A Land Once Magic is a tabletop role-playing game written by Viditya Voleti, edited by Charu Chandni Patel, and published by moreblueberries. The cover and interior feature the art of John Gagne and graphic design by Luna P.

During gameplay, the players get together to create a fantasy world, by drawing from a poker card deck and answering questions about the land.

Viditya tasked me with capturing the game's focus on unconventional, postmodern fantasy with the book's design. Along with Viditya, Charu and Elliot, we each contributed a bit of our cultures to the iconography for the game, which features in the covers and in the chapters, forming a flower-shaped mandala.

As a nod to a previous edition of the game (which used a font with romanesque characteristics), the font Forevs by OH no Type Co. was chosen for its alternate A inspired by Weiß-Initialen, and its flared serifs which echo the flower pattern used in the mandala. Different weights are used through out the book in titles.

Additionally, Fern by DJR is used for body text, along with Underware’s Zeitung Micro in tables and page numbers, and Dave Rowland’s Margot for its poker suit symbols.

Wolves at the Lake is a tabletop roleplaying game by Quinn Blackwell, originally uploaded in pdf format to drivethruRPG in 2022.

The Full Moon edition zine, published by Plus One Exp in both physical and digital formats, expands the original game with new mechanics, cover and full-spread illustrations by Casey Boatwright, and typography and layout by Luna P..

The all-caps logo was set in a slightly modified Lineal, designed by Frank Adebiaye (with contributions from Anton Moglia and Ariel Martín Pérez) and shared through Velvetyne. The rest of the cover was set in Warbler by David Jonathan Ross. The interior uses the previously mentioned fonts for headers, sidebars and details, while the body text uses Fern, also by DJR.

Goblin Mail is an unofficial supplement zine for the Troika! tabletop role-playing game. It was written by Sofia Ramos and illustrated by Evlyn Moreau, with Interior layout design by Luna P. Each page is typeset primarily in Fern by DJR, with titles and details set in TT2020 by Fredrick Brennan.

Scott Boms published a second expanded edition of I Take Full Responsibility, a small book produced and assembled by hand. From his description of the project:

I Take Full Responsibility collects fourteen of the most significant communications from technology company CEOs since November 2022, who, during that time, have reduced their employee bases by huge swathes. Accompanied by a personal introduction, photos, and artwork from more than ten years in tech, it’s intended to be a time capsule circumventing Silicon Valley’s short-term memory and a clear statement of fact that work will not love you back.

Risograph printed in black, bright red, sunflower, and metallic gold inks on 5 different paper stocks, its urgent message arrives enclosed within a redesigned and screen-printed closed-spine format along with laser-cut accessory prints delivered in a personalized Inter-office envelope.

Scott shared also some notes about the typography by email:

I chose Bennet Text 2 as the main typeface used throughout the book for practical reasons, such as its character set, which includes small caps and a solid range of figures. It’s also one I’ve used before with the Riso and has proven to work well with that process. As I started setting the text, I experimented with other options but kept coming back to Bennet because of its solid, authoritative feel and consistently even color. It’s made for editorial uses like this but also works well at larger sizes where its subtle details become more apparent.

Gridlite PE was originally only going to be used for the “Approved” stamp on the pink slip card because it could look authoritative while also solving a practical need when run on the laser cutter. As the design of the cover evolved and I added the original acetate layer in the first edition, it became an obvious choice as it worked really well against the other imagery and helped then connect the various pieces together.

When I was designing the pink slip and Tech CEO Bingo cards, Aglet Mono just felt right. I was going for something that wouldn't feel out of place on a business form but could also hold its own visually and pair well with type used elsewhere in the book.

The monospace form of both Gridlite PE and Aglet just seemed to make sense. I believe an early version of the cover was set in Aglet which led to me to try Gridlite PE, which ultimately stuck in the end.

The book also includes appearances by Knockout, Champion Gothic, Fern Micro, Rhody, and San Francisco. The accompanying prints add to the eclectic mix with Displace Cut and an early use of Regrets.

Cover detail

The title page, set in Bennet Text.

Pink slip and Tech CEO Bingo card, primarily set in Aglet Mono, with die cut in Gridlite, small text in Fern Micro, and heading in Champion Gothic.

Pink slip detail

An interior spread (with the first edition’s staple binding)

Interior excerpts (San Francisco used for the email text)

Interior excerpts (Rhody featured on the first page)

Bonus print, featuring Regrets and Displace Cut

Bonus print, featuring Champion Gothic. (The Risolute Press logo is Banque Gothique.)

These pages are from The Culture Keeper, the 2022 edition of the Kresge Foundation’s Eminent Artist Monograph. I was the designer, photographer, and production artist for the book.

