Chez Smith is a cozy and stylish wine bar and restaurant in Zurich’s Binz district, born from friendship and a shared passion for gastronomy. Set in a former industrial building, it blends French-inspired cuisine with an extensive wine list of over a thousand bottles. More than just a dining spot, Chez Smith is a neighborhood hub where stories begin, creativity flows, and guests are warmly welcomed.

PPP stands for the Perpetual Peace Project ~2022, which is created and maintained by the Center for Philosophical Technologies and is a part of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. Its third edition is an academic/educational response to the Ukraine War, enabling conversations about the concept of peace in different directions with multiple perspectives. It begins from the understanding that for many today “peace” is a poorly defined word that has many meanings in different contexts – defined negatively as the absence of war.

From 2022 onwards, the project will investigate those political and institutional spaces best equipped to forge new practices of peace, especially in addressing current geopolitical conditions that seem to make peace unlikely, if not impossible.

The developed visual identity has its journalistic approach with a minimalistic color palette of grey tones, accompanied by black and white images from the war area. Effects like color inversion, image distortion, overlays, and contrast in the used typography add dramaturgy to the whole. Additionally, the use of a bit of mechanic but plenty of character Approach combined with its fixed width version Approach Mono brings an aseptic voice to the identity.

The PPP logo symbol contains three monospaced letters – where each of them has a separate stem and bowl from the other. This treatment gives a DIY / stencil feel to the sign but also emphasizes the destruction and fragmentation which is happening due to the war. The abbreviated PPP form is accompanied by the text in the monospaced typewriter style adding a rhythm and journalistic vibe to the developed visual system.

The repetitive aspect of the letterforms in the logo, as well as the usage of monospaced typography, allowed us to put the identity in motion and play with the perpetuity of animations or interactions on the project website.

Credits
Project organizers: Gregg Lambert & Adam Nocek
Branding and website design: Gabriela Baka
Website development: Owls Department

The redacted update of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace combines EB Garamond and Dreaming Outloud Script.

The Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur (“International Short Movies Days Winterthur”) are one the most significant short film festivals in Switzerland. Ther website uses Approach throughout, save for a big red k from ITC American Typewriter.

Approach is the identity typeface for Budapest’s Museum of Ethnography (Néprajzi Múzeum).

Coinciding with the 150th anniversary, the museum invited five designers to work together on the new design and logo, and think alongside the museum’s staff. From the announcement:

Nóra Demeczky and Enikő Dér from DE_FORM Studio, Hunor Kátay, Szilárd Kovács and Sebestyén Németh from Explicit Studio accepted to participate in a creative process based on constant dialogue. […]

The museum’s new visual image aimed to create a brand identity that would fit in with the cultural diversity of ethnography and reflect the diverse motifs of the Hungarian and international collections of the institution. An essential aspect of the renewal was that the new identity should be able to stand its ground in the digital environment of the present and the future and to represent the institution on an international stage. […]

The Approach font family chosen for the institute has a neutral, timeless character that complements the distinctive visual appearance of the logo and the identity. The basic identity can be used in monochrome black and white, or the emblem complemented with red. On the various communication platforms, a more complex range of colours related to ethnography is available to create more dynamic, varied and eye-catching content. Four basic elements extracted from the pattern of the logo can be used to create a set of patterns that can be easily varied to ensure the recognition of the institution’s visual identity on different communication platforms.

Approach is the corporate typeface of Space&Matter, an Amsterdam-based design studio that specialises in architecture, circular area development, and vision-making. On their portfolio website, it is paired with Freight Text.

From the Squake website:

The Squake API allows you to purchase CO2 offsets on behalf of your customers. We help you to calculate the emissions of your company the easy way. We don’t leave you alone with our code, but support you with tailored solutions. Making your business organization sustainable unlocks great opportunities, and new challenges.

The startup’s logo uses the Black weight of Approach. The clean website (designer yet unknown) uses the same typeface for subheaders, body text and UI elements, paired with headlines set in Approach Mono.

Zoltán Neville is a registered architect in France, with professional architecture degrees from the USC School of Architecture in Los Angeles and ENSAP Lille in France, as well as his French licensing accreditation from ENSA Paris-Malaquais. Prior to joining Coldefy, he has experience in both boutique firms and international offices in the US and Europe.

His visual identity by De_Form makes a striking use of diagonal lines and cuts. Approach is used throughout stationery, brochures and the portfolio website that was built with Readymag.

Signage for the Fundació Joan Brossa in Barcelona. They wanted to capture the spirit of the 20th-century poet through the typography used as images. Joan Brossa (19 January 1919 – 30 December 1998) was a Catalan poet, playwright, graphic designer and visual artist. He wrote exclusively in the Catalan language.