Moje Korzenie (“My roots”) is a monograph of the Banasik family. The author, Paweł Banasik, devoted a few years of his life to the creation of this book. With his painstaking research and chronicler’s hard graft, we can now enjoy the Banasik family history in book form.

Design by Meteora. The titles are set in Cako. Body copy is set in a yet unidentified typeface [edit: it’s probably Karmina, with Karmina Sans, see comments].

In our publishing house, Kara Plak, we have a series of small-format books on record albums. They measure 11.5×16,5 cm (approx 4.5×6.5 inches), so I needed a typeface which would still be strong and readable in small letters. Only after I chose Karmina, I read that Veronika Burian and José Scaglione designed this typeface for pocket books. It was meant to be.

The body text set in 10/12pt, with blockquotes and footnotes in slightly smaller sizes (9.5/11.5pt and 8/10pt, respectively). The blockquotes present lyrics and their translations. Karmina Sans is used for the original language.

The depicted book is Mark Polizotti’s monograph on Bob Dylan’s album Highway 61 Revisited, translated to Turkish by Burcu Uğuz and published by Kara Plak.

Helvetica (RI), Karmina Sans (GRA), Geneva (tnK) … and what else?

In November 2018, Ariana Grande dropped “thank u, next” — a twinkling, catchy pop song that shimmers with gratitude for her exes, while evolving into an anthem about self-love. The song became sensational overnight, and surpassed 100 million streams on Spotify in just eleven days — making it the fastest song in history to reach that milestone.

She released a lyric video along with the drop, making use of the ransom note effect by mixing up a bunch of familiar fonts including Arial, ITC American Typewriter, Gill Sans, Myriad, and Geneva. There are also some unexpected ones, like Emigre’s Fairplex Wide and Joshua Darden’s Freight Display. Can you identify the missing ones? Let us know in a comment!

This art style was also a perfect setup for her music video released a month later, when Grande re-enacted four early 2000s movies: Mean Girls, Bring It On, 13 Going on 30, and Legally Blonde. The letters reappear on the cover of Grande’s “Burn Book”, but unlike Regina George’s gossip, Grande fills the book with positive traits and fond memories of her exes.

Director: Chris Shelley @Create
Editor: Remington Franklin
Producer: Light Switch Digital

Geneva (an), Courier New (R), Fairplex Wide (pE) and maybe Big Bag (Te); Arial Rounded (M), Pistilli Roman (S), ITC American Typewriter (th), Freight Big (Ank L), Arial (fU).

Gill Sans (tA) and slanted Alternate Gothic (gH).

More Geneva (taNK), Craw Modern Italic (nE), Arial Black (t).

Craw Modern Italic (fu g), Arial Black (inG), Alternate Gothic (Ra), Pistilli Roman (f), American Typewriter (Y).

Arial Black (t) and Italic (Ha), more Craw Modern Italic (nk), Pistilli Roman (u, Xt), Arial Rounded (n).

What goes on in female designers’ heads? Whether we like it or not, the world is, to a large degree, a product of design. Behind the artifacts we use daily there are their authors – male and female! More often than not we do not know their names, or where they come from – not to mention what goes on in their heads and what inspires them. But we do know that without female designers, the industrial history of the region would have been completely different.

The exhibition is a meeting with female designers and good design promoters who either come from the region or are bound with it professionally. Some of them are already icons – and co-authors of the everyday we live in. Others, those working today, are writing new chapters in this history. Let’s meet them!

The exhibition is part of Industriada 2018, which gives the floor to women – because industry has never been solely a man’s world. And the motto of this year’s celebration of the Silesian Industrial Monuments Route is: ‘Industry is Female’.

Organizer: Zamek Cieszyn
Exhibition concept: Anna Kaczkowska, muflon studio
Illustrations and graphic design: muflon studio
Design and space arrangement: Anna Kaczkowska
Exhibition realization: Agnieszka Zdonek, Anna Kaczkowska
Query, editing: Olga Kostrzewska-Cichoń
Exhibition coordination: Agnieszka Szczepanik-Szewczyk
Photography: Marek Dziurkowski

Rewolucje 1968 (“Revolutions 1968”) is a book on the revolution of 1968 which took place in the USA and Europe. Redesign of an earlier publication accompanying an exhibition at Zachęta, made at ASP Katowice.

Event logo with Sorvettero Diamond and Block and Abril Text.

DiaTipo is a typographic event that takes place in some Brazilian cities like São Paulo, Porto Alegre and Campinas. Traditionally the event graphics use typefaces from one or more speakers from that year. In 2016, Campinas chose to use the typeface Sorvettero, a layered unicase font system from Just in Type, paired with Abril and Karmina Sans from TypeTogether to create a nice visual identity.

