The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in collaboration with design studio Gretel, rebuilt its identity with the goal of putting the institution in direct conversation with the city that surrounds it. Typography is the primary device for achieving this. The type palette mainly works on two levels: outside-and-inside, or community-and-institution.

Inspired by Philadelphia’s rich visual texture of storefronts, street vendors, and murals, the vernacular type palette brings the voice of Philly into the museum and injects the identity system with contrast and spontaneity. The current library is curated (exemplified by the likes of Shatter, Cooper Black, and Balloon), but it is designed to continue growing over time. Each of these display typefaces can be used on various seasonal activations, or specifically assigned to exhibitions or departmental roles. ITC Pioneer was used for the recent exhibition The Time is Always Now, a survey of contemporary Black and African diasporic figurative art. Purple Haze is the designated typeface for PMA Members, and Megazoid is used for PMA Kids.

On the other hand, the institutional typographic voice serves an evergreen role: echoing the museum’s classical character while embodying Philadelphia’s industrial sensibility. The core typeface, Fairmount Serif—named for the Fairmount neighborhood—was custom-drawn by Ryan Bugden after a study of Philadelphia’s typographic history. Searching for a balance between the industrial structure of 1930s American sans-serifs and a classical features brought Hess Neobold forward as a key reference. Its designer Sol Hess attended PMSIA—the precursor to the museum—and later succeeded Frederic Goudy as Philadelphia-based Lanston Monotype’s type director. Fairmount Serif evolves the Hess Neobold model while incorporating more contemporaneous industrial cues. It remains relatively neutral alongside the museum’s broad palette of display faces while providing a distinct, authoritative voice of its own. Fairmount Serif was also used as a starting point in rendering the various institutional logos.

For the more workhorse level, Klarheit Grotesk serves as the museum’s body text typeface. It is set at small sizes across branding, materials, signage, and exhibition text.

See more images in Gretel’s case study.

Mockups of exhibition catalogs

Banners.

Seasonal program.

The first illuminated characters, primarily created for big-city entertainment enterprises, consisted of electric bulbs arranged to form the outlines of letters. BVH BDot imitates this idea and is a perfect fit for KOSMOLINO, the children’s program of Theater KOSMOS in Bregenz, Austria.

From the website of designer Anuschka Fink (translated from the German):

Hubert Dragaschnig once said:
“A theater production requires many different stars – whether it’s the office, administration, stage design, music, acting, directing, technical crew, wardrobe, makeup, etc. – and when all of these serve the same sky, namely the author and the play, a cosmos emerges.”

Inspired by this, I designed a graphic concept for both Kosmodrom and Kosmolino. The two visual identities were meant to share similarities while still remaining distinct and striking. The stars – or the light – of the stage backdrop became a key design element. Reduced to a single “dot,” it symbolizes the stars of the theater cosmos.

Jameel Arts Centre is an independent institution dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art to the public and engaging communities through learning, research and commissions. Founded and supported by Art Jameel, the Centre is located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Every year, they organise a Career Day:

This second iteration of Creative Careers Days, titled You Can’t Have Art Without…, is dedicated to showcasing the multiple roles that can contribute to the growth of the arts ecosystem. Discover how you can apply your core interests from business, accounting and law to humanities, social studies and languages, as well as fine and performing arts to the creative industries.

They realize a sub-identity for every of these events. For this year, they chose to work with BVH BLine and BVH BDot, apparently with matching lettering for the Arabic. Their standard typefaces are Greta Text (with Arabic) and Graphik (with Arabic).

To mark the 50th anniversary of the social institution FoyerBasel, Studio von Aarburg was commissioned to design a new visual identity that appeals to both referring organisations and young women. This includes a new logo, colour scheme and images. They designed some brochures but the identity is mainly developped over the website, coded by Arteria. They worked exclusively with the combination of BVH BLine and BVH BDot, the dots materializing the connections between people.

FoyerBasel has been in existence since 1973, providing residential care for girls and young women with psychiatric disorders. From the outset, the institution’s working methods have been based on the non-hierarchical interaction of social education, psychology and psychiatry.

In 2007, an exhibition in three parts was organized around the work of André Baldinger and Philippe Millot. The exhibition, named Ping-Pong, Échange visuel presented a selection of their work from the last ten years. From type design to signage, through visual identity or the design of books and posters or scenography, their work covers a wide spectrum of visual expression and is regularly the subject of publications, awards and distinctions.

The exhibition was shown at Ecole régionale des beaux-arts de Besançon (ERBA; now known as L’Institut supérieur des beaux-arts de Besançon), ESAD d’Amiens, and Bibliothèque universitaire du Havre.

They used BVH BDot as the main typeface, to evoke ping pong balls, accompanied from time to time by BVH Eiffel Level.

Exhibition invitation

exhibition bookmark

On the 14th of June 2023, bvh type hosted an event at Floréal Belleville in Paris with the entire team to celebrate the launch of our type foundry and the unveiling of our latest major project: the new visual identity for the city of Chaumont, for which we created a complete type family, Dina Chaumont Text and Dina Chaumont Display.

