Toledo Serial in use on a German poster for Endless Poetry (Spanish: Poesía sin fin), a 2016 French-Chilean drama film directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. While the film’s plot is set around 1950, designer Miro Denck embraced a late-1960s/early-1970s aesthetic, both in regard to the illustration and the type choice.

Toledo is the name used for digitizations of Trooper Serial, which in turn is a revision and expansion of a design by David Trooper, originally released around 1968 by VGC as Trooper Roman. Trooper Serial was made at Brendel / Typeshop in the 1980s.

[More info on IMDb]

enorm 06/2019 – “Make Love”

Enorm is a magazine for social change. It aims to encourage individuals by showing small steps that enable each and every individual to contribute, following the motto “The future starts with you”. In addition, it presents enormously inspiring people of action and their ideas as well as companies and projects that make life and work more sustainable and sustainable. Constructive, intelligent and solution-oriented, enorm is a journalistic print and digital project for a good life in a better world.

The magazine logo and headlines use Toledo Serial, paired with Whitman and Whitney for smaller text. The fifth image shows a spread using overprinted Adventure for quotes.

enorm 05/2019 – “Alles ist gesagt. Was tun?”

“Commissioned as part of Offset's ‘Celebrating The City’ campaign, we were asked to create something for South William Street which has been the studio's neighbourhood since the start.

We worked with 10 creative people to write and illustrate a series of articles of imagined futures and creative interpretations for South William street from a number of different angles. The results were presented in a 2 colour, 8 page broadsheet which was handed out on a single day from make-shift vendor booths. And of course there was a website, because all newspapers need a website of they want to stay relevant.” — The 100 Archive

The New Republic:

Chip Kidd, who designs book covers for Alfred A. Knopf, told me that the book appears to him to be “from around 1972.” It’s not a compliment. “For me it’s sort of like everything that I react against when I'm designing a book cover,” Kidd said. “I just don't understand why they would go with this route.” He added that, for a book like Dunham’s, he would think, “you would want to send the message that it's fresh, uncharted territory, and I just don't get that from this.”

Kidd is right on — as far as the stylistic period is concerned. Trooper Roman, which was the basis for the Toledo typeface used on this cover, was released by VGC in the early ’70s. The typeface was fairly common in phototypesetting days (see this ad for Jim Beam, a campaign for jump suits, and a Christian paperback) but virtually disappeared from use by the ’90s. This was likely due to changing fashions (high contrast, slightly wonky poster serifs gave way to Grunge and Neo-Classical type), but also because Trooper was hard to find in digital form. The availability of Toledo, a phototype follower of Trooper, alleviates that absence.

I disagree with Kidd, however, about the decision to use type like this for Dunham’s cover. I think it’s brilliant. It may not be “fresh, uncharted territory”, but it will stand out on the shelf simply because it is so clearly of another time. No other title on the “New Books” display will be like it. And, more importantly, it fits Dunham’s penchant for mid-century literature while reflecting her own offbeat personality.

The TNR piece goes on to discuss the type on the Lizzie Skurnick covers, which we’ve also covered here.

Read more about the design from CHIPS themselves.

“Familienmacher” (Family Maker) was an exhibition held at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Vienna from November 12, 2011 through March 25, 2012. Its subtitle translates to “To Hold on To, to Connect, to Get Rid Off”.

Who are you related to? Who takes the family pictures? How many of your kin are in your phone? Where do you store unloved heirlooms? Where to put the photo of the baby-bump? Whose picture to put into the frame? Does a family have a nationality? The exhibition is based on ethnographic research in the 8th and 16th district of Vienna.

Wolfram Wiedner studio created the identity and the exhibition graphics together with Johannes Lang. The exhibition interior and installations were designed by Kathrina Dankl. In 2012, “Familienmacher, Ausstellungsmachen”, an accompanying exhibition catalogue was released.

The exhibition logo is a purely typographic representation of the concept of family. The word Familienmacher is assembled of five diverse pieces, each of them set in a different and idiosyncratic typeface. None of them share a baseline, still all of them are united by the color red.

The selected typefaces include several of my favorites, many of them underused. Reporter is an energetic dry brush script from 1930s Germany. The marvelously angular Scriptek Italic is inspired by Russian Construcivism. While Goudy Sans hearkens back to the 1920s, the Bold Italic that is used here is a much younger addition. @typeentity:7718@ is a high-contrast display face from the 1960s, digitized under many names including Troover Roman and @typeentity:29655@. The last typeface does not only have the weirdest look, but also the weirdest name: Gneisenauette Black Alternate.

For everything else, the designers chose a very neutral face: Theinhardt is a revisited and refined Akzidenz-Grotesk by François Rappo.