Cyla Costa and a conference identity banner on stage

A wood laser cutted sign for José Scaglione workshop, the typeface is Sorvettero Stencil by Just in Type and the printer’s fist is Abril, by TypeTogether

Facebook post

Conference badge with Abril Display and Karmina Sans

Diego Maldonado eating the official conference chocolate with his typeface, Sorvettero.

Ciro Esposito is an art director and teacher located in Milan and Catania. He writes about design at Tiragraffi.

In 2014 the Czech News Agency (CTK), organised the exhibition Co odnesl čas … / Faded with time …, a retrospective of Jovan Dezort’s photographs. Jovan Dezort (*1934, Brno) is a Czech journalist, photographer and artist. The exhibition commemorated his sixty years of commitment as a professional photographer. He worked for the Czech News Agency for 15 years, as well as a photo-reporter for other media such as Vlasta magazine. His work has been awarded numerous times nationally and internationally.

The Czech News Agency commissioned the Prague based design studio Ask Designers to create a book with the Dezort photographs. This marked the style and design of the entire exhibition, including promotional posters, banners, tickets, etc. To enhance the contrast and match the richness of the photographic quality the book was printed using a special technique mixing two black inks.

The text was entirely set in Karmina Sans. Markéta Cole, from Ask Designers, explained that Karmina Sans offered the flexibility they needed, “a modern typeface which would work well in the physical space as well in print”, that would perform in printed sizes but also in the exhibition materials. “The light weight looks graceful at small sizes and doesn’t compete too much with the photography. The bold weight on the other hand commands attention and allowed us to create a clean and clear hierarchy on text pages”.

Detail, captions for illustrations.

Como criar tipos (“How to create typefaces”), published by Estereográfica, is the Brazilian edition of Cómo crear tipografías, by Cristobal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer and José Scaglione, originally published by Tipo e in Spain.

Translated to Portuguese by Priscila Farias, this book was composed in Karmina and Karmina Sans, by Rafael Dietzsch and André Maya (based on the original artwork by Elena Veguillas). This title was also published in Polish by d2d in 2013. 

Detail, diagram.

Detail, sidenotes.

Detail, glossary.

Chaper opening.

Detail of a spread.

Front cover.

Algirdas Šeškus (born 1945) is a Lithuanian artist and photographer, whose photographs, made in the 1970s to the 1980s, defied Soviet culture of the time. In 2010 the National Gallery of Art in Lithuania organised a major retrospective of his work and he has recently received the Lithuanian National Culture and Arts award.

In January 2014 Šeškus' photographs were exhibited in the Le Château d’Eau gallery in Toulouse, France. The book Algirdas Šeškus “Grey, but not Grey” accompanied the show. Book designer Tom Mrazauskas used Karmina Sans for the design of the book, as he was looking for an expressive and flexible typeface with several weights and complete language support for Lithuanian: “Might sound very technical, but at the same time it’s hard to imagine a better solution to set several pages of text in that level of quality and diversity.”

The publication Atlas Cultural de la Argentina (Argentinian cultural atlas), is a compendium of the diverse cultural scene in Argentina, and includes stats, cartography, and other indicators of the cultural life throughout the country.

The information has been gathered and edited by SinCa, Sistema de Información Cultural de la Argentina (Argentinian cultural information system), and designed by Juan Lo Bianco, Catalina Ruiz Luque and Theo Contestin from the renowned agency Estudio Lo Bianco.

Lo Bianco used Karmina Sans for every purpose, from titling to navigation, and from text to cartography and charts. The team found Karmina Sans to be the perfect tool for this very complex project, where clean and rigorous design meets an enormous amount of information.

The Polish edition of the book Cómo crear tipografías (“How to create typefaces”), Jak projektować kroje pisma, by Cristobal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer and José Scaglione, uses Karmina Sans in headlines and text, with a crispy and contemporary result.

The translation was supervised by Adam Twardoch. The book was published by Polish publishing house d2d in 2013.

Posted as part of a little survey about websites for conferences on typography and graphic design – how do these specialist events present themselves typographically, in 2013?

Ampersand is “The Web Typography Conference”, and it obviously is at home in the web. Arguably the event website that understands best how type sizes, coloring and texture can be used to establish hierarchy and structure on the screen, and how the aspects need to be adjusted for different sizes. The Karmina superfamily by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione has been put to great use. Interestingly, Ampersand opts for white type on dark background, just like ISType, Typism, and AGI Open.

