Dutch furniture company Noteborn provides luxury made-to-measure wardrobes. Their visual identity was overhauled by Studio BOB. The company’s pre-existing logo, set in FF Fago, is now paired with the main brand typeface Silvana Display Regular and Italic. The Regular style of DIN Next is used for details and body copy.

Creative direction, art direction: Alessia Sistori, Lilly Friedeberg

When living and working in Gent, Belgium, my partner Catherine Dal and I ran a tiny studio called Dorp & Dal (Village & Valley). Having started out as an art gallery, the studio remained firmly with one leg in the cultural realm, making brochures, books and leaflets for theater and art events, a gallery, and the Arts Department of the City of Gent (English spelling: Ghent).

Around the turn of the century we did about five issues of the Arts Department’s yearly newspaper and listings. On a visit to Prague during that time we had discovered the work by Czech type designer and virtuoso wood engraver František Štorm of Storm Type Foundry, and loved it. Štorm is a type history buff, but also displays a very personal view on letterforms. He produces work that is thorough, yet baroque and often theatrical.

The leading face on the 2000–2001 front page is Štorm’s slab-serif Farao, a whimsical variation on the theme of modern face-meets-Scotch-Roman. The supporting role went to Serapion, probably his wackiest and most personal variation on the Renaissance oldstyle. Text face is Ole Schäfer’s FF Fago.

This site addresses complex issues related to Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama as well as Buddhism in general.

The general typeface for the site is FF Mark – sometimes also FF Mark Narrow is used. For headings Skolar PE Semibold is used. The logo uses Skolar paired with FF Mark.

Since the vast majority of academic writing that uses Sanskrit is conducted in transliteration, another typeface, FF Fago, is used for those (few) articles.

See also the English-language sibling of this website on Fonts In Use.

This site addresses complex issues related to Tibet, Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama as well as Buddhism in general.

The general typface for the site is OurType’s Meran and FF Dax. The typeface of the logo is Roboto. Since the vast majority of academic writing that uses Sanskrit is conducted in transliteration, another typeface, FF Fago, is used for those articles and is paired with OurType’s Fresco.

There is also a microsite that introduces a “lost dialogue” between Tibetan Buddhism, the XIVth Dalai Lama and modern art, together with an interview by Louwrien Wijers with the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. This microsite uses Monitor and pairs it with Tiina for headers.

Inner sleeve and cover of 12-inch vinyl

Rear of 12-inch vinyl

Front of 12-inch vinyl

Rear of CD

Inside of CD

Front of CD

The X Games in Munich, an extreme sport competition, uses Garage Gothic for all of its headlines.

Rutschi AG – one of the leading providers in Switzerland of visual display systems – commissioned Studio CRR to design a visual language for a new sub-brand focussing on the distribution and sale of adhesive decoration foils in large as well as small quantities.
Studio CRR helped Rutschi AG to capitalise on these resources, as well as to respond to a growing demand from a previously un-tapped customer base, by developing the sub-brand, Nettofolien. Studio CRR drafted a refreshing corporate design, utilizing the visual codes of sales to generate a precise and surprising visual image for the brand.

studiocrr.com

I always felt that Bello Words would provide an excellent ready-made basis for a design system – one that isn’t too corporate, but that communicates on a more personal, almost chummy level. 

Last week German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau had to declare itself insolvent. It’s not a small local paper as the name might suggest but a nationwide one with a long tradition, and for many the message did not come as a total surprise. There were rumors that “the FR” as we call it, was in trouble for a while already.

I like this paper a lot, especially after its thorough redesign by TiedgeDulfaqar in 2007. Almost two years ago I wrote a post for this blog about it, but never published it because my photos were so poor. Of course I didn’t get around to make better ones. Now facing the potential end of my favorite newspaper, I’ll post it anyway. For those who don’t want to read it all but rather discuss the current state of newspapers, please jump to the end of the article.

Comparison of old (left) and new (right) design in 2007. The former headline face was Linotype Compatil, now Farnham and Fago. Click to enlarge. (Photo fontblog.de)

In 2007, the masses were in uproar and I was also skeptical when Frankfurter Rundschau was the first nationwide German newspaper to change its format from traditional broadsheet to the half as big tabloid format. This was introduced in the course of a major redesign and restructuring, and those are always difficult to get regular readers to approve. All changes, how tiny and for the good they might be, are a bad thing for the inured eye. Hardly anyone spoke about the excellent, improved typography and the clear, unraveled layout. Most concerns heard were about the newspaper not to be taken seriously anymore in the smaller format, with rich use of photos, graphics and four-color printing throughout. Is this correlation still true — the bigger the format the more respectable the newspaper?

Size comparison of common German newspapers. Click to enlarge.

