Hotel Love is a novel described as “a creepy love story with AI” written by Austrian author Petra Piuk and published by Leykam Buchverlag.

The design, full of editorial details, was carried out by Vienna-based Sellerie Studio, who developed a series of lipstick lettering, as well as the layout and typesetting of the book. The designers comment on the book design (translated from German):

It was clear from the very first pencil sketches that we wanted to package this dystopian love story in a way that was as toxic as possible.
Glossy lip service: Our design “Read My Lips” (or not ...) went through several stages of development before it arrived at the (forest) bottom of reality — fortunately without exceeding its best-before date.

The typesetting uses MT Baskerville for the main text, Violeta for titles and highlights, and Input Mono Compressed for the ISBN on the cover and the book’s sections.

Abejorros (“bumblebee”) is a free magazine about popular music and Chilean folklore. The project is developed by Colectivo Abejorros (IG), a multidisciplinary group of four people passionate about local music and traditions. It’s made up of musicians Miguel Molina and Claudio Constanzo, sociologist Carolina Adaros, and designer Missael Godoy. Shown here is the first issue. The project envisages a quarterly publication.

The typesetting uses mainly Violeta for the general texts, together with Violeta Jardinera for titles, drop caps, and magazine logo. Simona is used for specific titles of some sections. Illustrations by Nicolás Astorga.

A pdf of the complete magazine (in Spanish) is available for download.

Note the fleuron, part of Violeta glyph set, which represents the vine leaf.

Note Simona’s use of uppercase swashes.

This issue includes an interview about the design of the book Por la Güeya del Matadero, published in 2011, in which early versions of Mazúrquica and Berenjena fonts were used.

Every year the music blog New Commute asks graphic designers from all over the world to make some artwork depicting their top five albums released in the passing year. For this project, I scanned in some of my personal matchbook collection to rework my favorite albums into fake, long forgotten matchbooks. Using a wide array of my personal favorite typefaces from across eras I was able to put together this depiction of my favorite albums.

Book presentation day at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino

The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino (Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art) has published this book titled Tramas. Laboratorio transdisciplinar de debates interculturales (“Wefts. Transdisciplinary Laboratory for Intercultural Debates”). It brings together the work of nine indigenous people who participated in a scholarship and internship program offered by the museum in collaboration with the Corporación Nacional de Desarrollo Indígena (National Corporation for Indigenous Development).

The main editorial challenge of the project was to give unity to very different texts, both in terms of content and form: there are short and poetic texts (with and without images), essays, academic texts, and content such as a catalog of artworks (photographic documentation). In addition, a clear distinction had to be made between the projects of the fellowship and the internship.

The design proposal of the book is articulated by a simple geometric pattern in two colors that define the division between the first part (scholarship: magenta) and the second part (internship: cyan). The binding is with an exposed spine, which allows a 180° opening and gives the opportunity to use the double page at its maximum expression. Thus, we draw a permanent pattern that separates the book thematically and literally since it divides and articulates the double page. We used the Brandon Text sans serif family, the font of the museum's visual identity, and the Violeta serif family with its variant Violeta Jardinera.

The pattern dividing the double page is drawn on the exposed spine and visually separates the two parts of the book.

The table of contents plays with the vertical axis that divides the entire book.

Presentation of Part One: American Futures Scholarship. Later, a similar pattern in cyan and black introduces the second part of the book.

The book uses the classic resource of the table of contents on the cover.

Amanecimos sobre la palabra (“We dawned on the word”) is an anthology of young and recent Venezuelan poetry, selected and prefaced by Oriette D’Angelo. Published in 2016 by Team Poetero from Caracas, the book was designed by Juan F. Mercerón from Santiago de Chile.

The typesetting was done with early versions of Violeta, for the poem layout, and Lira Sans, for the headlines and introductory text, both families published by Quintana-Font. Lira Sans was used in the Bold version, combined with the Italic of National Bold, published by Klim Type Foundry.

Note the mixed types: Lira Sans Bold with National Bold Italic.

The cover shows two weights of Mazúrquica family set in all caps, with the OpenType feature Titling alt-Interlocking caps activated.

The book Trafülkantun. Cantos cruzados entre Garrido y Curilem (“Trafülkantun. Cross songs between Garrido and Curilem”) is the result of a research by Laura Jordán, PhD in Musicology, and Andrea Salazar, PhD in Linguistics, on the intellectual relationship, and collaboration between Pablo Garrido (Chilean musicologist) and Juan de Dios Curilem (Mapuche musicologist). The book presents the research, a critical edition of unpublished texts by Garrido, and seven traditional Mapuche songs (ülkantun) – originally compiled by Curilem, which are presented in detail in the third part of the book, which comprises scores, original lyrics in Mapudungún (Mapuche language), Spanish translation, and a QR code that leads to a contemporary interpretations of each song.

The typesetting was done with an assorted palette of type families, which share conceptual and formal relationships, note the “reverse contrast” modulation featured in Mazúrquica, Modérnica, Violeta and Cerchán; it may also be of interest to know that Violeta Parra is the most important and outstanding Chilean musician, poet and artist of the last century, and that one of her songs is called “Mazúrquica Modérnica”.

