Home office, forced by the corona crisis, has radically changed our behavior as commuters. We settled down. With Dezentralschweiz (“decentralized Switzerland”), historian and spatial planner Paul Schneeberger, and geographer/urbanist Joris Van Wezemael wrote a book for planners, politicians, and anyone interested in urban planning and the evolution of settlements. The book was published by Edition Hochparterre in 2021.

The concept and design is made by design agency TGG Hafen Senn Stieger, using Jost Hochuli’s Allegra in combination with FS Brabo by Fernando Mello.

ABC – Geschichte und Form der lateinischen Schrift
ABC – History and Form of the Latin Script
ABC – Histoire et forme de l’écriture latine

Why do our letters look the way they do? Their original shapes have resulted from the interaction of writing material, writing speed and aesthetics. The alphabet used by the Romans changed depending on the writing material (stone, chisel, papyrus, parchment, writing tube, quill) and also over time. Since Gutenberg, books are no longer written by hand but printed, and since the invention of the typewriter at the end of the 19th century, people in business and administration no longer write but type. Finally, digitization has once again significantly reduced private writing by hand, but has made many typefaces available to everyone.

Based on Hans Eduard Meier’s standard work The development of writing, the editorial team, Rudolf Barmettler, Roland Stieger and Rupert Kalkofen, has completely revised the book, supplemented and expanded it according to the latest scientific findings. The new publication (in German, English and French) gives an overview of the development of the Latin script from the origin of the Latin characters, their changes through the centuries to the current state of digital fonts as well as the latest trends.

122 illustrations demonstrate this development and are commented on.

92 pages; 20×29,7 cm; Swiss paperback.
VGS Verlagsgenossenschaft St. Gallen

From the portfolio website of design studio Dornig:

In 2005, the Hilti Art Foundation was opened in Vaduz as an annex to the Liechtenstein Museum located there. It is home to the art collection of the Hilti family and includes works from classical modernism to current art trends.

In close collaboration with Uwe Wieczorek – the curator of the collection and the exhibitions – four publications have been produced so far, including the comprehensive collection catalogue in 2 volumes in 2019/20. A particular challenge was the alternating use of coated paper (illustrations of works) and uncoated paper (texts). For a small part of the edition, a high-quality slipcase was also made by hand.

For covers and interior, designer Kurt Dornig paired Jost Hochuli's Allegra – used in particular for volume 2, Art from 1950 to the Present – with Novel by Christoph Dunst.

The book Der erste Eindruck zählt! (“The first impression counts!”) by Sabrina Öttl is a practical guide for those who want to learn the art of typography in all its details.

Translated from the website of publisher Hermann Schmidt:

Sabrina Öttl introduces you to the effects of typography and how to use it in a competent and practical manner. It conveys know-how on legibility and readability, guides you through the jungle of typefaces, sensitizes you to fine differences and gives you selection criteria at hand.

Der erste Eindruck zählt! Das Handwerk der Typografie verstehen und anwenden
Pages: 160
Size: 17.2×24.5 cm

The book is available from VGS Verlagsgenossenschaft St. Gallen. They describe the book as follows (translated):

Jost Hochuli’s new publication deals with the St. Gallen typographer Max Koller (1933–2018). He shows Koller's work in words and pictures, Koller's typographic ‘handwriting’ through numerous publications, private prints and advertising. Koller also taught at the Schule für Gestaltung in St. Gallen. In Buchgestaltung in St. Gallen Roland Früh attests to Koller’s “intuition and sense of the right thing, away from dogmatic discussions. Convincing and timeless they [the works] are, despite their functionality, [...] never boring – on the contrary. They always, and again and again, appear surprisingly fresh.”

For the typography, Hochuli used his own Allegra.

Design of the Notre-Dame (re)construction site palisade. Signage and information graphics. Allegra is used throughout in various sizes and weights.

Every year on a weekend in November, around 100 exhibitors present their works and products at the Potentiale in Feldkirch, Vorarlberg. The Potentiale festival offers a platform for designers to present their works to the public. The focus of the 2017 edition was on typography.

Jost Hochuli and Roland Stieger, two renowned typographers from the close-by St. Gallen in Switzerland, presented at this occasion a booklet named Das Alphabet der guten Nachbarschaft (“The Alphabet of Good Neighbourhood”), which demonstrates their appreciation for the Austrian Vorarlberg region. The booklet was conceived and designed by Jost Hochuli, with texts written by Lena Hopp. It was published in the Reihe Ostschweiz and is available from Verlagsgenossenschaft St. Gallen.

The campaign for the Nachbarschaft project at Potentiale was designed by Alltag. Just like the booklet itself, it uses Jost Hochuli’s typeface Allegra.

The cover shows the river Rhine which marks the border between Vorarlberg (Austria) and St. Gallen (Switzerland).

Table of contents, title page

The headlines on the left are reproduced from a poster for the 1919 referendum when Vorarlberg voted whether they wanted to join Switzerland. The typefaces are Schmale Herold, a bold condensed Etienne with manicules, and Boutique.

From Sabrina Öttl's website, describing her bachelor thesis project that went on the win the Red Dot Award, among other things:

Type is language visualized. Every day we encounter information made out of letters that are then combined to words in different media. In this wealth of information, those things that are specially differentiated stand out. Therefore, typography becomes the balancing act between design and communication.

“Matter of opinion – about readability and the details in typography” is about analyzing the aspects of microtypography that affect the readability of printed text as well as the design possibilities that arise out of them. For this purpose, different theses from different designers are put in relation. Hence a grading system for ideal qualitative font selection – besides subjective or contextual circumstances – was developed. This thesis demonstrates that font selection alone is not what matters most for optimum reception of a text. Typography is a craft and requires knowledge, proficiency, sense and experience of its practitioners. The practical part consists of a specimen book that is put together using the criteria of the theoretical part. This thesis does not only provide knowledge about typography but also has practical relevance and provides some orientation in the multitude of available fonts.

The main typefaces used for the book design are Nils Thomsen’s Pensum Pro (TypeMates) and Jost Hochuli’s abc Allegra (abc Litera). Ansichtssache presents many other fonts, too. Among the ones that are prominently visible in the featured images are Carol Twobly’s Adobe Caslon (Bold Italic, with swash caps) and Michael Hochleitner’s Ingeborg Fat.

For Krawanker, Edition Krill for the first time left the book design to an external designer, and gave a carte blanche to Jost Hochuli. In the resulting publication, the actual content is separated from paratexts like title, dedication, imprint etc. through the color of the selected paper grades. Further, it is the first time that Hochuli’s own Allegra was put to use. The typeface will be commercially available soon.

52 pages, schoolbook soft cover (“Schulbuchbroschur”) sewn with black thread, two colored endpapers, 168×280 mm — editionkrill.at

The book includes three etchings by Markus Orsini-Rosenberg.

Detail: Pages start with a bold initial in the same size. They end with a bold page number. Latter is not assigned a fixed position on the page, but rather a fixed distance from the last line of the column.

A closer look at this early version of Allegra.