Webfonts: ✓ (>5 styles via Fontdeck)
Designer credits: (✓)
Typeface credits: ✓

Czech design studio Designiq choose three of our typefaces for the new fresh design of Prague's theater newspaper, DN divadelní noviny. Bree Extrabold is wonderfully used in headlines and titles, showing sometimes the alternate letters for more clarity. Karmina excels as main text face and the occasional subtitle and its partner Karmina Sans shows off in captions, subtitles and tables. Overall it is an inspiring and very pleasant design in the handy Berliner format on good quality paper.

The Standard edition of the 2011 Norwegian Bible. The cover is a glass painting by Norwegian artist Tor Lindrupsen. Click to enlarge.

The new Norwegian Bible translation is by no means a rush job. The project began way back in 2000 and involves input from theologians and linguists, as well as some of our greatest authors of fiction, among them Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jon Fosse, and Hanne Ørstavik. A standalone edition of the New Testament was released in 2005, while three variants of the “Good Book” in its entirety were released simultaneously this fall: a standard print edition (medium and large print), a literary print edition, and a digital edition for the iPad.

Karmina in use for the Standard edition of the 2011 Norwegian Bible. Click to enlarge.

Karmina Sans is used for notes. Click to enlarge.

The Standard edition, by the Danish book design bureau 2Krogh, is not unlike the expected Bible format, but the choice of typeface, José Scaglione and Veronika Burian’s Karmina, gives the text a distinctly contemporary tone. Karmina is, from a technical point of view, a wise choice for such a dense book — its chunky serifs, open letterforms, tall x-height, and large inktraps make the text readable at small sizes. Still, I can’t help but feel it might be bit a too static for the material. The Bible’s ancientness, its poetic language, and religious authority calls for more subtlety and passion than an economical, rational news face like Karmina can deliver.

2Krogh made wise use of the baseline rhythm, aligning body copy on both sides of the slightly opaque thin paper to minimize visual clutter. The typesetting is lovely, and the color is remarkably even, considering the short measure. Both all caps and small caps could do with more tracking, and the use of a bar to separate chapter name and page number (in both editions), looks rather dated.

The Standard edition comes in various bindings. The most publicized cover — Tor Lindrupsen’s red and blue glass painting — is unfortunately the least inviting.

The 2011 Norwegian Bible, Literary edition. The borders on each cover use elements from Egyptian, Hellenistic, and Roman art.

A spread from the Literary edition. Click images to enlarge.

The Literary edition, on the other hand, is a marvelous piece of art: Aud Gloppen of Blæst designed a three-piece box set bound in cloth and typeset in Kent Lew’s Whitman on cream-colored paper. Unlike the Standard edition, the text runs uninterrupted by verse numbers and footnotes. The body copy runs in one column, emphasizing the poetic qualities of the language. The titles are foil stamped on the covers in gold on a dark, almost misty background with tasteful engravings and subtle borders running parallel to the spine.

Whitman’s austerity is balanced by the literary edition’s comfortable margins and cream-colored paper. Here’s one of a dozen alphabetic acrostic poems in the bible, marked with Hebrew letters in the margin.

Each section in the Literary edition has an introduction set in Whitman Italic. The mistake of lining figures (see “Joh. 3,16”) was discovered too late to correct for the first print run. Click images to enlarge.

2Krogh did the typesetting following Gloppen’s direction, and apart from a small mistake with numeral styles (see image above), the craft is sublime. The book looks and feels like a high-quality novel.

With this edition, Bibelselskapet first intended to continue in the style of the already proposed Standard edition, but designer Aud Gloppen expressed the need for a more humanist tone. Its predecessor, the New Testament of 2005, was typeset in Bram de Does’ Trinité (a choice seemingly inspired by Jongbloed’s De Bijbel released a year earlier). Whitman was chosen as a middle ground between the calligraphic style of Trinité and the more modern, rugged Karmina of the Standard edition. Whitman’s proportions and color lend themselves nicely to the wide measure and large leading. Although austere, it does not come off as such on the page.

The iPad app Pomegranate lets you read the Bible in one of four different fonts. This is OurType’s Fresco. Click to enlarge.

Although it was intended as a visually consistent release, the Norwegian Bible collection stops short of that goal. The Standard and Literary editions have too little in common, both externally and internally. If anything, this release makes a great case for text families that cater to both literary and editorial needs.

Based in Oslo, Frode Helland is a graphic designer specializing in type, identities, and editorial design.
Photos by Erlend Berge.