The third issue of the Transnational Social Strike Journal documents the wave of women’s strikes in 2018. The booklet is printed A5 on a relatively transparent stock to make the purple spot bleed through the pages whenever possible.

Messer carries the design with its confident clarity. It pairs with Riviera Nights, then a single-weight lab font, matching its resolute, sharp edges with the knifes edge serifs.

The journal is available as a download from the Transnational Social Strike website.

De facto is an agency based in New York, representing artists in the categories Photo & Motion, Styling, Sets & Props, Makeup, Hair, and Manicure. For the website, art director Chase Hostler exclusively used the Messer family by Inga Plönnigs, black on white, in all of its three styles*; Regular, Italic and Display (see Messer Condensed). The logo uses Neue Helvetica Bold or similar.

*) Messer is still work in progress. An additional condensed style with high contrast has been announced already.

The items on the homepage pair Messer Italic in mixed case with Messer Regular in all caps for the names.

Messer’s Display cut here ironically is used for the smallest type.

Messer comes with lining and oldstyle figures. De facto uses the latter ones.

Tonal is the blog of Goodhertz, makers of audio plugins such as “Megaverb” that was introduced with a video previously shown on Fonts In Use. Another Goodhertz product is the “Vulf Compressor”, named after the band Vulfpeck - which in turn was the namesake of OH no Type Co’s Vulf Mono.

OH no’s James Edmondson also designed the typeface used for for links and emphasis on the Tonal blog. Hobeaux was started during his TypeMedia year at the KABK in The Hague. The headlines and body text of the blog are set in a design by another TypeMedia graduate from a few years later: Messer (incl. Messer Condensed), a reinterpretation of Weiß-Antiqua by Inga Plönnigs. To complete the circle: Messer was among the first typefaces available at Future Fonts, the font-in-progress platform created by Scribble Type with assistance of, you guessed it: James Edmondson.

While the blog itself uses Hobeaux and Messer for all typography, some videos and interactive plugins are inserted, using more type. Here, a tutorial pairs Messer with Export Stencil, Vulf Mono and Metallophile Sp8, among many other fonts.

Messer Condensed is used for headings, with Messer Regular and Italic for text. Author names, date, and drop cap brought to you by Hobeaux Bold and Black.

Interactive example of a plugin that mimics hearing loss, with typography set in Covik Sans Mono, a typeface that evolved from Edmondson’s graduation project at the KABK.

Some of the blog posts (and plugin interfaces) have been translated to Portuguese.

In summer 2019, on the occasion of the Bauhaus centennial, the Museum of the Printing Arts Leipzig will show an exhibition about the Bauhaus and its precursors in the graphic arts industry, titled Druckkunst 1919 (“Art of Printing 1919”).

The invitation is set in Messer, a typeface designed by Inga Plönnigs based on Weiß-Antiqua (1928). A first version of Messer was made available via Future Fonts in early 2018. Messer is here used in regular and italic styles. It’s paired with what looks like a version of Akzidenz-Grotesk or similar. The cover of the folded card shows a detail from an ad for Roeder fountain pens from around 1914.

With a cross-section through the year 1919, the exhibition uses the example of posters, printed advertising materials, company logos, (trade) magazines, books, typefaces and product designs to show how innovative the printing industry and commercial art in Germany were shortly after the end of the First World War. Even before the founding of the Bauhaus, the art of printing shaped and decisively influenced the view of modern design.

For our moving to Europe Garage Sale, Frank and myself set to do a different flyer every day of the leading week of the grand event. We would post these digital flyers in our Instagram Stories. We ended up not following through and did only four flyers.

We did the first one together, the second and third one are from me and the last one is from Frank.

For the first one, we used Nostra because it had just come out in Future Fonts and it’s awesome!

The second one I decided to play with as many typefaces as possible from the Pyte Foundry.

The third one is an ode to the female type designers present in Future Fonts.

The fourth one is an accurate description through the display of emojis of everything that we had for sale. :)

Women type designers at Future Fonts, starring from top to bottom: Inga Plönnig’s Messer Condensed; Pauline Fourest with Giboula, Sun Helen Isdahl Kalvenes with Ricochet, and Daria Petrova's Zangezi.

Apple Color Emoji and Daria Petrova's Zangezi.