Coincidentally I started traveling a lot around the time of the redesign and I learned to really love the smaller format, the shorter articles, distributed over five narrow columns, with cross headings easy to grasp, quotes and graphics breaking up the gray. This all sped up the process of quickly informing myself. I guess very few read every article in a paper word for word. We rather scan a whole spread, look at pictures, read headlines and captions, check info boxes and tables. Of course, a newspaper should still be something you choose based on quality of content and journalism (Frankfurter Rundschau is said to be liberal as opposed to its more conservative local counterpart Frankfurter Allgemeine). But I can’t negate being a visual designer. So here, I admit it, I read Frankfurter Rundschau because of Farnham.

Designed by Christian Schwartz and published in 2004, Farnham is a Rational typeface based on the work of German-born punch-cutter Johann Fleischmann. It combines open, legible forms with peppy sharp details and some compelling ball terminals. Generous notches where straight lines meet curves are supposed to act as ink-traps in small sizes but become striking in headlines, which shape a newspaper’s face most considerably. Although the family consists of 25 fonts, including very readable text styles, only the Display variants are used for headlines, subheads and occasional quotes — the Bold, Regular and Light for news, and the Italics for the op-eds and opinion pages. (The typeface plays an even more prominent role in the iPad edition of the paper.)

All body copy is set in Charter, a highly legible family designed in 1987 by Matthew Carter for low-resolution output and other demanding printing conditions. It is less refined than Farnham but partners well with the headline face since both have square serifs and share the same general proportions and form model.

As a third counterpoise to the two serifs FF Fago is used for less formal, but “gripping” headlines in the sports and magazine section, but also for shorter reports, deck, boxes and side notes. The calm, economical humanist sans by Ole Schäfer from 2000 is a good pick for newsprint and small sizes. I once set a book in Fago and was not happy with the outcome. It is almost too loosely spaced and narrow for sharp offset printing in regular reading sizes. Here though, even the dense TV guide, stock prices and compact, all-caps headlines stay legible. The typeface’s open, regular forms are a good compromise between “stiff” and “informal” and complement the more serious, newspaper-ish style of Farnham and Charter well. All three together make for a contemporary and elegant look of the paper.

To conclude a note on the very top of the newspaper: the masthead. Unchanged for years, it remains set in an iconic customized version of Memphis Bold Condensed, for which there’s no digital retail font available. The closest alternative is Karnak Condensed Black, the analogue design by Ludlow.

Back to today and the sad news. Being the target group for this paper — the “young, female”, educated, flexible, independent, globally thinking, liberal academics — I have to ask myself why I let it die. I could afford a subscription of the print edition but have none (I’m hardly at home). I could buy single issues at the newsstand but don’t (I hardly get to newsstands). I’m online and read from screens almost all the time, but only bought their iPad edition twice (it’s really good, I wrote a post about it too). It’s not Frankfurter Rundschau’s fault, I don’t read any printed newspaper anymore. The only thing that makes me feel a tiny bit less horrible about this is that I did not contribute the waste of an enormous amount of paper.

But many of us read more than ever before in our lives. So what do we read? For current information, I have to admit that websites, social media, and read-later services won me over. For all other content, I still love books.

What about you? When did you last buy a printed newspaper?

The Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers’ Welfare Association) is one of Germany’s leading charitable organizations. Simon Zirkunow is the designer of the annual reports for their local office in Schwäbisch Hall. For the 2009 edition, he divided the title of the publication into two halves and placed them on the front and the back of the cover. The reader is invited to merge the text back together. By doing so, the brochure forms a heart – which is also the logo of this non-profit organization.

The font in use is Ole Schäfer’s FF Fago Bold. Fago is the corporate typeface of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt, and is also used on their website.

Wasn't ever a huge fan, but found FF Fago pleasantly readable on this outdoor educational gallery at the site of the Berlin Wall.

Most of the outdoor interpretive timeline at the site of the Berlin Wall is very well done (many steps above the haphazardry of the Checkpoint Charlie museum down the street). The large panels that line both sides of Friedrichstrasse are clearly typeset with thoughtful linebreaks, spacing, and layout.

Strangely, at one end of the display they chose to set the English portion of the text in Quay Sans. What results is an unintended but perfect comparison of good and mediocre type design — at least for this purpose: quick reading of short to mid-range texts from more than an arm's-length distance.

FF Fago's shapes are balanced and well proportioned (barring the strangely narrow 'C', which Spiekermann tells me is common in German faces). There are no distracting quirks. Its counters are open.

In contrast, ITC Quay Sans suffers from closed counters, a few awkward strokes that unexpectedly jerk into straight lines, and a tiny, floating @ sign. It's also out of fashion – a very ’70s–’80s design, with its flared endings.

Quay Sans certainly isn't awful — but standing in front of those panels last week, it was easy to see why Fago works better here.