Hostilia is an independent magazine developed during a week-long workshop at Politecnico di Milano held by Jeremy Francis Leslie, founder of magCulture.

The project investigates friction as a defining condition of contemporary reality. In a landscape shaped by frictionless digital interactions, Hostilia reintroduces resistance as both editorial stance and physical experience. Built around the concept of hostile contact – the encounter between forces that generates pressure, wear, and transformation – the magazine adopts a critical position, addressing political, economic, and social imbalances.

The first issue, “Pressure“, unfolds through four stages (Accumulation, Compression, Deformation, and Breaking Point), mirroring how tensions build and eventually rupture.
Materiality becomes part of the narrative: metallic surfaces, rigid inserts and exposed binding turn the magazine into a resistant object, where contact is not neutral, but always leaves a trace.

The magazine’s objective was to convey a sense of pressure through typography and layout deformation. For instance, OT Neue Montreal Squeezed and Migra are occasionally distorted to reflect the magazine’s conceptual approach.

“Two motifs merge into one lenticular poster. The image changes depending on where you stand — there is no fixed final image, only perspectives. Cultural belonging exists in relation to context, position, and viewpoint. 400 × 600mm”

Hyperculture is the diploma project of Dabin Kim made at ABK Stuttgart. The project captures the blurring of cultural boundaries, allowing different cultures to coexist in a globalized world in a “both–and” rather than “either–or” way.

Cultural practices in East and West are explored through everyday creations, shared media, and consumption. This shows how trends move between cultures, overlap, and are interpreted differently. The practices are presented through quotes, articles, digital images, and original visuals.

Dabin Kim describes the project as follows:

The publication is read from both sides: one presents an Eastern perspective, the other a Western one. Each examines how the other culture’s practices are adopted, influenced, and often misunderstood in different contexts.

Chapter 1 focuses on Language, Chapter 2 on Food, and Chapter 3 on Industry—each from both perspectives. Chapter 4 concludes with interviews that bring both views together.

The conversations reveal that cultural identity is increasingly hybrid and fluid, shaped through consumption and digital media. While visual cultural boundaries blur, deeper social differences and experiences of belonging persist.

Looking across language, food, and industry, the West often translates cultural elements into simplified, marketable forms, while the East actively transforms and hybridizes global influences.

Hyperculture emerges as both a driver of cultural reduction and a source of creative reconfiguration – simultaneously part of the problem and part of the solution.

Designed with Solæ and OT Neue Montreal Squeezed. 232 pages, 210×297 mm

Spot is a Detroit food pop-up serving down-to-earth eats and block party vibes. Designers Evan Gendell and Alyssa Arnesen were approached to design an identity that could travel from Spot to Spot and be employed at a moment’s notice. The logo needed to embrace ephemerality and flex to announce any event that Spot might cater while still being instantly recognizable in the Detroit food scene.

Inspired by vintage techno records and vernacular typography, Evan Gendell and Alyssa Arnesen designed a revolving logo “place setting” that serves up the location and date of the next Spot on a platter. A restrained typographic palette, based on Off Type’s Neue Montreal Squeezed, and the use of black and white ground a suite of playful social animations that announce the next pop-up. The modular menu design accommodates the wide range of dish names and ingredient lists that Spot cooks up.

Check out the series of animated vignettes.

The birth of the restaurant is tied to David Chang’s Momofuku Noodle Bar in East Village, where the Fuku spicy sando debuted, going on to quickly become a cult favourite and earning its own restaurant, Fuku. Nearly a decade after it launched, the restaurant chain was ready for a design shake-up, and it reached out to branding and design agency Red Antler to show them the ropes.

When it came to the facelift, the wordmark was already dripping with brand recognition, so it only needed slight tweaks and not a complete overhaul. “We didn’t want to create a completely new mark – that didn’t feel right spiritually. When it comes to rebrands, you have to evaluate what to carry through because you’re never starting from a blank canvas,” Creative Director Devry Drosky tells us. The team chose to keep the lowercase condensed sans, and dial up the details. They got rid of the italics, and made light-handed adjustments to the characters to bring in a modern edge. “Scalability and recognition were important considerations in landing the final result,” adds Drosky. “How does the wordmark translate through signage? How does it reduce down in smaller branded moments? And does it maintain its impact? The previous mark was lacking in that impactful presence, especially at varying scales.”

The Fuku brand is all about a sense of no-nonsense honesty and this is felt in the logo – a literal chicken sandwiched between the buns. The design doesn’t leave you scratching your head, but tells you what you need to know quite simply, but effectively. “There’s a frankness and simplicity we wanted to celebrate. This attitude extends to our tone of voice, with lines like ‘take it or take it’ embracing the no-nonsense ethos of New York City,” says Drosky.

Everywhere else, the team chose to incorporate an explosion of type, pulling inspiration directly from the streets of the city, particularly downtown where David Chang first planted his roots. “We looked to the gritty charm of hand-painted awnings, event flyers, and layered urban graphics for our typographic choices and broader graphic language. Street photography also played a huge role, inspiring high-flash, textural art direction with candid captures,” Drosky explains. While the wordmark is set in Akzidenz-Grotesk BQ Condensed to echo the typography “you see on awnings all over downtown Manhattan,” the rest of brand uses OT Neue Montreal Squeezed, PP Neue Montreal, and PP Right Serif to create a dynamic, versatile type system. “The appeal of Neue Montreal is in its ability to serve both the functional and display typeface roles through its varying widths, weights and cuts. It’s culturally relevant yet timeless,” says Drosky. “PP Right Serif acts as a refined counterpoint, adding a sense of craft and sophistication that mirrors Fuku’s devotion to making delicious food. The interplay between these two typefaces creates a compelling tension, blending bold personality with polished craftsmanship.”

All the typefaces come together on the bun wrapper where stickers jostle for space. They’re pasted haphazardly on top of each other, as if put together by someone quite quickly, championing Fuku’s essence of handmade deliciousness. “We were inspired by the flyers, graffiti, and stickers that wallpaper NYC sidewalks. There’s a chaoticness to the sticker applications that harness the unpredictability of NYC,” says Drosky. “It’s also a subtle homage to kitchen culture; we thought a lot about the overarching world of David Chang, and how this could sit uniquely in that ecosystem while simultaneously existing alongside his other ventures.”