Miss May Does Not Exist, by Carrie Courogen, with cover design by Danielle Christopher, photograph by Bill Ray from The Life Picture Collection, and typeface Nobel by Frere-Jones Type.

The book is the riveting biography of comedian, director, actor and writer Elaine May, one of America’s greatest comic geniuses. May began her career as one-half of the legendary comedy team known as Nichols and May, the duo that revolutionized the comedy sketch. Published by St. Martin’s Press in 2024.

Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com Cover design: Pei Loi Koay. License: All Rights Reserved.

First published in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale earned Margaret Atwood nominations for the Booker Prize, the Nebula Award, and the Prometheus Award, and won her the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Nobel by Frere-Jones Type has appeared on numerous book covers by novelist Margaret Atwood, published by Penguin Random House in their Vintage Books and Anchor Books imprints since around 2019.

The covers – or at least most of them – were designed by Pei Loi Koay. The cover art is by Noma Bar, some of which was originally created for the Chatto & Windus hardback editions (with creative direction from Suzanne Dean).

Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com Cover design: Pei Loi Koay. License: All Rights Reserved.

The Testaments was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Booker prize. A modern masterpiece that “reminds us of the power of truth in the face of evil” (People)—and can be read on its own or as a sequel to Margaret Atwood’s classic, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com Design: Pei Loi Koay. License: All Rights Reserved.

A stunning box set of the bestselling companion novels The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (The New York Times)

Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com Cover design: Pei Loi Koay. License: All Rights Reserved.

Burning Questions: In more than fifty pieces, Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humor at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to Atwood’s views on the climate crisis, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.

Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com Cover design: Pei Loi Koay. License: All Rights Reserved.

The Heart Goes Last

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Bodily Harm

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Cat’s Eye

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The Blind Assassin

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The Robber Bride

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Lady Oracle

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Alias Grace

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The Edible Woman

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Surfacing

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Bluebeard’s Egg

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Dancing Girls

Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com Cover design: Pei Loi Koay. License: All Rights Reserved.

Stone Mattress

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Moral Disorder

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Wilderness Tips

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Life Before Man

Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com Cover design: Pei Loi Koay. License: All Rights Reserved.

Old Babes in the Wood

Poster design by Paula Scher of Pentagram, featuring Nobel typeface by Frere-Jones Type.

Shakespeare's Measure for Measure was the first production presented by the New York Shakespeare Festival / The Public Theater 2001 series in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. The production directed by Mary Zimmerman joined the already announced The Seagull by Chekov in a new version by Tom Stoppard, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline.

Schultze & Weaver was an architecture firm established in 1921 in New York City. As the architects of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, they also designed all the engraved and gilt inlay signage on the building’s facades. When researching the hotel’s vast historic archives, the building elevation drawings revealed that the typography was part of the fabric of the construction. The typeface, however, was never drawn beyond the characters of the hotel name. In collaboration with Noë & Associates, we expanded the original 1929 drawings into a full character set, creating the new Edificio Etc (formerly Waldorf Astoria) custom typeface. This ensures that all visual communications are instantly identifiable and unique. With a direct link to its Art Deco roots, yet inspired by a futuristic vision, we also developed the logo mark and patterning based on an original illustration retrieved from the archives.

Kurversbrug from Retype Foundry and Tobias Frere-Jones’s Nobel (Frere-Jones) (a revival of Nobel, released in 1929 by Typefoundry Amsterdam) are the brand typefaces of Wellfound Foods. From design studio Polygraph:

After studying in Amsterdam, Wellfound founder Sarah “Frim” Frimpong decided to bring the culture of fresh on-the-go sandwiches back to her home in the States. Frim wanted the Wellfound fare to stand out in cafe food cases and clearly show their high-quality ingredients. We designed a bold, colorful brand and system of labels for Wellfound’s varied containers and food styles, featuring a block map of Amsterdam’s iconic Oude Centrum. The core element of the new brand is the beautiful display type Kurversbrug, designed by Ramiro Espinoza. The bold, modern sans is a revival of the letters that appear on the historic bridges of Amsterdam.

Peranakan culture – famed for its colourful exuberance and hybridity – was quickly becoming a historical footnote in Southeast Asia. Many see it not as a living culture, but as a relic of the distant past. To challenge this perception, the brand refresh for the Peranakan Museum had to expand beyond the confines of history, to inspire a new generation of artists, rebels and creators.