These type families are combined in a fluid manner for the different text typologies deployed. The main titles are composed with Mazúrquica, the subtitles and margin notes with Modérnica, the main text and some headlines with Violeta, the initial letter with Violeta Jardinera, and a detail of the edition is that we use Chercán to compose the words written in Mapudungún, which are abound in the text. Finally, we used an unpublished Condensed version of Lira Sans to set a table rich in information.

Here you can appreciate the combination of Violeta and Chercán within the main text. The Mapudungun word ülkantun (third line) is set in Chercán.

Lira Sans Condensed Medium set in 7.8/9 pt. Note tabular lining figures in use.

This page shows some details of the typeface families’ glyph sets. Note the initial letter, the M swash, the use of small caps, and the different kinds of figures (small caps, old style, and superscript). Note also the relationship between the main column set in Violeta and the marginal notes set in Modérnica.

The scores are composed with a musical notation drawn especially for this edition as part of Violeta’s glyph set. Note the “reverse contrast” in the treble clef and 3/4.

The colophon is divided by a drawing of a Cultrún, a traditional Mapuche drum.

Parágrafos de gráfica y escritura 4 (“Paragraphs of Graphics and Writing 4”) is the debut publication of Pacientes Editores, a small publishing house that produces low print-run publications by hand.

The edition was limited to 78 copies, each numbered and signed by the author, and printed on bond paper using a black and white laser printer. The cover is made of green flyleaf paper. The text was composed using the Violeta, Violeta Jardinera, and Chercán typeface families.

The text was originally published in Suelo Americano (2003), a magazine of the School of Architecture of the ARCIS University in Santiago de Chile. In this article, Professor Rivera-Scott shares with us his readings and critical views on the books he reads, from a perspective that is sensitive to editorial design and typography.

For Spanish readers: El suplemento literario La palabra Quebrada, del puerto de Valparaíso, publicó en marzo del 2022 una reseña sobre esta edición llamada Honrar el diseño: Parágrafos de Gráfica y Escritura de Hugo Rivera-Scott, escrita por Laura Flores Moraga.

Publishing house logo

The Colección Papeles Ocasionales (“Occasional Papers Collection”) aims to bring together a series of different texts written by visual artist and professor Hugo Rivera-Scott throughout his career.

The text begins with a large initial letter from Violeta Jardinera, featuring two bird pictograms from Chercán’s glyph set.

In the first paragraph, the author recalls a fruit tree from his childhood that was visited by many little birds, among them the Chercán. This suggested the use of pictograms in several instances of the typesetting —as can be seen in the footnotes.

Another detail of the edition is that all the names of people mentioned in the text (set in Violeta), were composed with Chercán.

Towards the end, we included an index of names.

A detail from the top of the colophon, which is the page where the author numbered and signed each copy.

This book is a compilation of poems submitted by Venezuelan poets to the II. Rafael Cadenas National Youth Poetry Competition. In 2018, it was awarded an Honorary Appreciation in the Best Book Design from all over the World competition held in Leipzig, Germany. The two typeface families used in this book, Lira Sans and Violeta, had not been officially published to that date.

The following is the jury’s appraisal:

The cover beckons with an expanse of enticing, intense salmon-pink. Printed on it: the title, compactly in ink blue. The barcode – usually a tiresome addition – adorns the spine here as traversing lines that spill over to the front and back. On the inside cover, a truncated portrait of the writer Rafael Cadenas, whose gaze seems to watch over the contributions for the National Young Poetry Competition in Venezuela. The poems by 26 individualists have individual forms as well – their verse lengths, structures, peculiarities of typesetting: contour type, italicisation, indents, unusual word spacing. Which makes it tricky for the designer. The name of the competition is presented as a vignette, together with double page numbering, at the top on the left side of the left-hand pages – this defines the double page as an open space. The font is chosen particularly carefully, used for the first time ever in this book. The serifs are designed as fluent recollections of a quill pen; the structure of an Antiqua is alive in the grey tone – and its bold-fine style is borrowed from the Wild West versions of the Egyptienne typeface. This is noticeable on the rounded minuscules, but is even more striking in the bold capitals where the low lines lie horizontally. Writing, book printing, Latin America – these features are breathed into the font modestly yet confidently. The book designer casts a spell on the competition documentation, turning it into a document of graphic poetry.

The inside cover features a portrait of the Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas, who gives his name to the contest.

Published in a run of 50 copies by Ediciones Penal Largo from Santiago de Chile, Copa África presents a series of stories about the national soccer teams competing at the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations:

Rather than just a guide, we wanted to talk about teams, competitions and players that we never saw live, but that we enjoyed through lousy pirated broadcasts, photos, videos and old magazines. The thirty-second edition of this tournament offered us an excuse to document and imagine African football and the different Africas that we have in mind.

Risograph printed at Taller Cerro, Valparaíso. All text is set in different weights and styles of Violeta.