The book tells the story of artist Olayami Dabls, whose work often uses found materials such as mirror shards and urbanite. The typography of the book really began with the blocky letters of Alfarn, which was surprisingly similar to the signage on the outside of Dabls’ African Bead Gallery. I utilized the multiple capital widths available in Alfarn, and also created my own extreme letter variations for some of the titles. In April, about midway through production, Alfarn 2 was released, which was carefully lightened a touch to open up the counters, and features a full lowercase and a few new capital glyphs. Stunned at my second instance of Alfarn’s good fortune, I re-set most of the type in Alfarn 2.

For the body text, I used Fern Text, leaning on its translational contrast to offer a friendly anchor to the wild menagerie of type and collage-like art that dominated the reading experience. I set the optical size at 14, four points larger than the text itself, which tightened the justification behaviors very effectively. Subheads in New Spirit complemented Fern’s humanist touches, and I used Skolar Sans Extended for the captions and sidebars.

I found Alfarn’s punctuation somewhat wanting, so I manually replaced each punctuation mark with Ohno Fatface. Even though Fatface doesn’t really fit the whole geometric vs. translational typography of the book, the quotation marks bounced against the hard corners of Alfarn, in the same irreverent way that the artist Dabls would use clashing colors and materials.

This book is available for free to US residents. You can order a printed copy by completing this form. The book is also available as a pdf download.

Event graphics for the book's launch party were designed by Alejandro Herrera, senior graphic designer at the Kresge Foundation, based on the book's design.

Upon learning that the African Bead Gallery would be the subject of the book, my first idea was to create a digital font that followed the cues of this iconic hand-painted sign. Then I found Alfarn, which was shockingly (and blessedly) exactly what I was thinking of.

A spread from the book, title in modified Alfarn. The photo is of a work called Iron Sticking Out Of Wood, part of the African Scripted Language Wall

Fern Variable at work, showing off the small cap numerals

An introductory page showing the use of Ohno Fatface for punctuation with Alfarn

Birdmans was a pop-up chicken restaurant in Oslo, that ran from March through September 2019. Their identity was designed by Jonathan Schubert (The Schubert Studio), using a combination of four contrasting typefaces: Clifton from 205TF is used for the logo, and in some logo variants it is paired with Fern Micro from DJR’s Font of the Month Club. For additional typography, the restaurant uses Kvetch (Love Letters) and KH Sober Draftsman (Kern + Hyde Creation Co.) – both used exclusively in capitals.

What is a mushroom? What do mushrooms mean? What do mushrooms do? What do we want from mushrooms? What do the mushrooms want? These are the questions the makers of Broccoli ask and answer in Mushroom People, a special edition, single-issue magazine for mycophiles. Artists, writers, and fungi enthusiasts from around the world explore mushroom fact and fantasy, collecting specimens of all kinds: the strange and familiar, beautiful and ugly, toxic and healing, ephemeral and enduring.

The Front Lines of the War is a spoken word sound art album made with a resonance hum of civil conflict, poetry, and experimental sound. This album is rooted in personal connections to contested landscapes and marginalized communities, as it explores the ways that global systems implicate us all in vectors of destruction and conflict, in which “everyone is on the front lines of the war.”

Scott Ezell — spoken words, photographs
Will Klingenmeier — sound
Gor Jihanian — typography. Typeset in Fern Micro by DJR
Mastered by Taylor Deupree at 12k

Shown below is a video we made to a section of one of the poems. There’s another video in which we’re discussing the stories and production ethos behind the project.

Song Exploder is a podcast and Netflix series where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Each episode is produced and edited by host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway in Los Angeles.

The website typography combines Futura (Adobe) and Fern Micro (DJR). Illustrations by Carlos Lerma.

This 44-page mini-hymnal for the Christmas season is equal parts practical songbook and objet d’art. As this project was being conceived and designed, David Jonathan Ross’ Font of the Month Club delivered two typefaces (Bradley and Fern Micro) which perfectly fit the incunable/private press movement energy of the piece. Providential!

The books were risograph printed with teal and bright red inks by Clatter Press in Columbus, Ohio (a print studio co-owned by the designer). Bradley and Fern stand up really nicely to the inky and chromatic riso process.

Moonshine is a collaborative print project by graphic designers Shiva Nallaperumal and Henry Becker. It is a series of prints where the artists use visual elements (typography, cartography, emblems et al.) from books and documents from the 19th and the early 20th century that have now lost relevance to the original contexts in which they were created in. These previously unrelated elements are given new contexts when collaged together, with the poster format and the overall style tying them together into a series.

Typography was an integral element in bridging the conteporary approach with late 19th century visual cues of the project. We chose Brevier Viennese as the primary display face for its relevance to the time period we are concerned with.

For primary body text we requested David Jonathan Ross to let us use his unreleased typeface Fern. We used the RE (Reading Edge™, a series of typefaces by Font Bureau optimized for reading on small sizes in low resolution environments) version of Fern for both web and print applications.

The ‘M’ of Brevier Viennese was slightly modified to arrive at the final logotype.

Detail of the web typography (actual size)