From Wikipedia:

Sunny is an American black comedy television series created by Katie Robbins, based on the novel The Dark Manual by Irish writer Colin O’Sullivan. The series premiered on July 10, 2024, on Apple TV+.

The opening titles combine all-caps Basic Commercial for English text with TakaHand for Japanese, with tracked out News Gothic for labels. The Sunny logo uses Megazoid, with matching Kana lettering by Yosuke Ando.

The synopsis reads as follows:

Sunny stars Rashida Jones as Suzie, an American woman living in Kyoto, Japan, whose life is upended when her husband and son disappear in a mysterious plane crash. As “consolation” she’s given Sunny, one of a new class of domestic robots made by her husband’s electronics company. Though at first, Suzie resents Sunny’s attempts to fill the void in her life, gradually they develop an unexpected friendship. Together they uncover the dark truth of what really happened to Suzie’s family and become dangerously enmeshed in a world Suzie never knew existed.

Remedy Entertainment. License: All Rights Reserved.

Remedy Entertainment’s 2019 game Control takes place in a paranormal building that appears in a 1960s brutalist design – and that seems intent on making sure nothing inside gets much more modern. The game’s designers expertly reinforce that aesthetic with a limited palette of utilitarian typefaces.

Case files, research papers, and correspondence you come across are set in Linotype’s version of Akzidenz-Grotesk, Basic Commercial (the question mark is the tell tale glyph), a style favored by ‘Swiss’ design which became popular in the 1960s.

Remedy Entertainment. License: All Rights Reserved.

Basic Commercial helps convey a sense of plain, matter-of-fact, government bureaucracy.

Remedy Entertainment. License: All Rights Reserved.

The game warns players the interior of the building shifts around; pay attention to green directional signs to avoid getting lost. What better typeface for green wayfinding signs than Interstate, based on the FHWA fonts that saw wider exposure in the 1960s as the Interstate Highway System expanded.

ITC Avant Garde Gothic sees restrained use with its bold weight announcing the entry to major areas, remaining on screen even while action continues, commanding attention. It also pulls double duty, serving as the wordmark, also with restraint; just a single ligature and no alternate letterforms help give it a plain-but-unique style. While the typeface did not appear until the 1970s, its inspiration, Avant Garde magazine’s logotype, had its origins in the 1960s.

The designers even keep the typographic identity consistent in-world, and out, with both UI and HUD elements set in a mix of Interstate and Basic Commercial.

Remedy Entertainment. License: All Rights Reserved.

Wayfinding signs typeset in Interstate

Remedy Entertainment. License: All Rights Reserved.

Remedy Entertainment. License: All Rights Reserved.

ITC Avant Garde Gothic wants you to know where you are

Remedy Entertainment. License: All Rights Reserved.

HUDs keep the design aesthetic consistent with objectives & locations set in Interstate, and supporting information in Basic Commercial

Paperback edition of Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany, published by Vintage Books in May of 2001. The author’s name and the title are set in Basic Commercial Bold, and the rest of the text on the front cover is set in Basic Commercial Roman. The interior is set in ITC Berkeley Oldstyle.

Tierra Sol is a plant and handmade pots company from North Carolina. The branding and graphic identity was designed by the Mexican creative studio Menta Picante. Canopée is used for the logotype (with one of its alternate A’s) and as the main branding typeface, assisted by Gatwick for labels and Basic Commercial for information.

They created a set of mini plant starter kits with special soil for each plant type, special handmade planters and detailed instructions on how to take care of your plant.

We developed a simple and nature focused identity system. For the inspiration, we took the simplicity of the name and how nature can be, clay, cactus, soil, water, and sky colors was the base for this color palette. The icon is an abstraction of a desert landscape which, in combination with the logotype, creates a balance between simple and classic. The complementary illustrations have this carefree look to complete the whole concept.

About Kib Tea:

Nature itself is circular, full of cycles of transformation and regeneration that let us make the most of our resources again and again. At Kib, we’re harnessing the power of circularity to design new ways to work with the planet, now and for years to come.
[...] Kib’ is the Amharic word for ‘circle’, the idea at the heart of everything we do.

With a lot of illustrations and graphics, the herbal tea producer presents its catalog with a joyful and colourful atmosphere. Next to each herbal tea’s presentation, we find Basic Commercial (Linotype) Tarzana Narrow (Emigre) displayed. Osmose (Blaze Type) appears in the headings and the citations.

The whole site for VfmK Verlag für moderne Kunst GmbH uses Basic Commercial. Webdesign by GREAT (htttp://g-r-e-a-t.com).

Frankfurt agency, Fine German Design, claims their website for Cologne’s art musem may be the first German museum site to take advantage of responsive web design. And it responds in a way that I find more successful than many sites that make the responsive claim. Instead of fluidly stretching images and columns of text to any size to fit the full width of the window, the grid stays constant while shifting elements to fit at specific breakpoints, and resizing elements to reasonable presets. It’s a pleasant experience overall and allows the designers more control over the typography and visual relationships.

I only wonder why they didn’t take advantage of the known presets to make text type a bit larger at the widest column width. Also, the body text would read much better in the standard Roman weight of Basic Commercial (Linotype’s Akzidenz-Grotesk), not Light.

It is 200 years ago now since the Grimms’ Fairy Tales were published for the first time. My studio mate Frank Flöthmann (2F) spent the last couple of months on a book project which presents the tales by the Grimm brothers in a completely new way: ohne Worte – without words. I am thrilled that his comic book is finally available. This is what Frank writes on his blog:

I converted sixteen of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales into pictographic comics, using graphic symbols instead of words. The beautiful and funny book is aimed at educated adults but is suitable for their spoiled children as well. Order now from an online trader of your choosing. Or, if you consider them heartless, exploiting monopolists, attend an actual bookstore. The latter may include taking a refreshing walk, supporting local business and meeting actual people that will live happily ever after.

The book can also be ordered directly from the publisher, DuMont. You can see more images from of the book and its making on frankly.2-f.de.

Even a book without words needs a title on the cover. Frank aimed for a typographic solution that on the one hand alluded to German romanticism, but on the other matched his contemporary, unfussy and clear-cut illustration style. I was happy to be able to point him to Rostrot.

This modernized blackletter started out in 2006 as a graduation project at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Georg Seifert tried to answer the question how Fraktur typefaces would have looked like today, if they hadn’t fallen out of fashion. In Georg’s hands, the old Teutonic letterforms had to undergo the same stylistic shifts and transformations as Roman typefaces did: less ornamentation, a simplified construction, and a drastically reduced contrast. The result is a “grotesque” monolinear blackletter, Rostrot, and its “seriffed” sister style with some contrast, RosenRot. The fonts were never officially published, but come bundled with Judith Schalansky’s book Fraktur Mon Amour.

Frank slightly modified the letterforms, for he found that, at this size, Rostrot Dynamisch’s terminals looked more lively when sheared diagonally.

If Rostrot is a Fraktur Sans, RosenRot is the “Antiqua” counterpart: It is seriffed, so to speak, and exhibits some stroke contrast.

The monolinear and bare Rostrot was drawn in two flavors; “Static” and “Dynamic”. These classification terms were introduced by Indra Kupferschmid and Hans Peter Willberg in order to overcome historic and genre-specific terms like (Neo-)Classicist or Didone vs. Humanist or Garalde.

Rostrot Statisch (line 1) follows the modern form model, it is more rationalized. Lines 2–4 show the three weights of Rostrot Dynamisch, which could be described as the Blackletter equivalent to a Humanist Sans.

Identity designed by James Langdon for Motto using Twin by Mark El-khatib.