Wayfinding and branding by Re B (Reto Bürkli) and Büro 4 for an office building with two entrances: Ankerstrasse 112 and Bäckerstrasse 52 in Zürich, Switzerland.

Most of the wayfinding happens on and around the exterior of the renovated building: from stylish wayfinding panels, set in Typotheque's Jigsaw and Jigsaw Stencil to large pretzels and anchors, referencing the addresses adorning the the entrances on wall and pavement. Inside the building, Jigsaw Stencil's light weight helps visitors find their way, assisted by another small set of symbols that match the typography.

The signage panels outside look simple but classy on first sight, but on a closer look they may be as complex as one can get in wayfinding in respect to technique (embossing, debossing, panel-on-panel, vinyl lettering) and in logical thinking (different colours + technique + icon for each of the two entrances).

The multi-sensory installation Escales découvertes in Mount Royal Heritage Site, Montreal is using 3D bronze orientation maps; conical stone place-markers; and belvedere-like halts, each showcasing a specific landscape view, contextualising adjacent landscape features. The Jigsaw font family is used throughout the project through engraved, laser-cut or polished stone applications. Immersive and engaging, the project invites Montrealers and visitors to continually renew their experience of the mountain through a fuller understanding of place.

Papelote is a Czech brand of stationery, a creative studio, a shop and a workshop in the heart of Prague. Typotheque's Jigsaw and Jigsaw Stencil go hand in hand in with handwriting and bright colors in the shop's signs and price cards.

“A human-friendly digital currency wallet for multiple platforms.”

Most museums or non-profit institutions have some sort of wall for recognizing big donors. Most visitors briskly pass by the wall on their way to the real art. Things are different at the Arts Council of Princeton’s Paul Robeson Center for the Arts where sculptor Joshua Kirsch created an interactive a piece that stimulates visitors while it thanks those who helped make the institution possible.

Placed in the building’s rotunda/lobby is a motorized disk, on which are placed approximately 2000 names, loosely grouped by the first letter of the donor’s last name. Adjacent to the sculpture is a control panel with a button for each letter of the alphabet (excluding Q and X). When a viewer wants to find a particular name, he or she pushes the corresponding letter on the control panel. The disk rotates and stops at the requested letter and displays all the names corresponding to the requested letter by back-lighting them with white LEDs.

A digital schematic for the wheel shows the four styles of Jigsaw used: roman and cursive in two weights each.

Stenciled letters make sense for names which are laser cut in stainless steel. For these, Kirsch chose Jigsaw Stencil, designed by Johanna Biľak. Though stencil type is usually derived from decades-old industrial styles, I appreciate that the artist went with a modern-day typeface which better suits a contemporary institution in a brand new building. Fortunately, contemporary stencils are not as scarce as they used to be — see also Adam Cutted, FP Head Stencil, FF Signa Stencil (and Serif), and two seriffed stencil faces that take Renaissance forms and make them new: Typonine Stencil and Dala Floda.

I learned about the wheel on Metafilter where user Sys Rq calls the piece “a big ol’ Meh for everyone but the donors themselves” and “unnecessarily elaborate”. He may have a point about donor money being better spent elsewhere, but I’m not sure this wasn’t a worthy try. Donor walls are often dull (despite all the interesting things one can do with type), occupy too much space, and — as Sys Rq implies — hold no interest for anyone beyond the donors. This is none of those things. The Center addressed everything that’s wrong with a necessary evil and did it through a commissioned local artist to boot.

Tzegoh is a minimalist clothing line by Singaporean designer Tze Goh. The website, launched earlier this month, is also as minimal as it gets. Each page is merely a paragraph of text and spare, ghostly photography. It’s in this stark landscape that a typeface has the power to set the tone of a brand. For the identity and website, Thomas Manss & Company chose Johanna Biľak’s Jigsaw, one of Typotheque’s lesser-known faces that has been around since 1999 but feels as if it was released yesterday. Contemporary, austere, almost geometric but not mechanically so — it’s the perfect match for Tzegoh’s design.

Jigsaw is used as part of images on the homepage and Opinions pages, but the designers neglected to take advantage of Typotheque’s reasonably priced and easy to use webfont service for other pages, instead opting for a system font, Trebuchet MS. It looks ok, but why not go all the way?

This site was recommended by Alessandro Mingione, a reader with a cryptic but intriguing Twitter bio: “Trade Gothic by day, Fedra Sans by night”. We welcome your submissions and writing contributions. Just contact us or post to our new Facebook page. We can’t publish here every submission on this site, but if the typography is interesting and appropriate your chances are good. Plus, every submission will become part of the complete archive to be launched later this year.