into stacked layers and faux-3D boxes, set against vibrant fields of cyan, pink, green, and yellow. The result is a lively, fun, and engaging identity that has a clear voice but allows for plenty of variety, which is readily apparent in the club’s social media feed.

County Highway is a 20-page broadsheet newspaper designed by Abbott Miller and team at Pentagram. It highlights political and spiritual articles, as well as agriculture, civil liberties, animals, herbal medicine, literature, art, and music.

From Pentagram's website:

County Highway is a new newspaper based on an old idea—that nothing compares to the joys of reading in print. Positioning itself as “America’s Only Newspaper,” the bi-monthly publication harkens back to the glory days of ink-stained broadsheets, as well as the alternative press, that covered local communities alongside national issues. Pentagram has created a visual identity and editorial design for County Highway that looks back to the heyday of 19th-century newspapers and celebrates reconnecting with print culture.

The design is constructed with a pleasing medley of typefaces. Job Clarendon (by DJR and Bethany Heck) is featured prominently in the logo and masthead, as well as in various weights for some of the article headlines. It is a display face designed with the letterpress era in mind. The other display typefaces act as ingredients to ground the look firmly in the 19th-century. Caslon Doric (by Commercial Type) allows for more variation on the article titles, Trio Grotesk by Schick Toikka adds micro touches along the spreads, and Blackoak (by Joy Redick) works as a loud, brassy display face. For body text, Shift (by MCKL Type Foundry) is employed, balancing the newspaper in a space to be as serious or as playful as it needs to be.

Sol. Mitos, historia y sociedades (“Sun. Myths, History and Societies”) is a book by Emma Carenini that explains how the sun has never been something trivial in civilizations and how its conquest has been pursued for centuries by man.

The goal of the cover design of this Spanish edition for Punta de Vista editores was to reference the sun in the least obvious way possible. There is basically no circular shapes or colors linked to the sun. We use black as the main color. “Sol” is such a recognizable word that just reading it connotes images and sensations. The primary typeface is Megabase (with some modifications done by me), supported by small text set in another typeface from David Jonathan Ross’ Font of the Month Club: Job Clarendon.

Posters for the 18th Anniversary Party of WRIR, an independent radio station from Richmond, Virgina, which will take place at Hardywood brewery. Local graphic designer Brent McCormick utilized Gayot New for the headline copy, with band names set in Job Clarendon, and additional show details set in ITC Ronda. “97.3 wrir” is OCR-A with a chrome effect.

Alternate layout for Facebook event page cover image

Non-Étoile (English: Non-Star) is an artist run-space and collective started in Montreuil, France, in March 2022. The soirée fes’tiff was the opening celebration of one of their new ateliers and exhibition spaces. Job Clarendon was the perfect fit to give a festive vibe to this poster. It’s supported by another typeface by David Jonathan Ross, Forma DJR.

A typographic cover design for the latest novel by Hugo Award-winner Ted White, combining contrasting weights from two slab-serif typefaces by David Jonathan Ross, Job Clarendon and Rhody.

From the back of the book:

There I was in a beat-up 1981 Chevy Cavalier with twenty pounds of marijuana, cruising up I-95, and behind me, all too visible in my rear view mirror, the flashing lights of a state trooper…

He’d been set up. Someone (and “independent consultant” Ray Phoenix was pretty sure who) had filed a phony stolen car report. When a freak bus accident allows him to escape into the woods, Ray lands in an entirely new world of trouble – small-town cocaine dealing, counterfeit money, and a web of strange and violent relationships that will take all of Ray’s considerable skills to unravel.

As the type designer of Job Clarendon, Pomfret and Gimlet Sans, I can’t tell you how excited I am to see them used in a design with such inventive typography and limitless variety. In the words of the designer, Nhat Le:

The Tale of Kiều is one the most iconic piece of literature of Vietnam written through the medium of poem.

There are many editions of this book released in the past but this is the first time that it is incorporated with so many paintings that come along. All the paintings (24 paintings in this book are from artist LÊ THIẾT CƯƠNG) describing/summing up the story of this tale and the characters inside.

Job Clarendon is used in this book as main headlines and also for pieces of poem that the painting took inspiration from. Pomfret is used as lines of poem by another poet that took inspiration from the painting => A collaboration between poem – painting – poem. Gimlet Sans is used for body text.

A view of the exhibition entrance including the title and intro text

Bámigbóyè: A Master Sculptor of the Yorùbá Tradition is an exhibition curated by James Green at the Yale University Art Gallery, which celebrates Nigerian artist Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè (ca. 1885–1975), a Yorùbá woodcarver regarded for his intricately crafted sculptures and ceremonial masks. Exhibition graphics designed by Chris Chew.

The medium-to-heavy weight range of the variable typeface Job Clarendon by David Jonathan Ross and Bethany Heck echoes formal elements of prominent works in the exhibition. Similarities can be drawn between Bámigbóyè’s sculptures depicting multiple figures connected by a sturdy, flat base and the letterforms composed of strokes grounded by sturdy slab-serifs, particularly when the “connected serifs” stylistic set is employed. Job Clarendon’s woodtype origins also link the typeface to the artist’s craft.

Archivo was chosen as the secondary typeface due to the proportional similarities when using a narrow variant.

A color-coded timeline of the historical events and events related to the artist, applied in vinyl

Vinyl installation

Exhibition identity sketches

Jacket design for Margo Price's Maybe We'll Make It, published by University of Texas Press.

The book jacket features the typeface Job Clarendon, created by David Jonathan Ross with direction by Bethany Heck. I wanted a strong display typeface that balanced with the stunning cover photograph by Nadine Brach, while keeping in mind this was a memoir by a well-known, Nashville-based country musician. A slab serif in this genre could steer cliché fast, but Job Clarendon gave me the hefty, elegant presence I was looking for. The curved terminals in the lowercase r, a, and y gave the design some extra softness, balancing out the sharp angles of the uppercase M’s and W, as well as the darker color palette.

The blurb is set in Adobe Caslon and Sweet Sans.

Cover design by Amanda Weiss, with art direction by Derek George.

Poster and promotional postcards for Tennessee Blend, a Wild West play by Austrian theatre companies Staatstheater and Feinripp Ensemble. Sponsored by ÖBB, the Austrian railway company, the public is taken by dedicated trains to the roundhouse of Innsbruck’s main train station, where the play is staged. The posters are displayed on commuter trains throughout the Tirol region for the duration of the performance run, March through May 2022. Designed by Sol Kawage, the title is set in Job Clarendon Variable, as are the postcards with quotes from the play. The postcard information is set in Acumin Variable.

Based in Los Angeles, Heidi Duckler Dance is a dance company rooted in Democratic Dance, Arts Education, and Spatial Justice. Since 1985, it has been creating “site-specific performances that transform non-traditional spaces, providing learning opportunities and engaging diverse communities, in the belief that the arts can change our vision of the world and of ourselves.”

For the identity of Heidi Duckler Dance’s Truth or Consequences salon series, Traci Larson of Visual Issues made multicolored use of Streco.

After so many lockdowns, it's time to shape new things and “time to make it happen!”. A nice "papillon" could help me to do this and mostly other people to understand the need to do it in real life with papers, inks, and so on.

And for this Job Clarendon did the job very well, completed by Plantin in the back. The small text ads a question to the line set in Job Clarendon: “Perhaps with a printed medium to mark the spirit?”

Fresh silkscreen ink on the back !