To mark the occasion, we designed a range of goodies, postcards, stickers, tote bags and silkscreen posters using Dina Chaumont Display and BVH BDot. We took possession of the venue by printing type on A4 and A3 and pinning it up everywhere. Every 15 minutes, the text display on the large yellow wall was changed, line by line, as an evolving implementation of the typeface. We also displayed A4 compositions in the window, playing with the pictograms.

In the basement, bvh type showed an animation of Dina Chaumont Display explaining herself. This short film – created by Bettina Comte, with original music by Hugues Sanchez – was followed by the making of the project and an animation showing the evolution of research into the letter a and the A4 mascot.

Back in 2013, Marseille was designated as the European Capital of Culture, a label coveted by all European Union cities. A place of intense economic and cultural exchanges between the two shores of the Mediterranean, Marseille occupies a special place in France. The event reduced the distances in the territory, bringing Arles, Salon-de-Provence, Martigues, Aix-en-Provence, Aubagne, and Istres closer together. The partners were committed to creating a large scale, internationally renowned cultural event that promotes the cultural identities of the region through a dialogue between Europe and the Mediterranean. This project aimed to bring together all relevant stakeholders, producing lasting impacts on the cultural, economic, urban, and social aspects of the territory, with the goal of enhancing its international appeal and visibility.

Lyon-based graphic designer Thomas Serrière was in charge of creating the identity for the event. He worked on various mediums, from posters to badges, from signage to flyers, to cover the whole event.

From Thomas Serrière’s Behance page:

The identity is based on a typographical system. I designed a complete visual language in order to provide the maximum versatility and expression across every channel, format or material. The typeface was developed with André Baldinger, adapting his BVH BDot in which we introduced little “diamonds”. The MP2013 logo itself consists of a very tiny hyphen, linking all the places, events, dates of the capital year.

The logo combines BVH BLine and FF DIN Round. Some applications additionally use FF DIN.

Poster designed by Wout de Vringer in 2022, contributing to the poster exhibition shown on the occasion of the AGI 2022 Congress held in Trieste, Italy. This work is named Together.

Graphic designer Götz Gramlich has chosen BVH BDot to typeset his greeting cards for 2023. He made a deck of 35 joyful and playful cards, some with iridescent hot foil stamping, embossing, punching, to wish a round and colorful new year for 2023. BVH BDot is the perfect match to play around circles and explore all its graphical shapes!

Two hybrid editions, about Fric-Frac, a French comedy in five acts from 1937. One edition offers a facsimile reprint of La Petite Illustration from 12 June 1937, accompanied by two flip books. The other edition is a series of boxes containing flip books with images from Maurice Lehman’s 1939 film Fric-Frac, starring Arletty, Michel Simon and Fernandel. These editions are conceived and designed by SpMillot, for Éditions Cent Pages.

Du&Ma is an agency dedicated to exhibition design and works in the fields of museography. They called upon the graphic designer Toan Vu-Huu to rethink their graphic identity. He used the BVH BLine and BVH BDot in duo, to represent the duality and the plurality of missions of the agency.

This set of a correspondence card and business cards perfectly illustrates the joint use of BVH BLine and BVH BDot. Being typeset together, they act as different weights of the same typeface, highlighting sequences of words. The cards are designed for Bloomit, a French tech counseling firm.

Back in 2013, Toan Vu-Huu, with Wanja Ledowski, jointly with architects Frenak + Jullien, realized the signage of the Pavillon Vendôme, a contemporary art center in Clichy, France.

They chose to work both with BVH BLine and BVH BDot, creating pictograms with dots, creating a connexion and respiration in the signage. For the front sign, the typefaces are both in relief and engraved in the stone.

Baldinger•Vu-Huu designed a poster for Marc Johnson’s short film Yúyú using BVH BDot. Yúyú is a double portrait across the province of Chóngqìng, China, revealing the springtime coronation of a beekeeper named Shé Zuǒ Bīn.

The poster was selected and exhibited at the 26th International Poster and Graphic Design Festival of Chaumont and at the 7th International Poster Biennale of China.

Of Bridges & Borders is a curatorial experience, organized around two books edited and curated by Sigismond de Vajay. It is a group of contributions that materialized through exhibitions, urban interventions, concerts and conferences, with diverse formats including installation, video art, cinema, architecture, music and performances. Given these different forms, Of Bridges & Borders aims to provoke new ways of reading by proximity, difference and contradiction in a cultural background.

After the Vol. I, designed by André Baldinger, and two exhibitions, in Buenos Aires (2011) and in Valparaiso (2013), Of Bridges & Borders, Vol. II, designed by Baldinger•Vu-Huu, extends the vision of the project by bringing together a broad range of writers invited to share their ideas about bridges and borders. From singular stories to complex research, the essays address new technologies, contemporary art, migration and city developments, innovations in construction, freedom of speech, and utopian urbanism.

The two books have been conceived in close collaboration with Sigismond de Vajay, to give a body and a visual representation to all these different voices. The game of duality between the BVH BLine and the BVH BDot transcribes the plural atmosphere of the book.

Three posters to promote the ZhDK post-graduate degree in Type Design in Zurich, Switzerland, designed by André Baldinger, in 2007 and 2011. All three posters are typeset with his own typefaces. Information is set in BVH Baldinger (with discretionary ligatures). The 2007 posters use an early version of BVH Eiffel; the 2011 poster pairs BVH BDot with BVH BLine.