Picture disc design with screenprinted PVC sleeve, front.

Georgia Gothic is the latest album by Atlanta, Georgia-based musician and designer Mattiel.

Mattiel also designed the eye-catching album art for the release, which features the title set in Clavichord (artfully thickened with an outline), artist’s name set in Ogg’s expressive Italic, with track names and supporting text in Plaak Extra Condensed (The small type and fine print are set in various versions of Helvetica.)

For the picture disc version, the type is screen printed on a clear PVC sleeve. This sits on top of the striking photo taken by photographer Jason Travis, which is printed directly on the disc. In other versions, such as the Hot Red vinyl, all of the type moves to the back cover where it is set against an arboreal backdrop that relates to the photo on the front.

This design system is carried through to the Risograph-printed liner notes (printed by Risolve), website, and tour poster.

My typeface Clavichord is not a design that sees a ton of use, so it is especially gratifying to see it appear in a design with devilish details that reverberate against the typeface so perfectly. The video for the single “Jeff Goldblum” is already up, and that was enough to get me to pre-order a copy!

Picture disc design with screenprinted PVC sleeve, back.

Hot Red vinyl, front and back

Risograph-printed lyric book, cover

Risograph-printed lyric book, interior

Website

“Jeff Goldblum” single artwork

In 2020, Large was commissioned with the new visual identity for the Citadium department stores, part of the French Printemps chain. Citadium offers medium to high-end clothing and is aimed at a young audience, who likes to wear trendy clothes and sportswear.

Taking this target into account, Large created an identity filled with pop references, using different symbols, pictograms, logotypes as a graphic vocabulary arranged into a digital patchwork. This reference to how images are stored, released, copied and pasted in our digital era leads up into a playful identity, where symbols are diverted from their initial meaning, creating a new kind of syntax (this is very much visible on Citadium’s Instagram account and on their website). In terms of typography, Signal from Production Type is linked to this explosion of codes, and is used for the logotype and as the primary brand typeface, exclusively in all caps. Citadium employs a wide palette of secondary fonts, several of which are sourced from the library of system fonts.

Signal’s design is based on the French highway signage typeface, and is therefore anchored in the public space, as a kind of contemporary epigraphy. What better counter balance to the diversity of digital culture assumed in the identity, for a store claiming an urban style? While the font matches conceptually, it’s also coherent to bring back legibility and a simplicity that comes along with the evidence of fashion. In the end, Large succeeds in creating an identity that is the reflection of the youth of the time.

Signal in combination with Kaffi, an angular italic by Yin Fei Gwee which is among the recurring secondary typefaces.

Xmas 2020 graphics. Photography by Charlotte Navio, art direction by Virna Hagen & Hynd Mezaguer.

An adaptation of Jussi Parikka’s essay, “Malware as Operational Art: On the If/Then of Geopolitics and Tricksters” from Het Nieuwe Instituut’s 2019 exhibition, Malware: Symptoms of Viral Infection.

The structure of this book references the skeletal 
syntax of the web and the layered, nested anatomy of HTML. Smaller moves—the unravelling typography 
and cut paper revealing a computer-generated texture on the inner folds—seek to reinforce this theme 
of perceived danger, offering an uneasy, anti-reader friendly experience.

The use of San Francisco (Apple) references the visual language of Apple products, whereas Apple Chancery by Kris Holmes embodies the sprawl of weeds and hints at contagion. A condensed Authentic Sans (by Christina Janus and Desmond Wong) ties this all together, both highlighting important questions and inviting the reader to reconsider what a book can be—as seen in the front cover, which seeks to act as a billboard.

KEYMAG is a music magazine that aims to bring readers into new cultural worlds, with very few borders. All the albums and subjects in this second issue are linked by the theme of community.

Some of the designs here hinge on replication of existing designs, such as the Gong and LateNightTales pieces, and thus either use the typefaces from the original source, or a modernised, alternate version.

The body copy throughout uses Surt, which has become the staple font for the magazine. For the ‘Gateway to Dream Pop’ piece, a mixture of Antiquarian Scribe and Acier are used for the artist and album titles. These two contrast each other to give a very rustic design that matches the additional collage designs by Becky McGillivray.

Apple Chancery was used for the heading at the top of the piece on prog rock band Gong, in attempt to modernise the typography and design of the band’s original record gatefold – these were originally handwritten.

The page numbers in the mag are handled by Futura. For double-digit numbers, they are stacked vertically, as an interesting little feature seen on the LateNightTales page.

Oroban is used for the pull quote on the piece about New York’s The Kitchen, the only one in the mag. It brings a bit of negative space and more interesting break-up of the layout, and the font itself is a beautiful balance of poise and idiosyncracy.

Big Caslon was used on the page on D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, which puts an outlined stroke on a serif font, an increasingly popular design choice today. Also of note is the Black Lives Matter symbol overlayed in crimson red on the body copy in the same picture.

In mimicry of the design of the LateNightTales mix series and their album artwork, Neue Helvetica was used. This page more than any other shows how KEYMAG is nothing if not an homage to all the subjects it discusses.

KUNST.EE is an Estonian quarterly dedicated to the art scene in Estonia and various aspects of contemporary art and visual culture.

Since 2009, the magazine header is based on Neue Helvetica Black Oblique. It takes different forms for every issue. Cover compositions consist of fragments of images and texts presented inside a magazine issue. The magazine occasionally includes special pages inside, with a dedicated topic and distinct layout.

Most text is set in Farnham, with guest appearances by other typefaces.

Apple Chancery for “Three Cheers for Our Joker!”, an essay about Kris Lemsalu by Tamara Luuk, in KUNST.EE 4/2019.

Detail

Birra Stout is one of the many typefaces used for the typographic illustrations that accompany Amanda Kae Fronk’s article about linguist Mark E. Davies in an issue of BYU Magazine, a quarterly published by Brigham Young University. The whimsical display typeface by Darden Studio was chosen for the words “famous” and “crisis” in the large opening spread. Birra also appears in another graphic with “words about women”. Here it’s used to render the terms “pregnant” and “adult”.

What could you do with a few hundred billion words? A BYU professor is transforming linguistics research, language learning, legal studies, and other fields all over the world.

Among the other repeatedly or prominently used fonts in this smorgasbord are Klavika/Klavika Display (“Big Lang BYU”, “inalienable”, “huge”), Bourton Hand Script (“Flow”, “friendly”), Facebuster (“obesity”), Tungsten (“recession”), Quitador (“Ideal”), Burford Dots (“refugee”), Estilo Script (“creative”), and Archer (“civility”). See the typeface credits for more identified fonts in use.

Full spread

“Using Davies’s Corpus of Historical American English to compare some of the most common adjectives that appear near the word women in two different time periods – 1810–99 and 1970–2009 – reveals major shifts in attitudes about women and their role in society.” Klavika and Bourton Hand Script are used for the title, Pompadour Numerals, Cooper Black, and an unidentified grotesque for the years [edit: Champion Gothic, see comments].

Metallica’s collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and conductor Michael Kaman resulted in the provocatively named S&M: Symphony & Metallica. The album cover design departed significantly from Metallica’s usual imagery and even the band’s logo (only the M is seen) and is typeset in the sober Frutiger. The ampersand in the bottom is from Apple Chancery.