The rebranding distils Peranakan culture’s maximalist aesthetic into a digital library of reimagined patterns, motifs and more. Our graphic system layers and blends different visuals and styles, just as the Peranakans hybridised different cultures and influences, to create a riot of audacious beauty. We created both static and animated brand patterns with imagery and references drawn from the museum's archive.

For typography, Nobel by Frere-Jones Type was utilised as the headline typeface and Arlt by PampaType for body text; both institutional and contemporary in their base forms, with slight characterful and decorated lilts, allowing the brand to speak with both the formality of a museum and the flair of a Peranakan.

Megazoid and Nobel (Frere-Jones) Black

Various designs for the Blender Workshop, a regular event running at naund, Leipzig. Participants will learn to create some cool 3D objects using the free and open-source Blender software.

Tiny, Arachne, and Kern Expanded

Kodchasan and Pressio

BVH Anto Plot Mono and BM Hanna Pro

The Berlagebrug was named after Dutch architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage. While he only designed one building in Groningen, he co-authored a plan for the expansion of the city in 1928. Some of this plan was executed, some wasn’t, but the bridge he planned on this spot was finally realised after 80 years.

The sign uses capital O’s instead of 0’s for the year 2010.

The cover for the Jan 22, 1998 edition of Rolling Stone magazine features Mantinia by Matthew Carter. It is paired with what looks like another 1990s release from Font Bureau, FB Nobel. The cover photograph of Fiona Apple was shot by Mark Seliger.

Matthew Carter mentioned this cover in his talk “On Untypical Typefaces” at Design Indaba in 2013.

Book cover in a new series of Pelican Books that use Brandon Text (with alternate a and g) for title, author and branding.

The stickers on this cover use a variety of fonts. Arial for the Vietnamese, Nobel for the German, Marvin Visions and Times New Roman for Russian. The Chinese is hand lettered, based on an old poster.

Typefaces by Font Bureau. Nameplate refresh by Jim Parkinson — which was later replaced in 2014 with this dreary thing.

One of the longest running web-first publications, The Morning News has been around since 1999. Its current design by Jason Santa Maria has held steady since 2011.

Front page of website.

My portfolio website takes considerable inspiration from typography in fine print. All three typefaces in use have roots in Dutch type: both Verdigris Big and Malabar take cue from Hendrik Van den Keere, and Font Bureau's Nobel revives S.H. de Roos's same design for Lettergieterij Amsterdam, a.k.a. Tetterode.

Both MVB Verdigris Big and FB Nobel are served through WebType. The body text face, Malabar, is a custom-made version obtained through private communication with the type designer, Dan Reynolds. It features less overall darkness and longer ascenders & descenders.

Though not all, many texts that appear on this website were written directly within the design mockup with set leading and measure, solely for the sake of achieving a better unjustified rag without hyphenation, or evenly grey paragraphs in the case of the front page. Body texts are then automatically hyphenated using Mathias Nater's Hyphenator.

One of the case studies' page, with long-form process text.

The page with more imagery and explanatory text instead of long-form. Titles are placed at the full screen visual center.

PUR provides different water filter systems. The products and benefits of filtered water are presented on the firm’s website using Nobel for headings combined with FF DIN for everything else like navigation and continuous text.

The New York based global advertising agency Droga5 uses exclusively Nobel for its website matching the airy overall appearance of the online portfolio.

Design agency Project Projects and informatic bureau Systemantics created the web appearance of Reed Hilderbrand, a reputable landscape architecture office. Lyon for continuous text and headlines is combined with Nobel for navigation and section headings.

“They are road signs for your daily rituals — the instantly recognized symbols and icons you press, click and ogle countless times a day when you interact with your computer. But how much do you know about their origins?”

Readymag is a platform for producing and publishing a digital magazine. In this feature they pick their best of 2013.

Readymag is a platform to easily and quickly publish a digital magazine. In their newsletter they make good use of some of the typefaces that are available for their magazines, for instance Mark van Bronkhost’s Sweet Sans throughout for labels and body copy, combined with Freight Big for headlines, and supported by Nobel for text and the bright, huge numerals in their latest issue. 

Super simple one-page website for Product Club, an LA initiative to promote the local product scene with free office space and networking. Alix FB, designed by likewise Los Angeles based Matthew Butterick, has the talent to make even the most basic text look interesting, especially the italics. Bonus points for combining it with Nobel (which seems to be a popular type combination these days, but happened entirely without knowing. :)