The history of Europe, with rhinoceros. Gábor Schein’s book Ó, rinocérosz is a real fantastic read. The poetic novel plays with the dazzling idea of how the history of Europe and Western civilization can be written if the rhinoceros is included in its mythical and real stories as a flesh-and-blood figure.

The illustration “Rhino Wrapped Up” is by István Orosz.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Since the early 2000s, the official website of the United States federal government has not only been a crucial information and media outlet, but has also come to carry politically charged stylistic connotations. With each revision and evolution, the site’s design and typography has testified to changes in infrastructure, technology, ideology, and mainstream taste, and has eventually come to allegorize different eras’ political realities. With a little help from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and a browser window screenshotted at 1280px width, I will now retrace the typographical history of whitehouse.gov, demarcated by presidential terms.

Bush 2000–2004

Although the Wayback Machine has been snapshotting whitehouse.gov from as early as 1996, before the year 2000 it was just a makeshift search portal to White House articles and images. During the first administration of George W. Bush, whitehouse.gov became a properly designed website, rudimentarily laying out a rich body of government information with an HTML table layout at 755px width.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The whitehouse.gov homepage on September 12, 2001, the day after the infamous strike.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The bigger headings on this page (e.g., “President George W. Bush Inside the Oval Office”) use a paradigmatic American typeface, Franklin Gothic (here ITC Franklin Gothic), embedded in static images. The smaller ones, such as “President Tours Pentagon” and “Presidents’ Hall,” simply use a bigger, bolder style of the body typeface: Verdana.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The White House news page

Aside from the ITC Edwardian Script embedded in many images, also notable is the presence of ITC Franklin Gothic in some of the headlines. Despite Franklin Gothic’s status as the quintessential American gothic, it never reappeared in later administrations’ sites.

Bush 2004–2008

Still hampered by bandwidth limitations and crude browser technology, whitehouse.gov during Bush Junior’s second term followed a basic three-column layout that was popular at the time. By this point, though, the designers had enlarged the table-body width to 900px and centered it horizontally in the HTML document.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

October 1, 2008. This was shortly after the financial market crash. The top right corner features links not only to the president’s and first lady’s profiles, but also to those of the vice president and second lady.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The president’s profile page. The ample use of gold ornamentation and script type eerily presages Trump.

Although the site’s designers set live text in Arial and Georgia, they embedded the balance of the typography in images, and used a variety of typefaces, like Baskerville Old Face in all caps for “The White House,” and Minion Bold with small caps for “President of the United States.” “George W. Bush” is in Polonaise. Some of the card titles are set in all-caps Trebuchet.

Obama 2008–2012

Under Obama, whitehouse.gov expanded the Bush era’s gradient reflections and drop shadows (then still built into images), evolving the overall look into a juvenile version of what would later become known as skeuomorphism, which emerged in phpBB forums and peaked in iOS 6. This early consciousness of typographic and design style on a web page steadily matured, crystallizing in the latter half of Obama’s second term.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

July 31, 2009. The hero section contents document a deepening of US–China relations: The former’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis depended on the latter’s contribution.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Barack Obama’s about page has significantly fewer gold accents than his predecessor’s.

The first Obama administration’s website slowly started to modernize, with the main body width expanding to approximately 1024 pixels. A burgeoning sense of web interactivity (as opposed to a web page thought of as a static onscreen document to be graphically laid out) also began to take shape, in the form of auto-rotating carousels in the “above the fold” section to highlight key policy focus.

Typographically, the Obama site inherited a lot from its predecessors, but started to embed type into images more extensively, mostly with various styles of Hoefler Text set in all caps. Given the availability of similar Garalde typefaces at the time, the rationale for choosing Hoefler Text is not completely clear – except that Hoefler Text had long been bundled with Mac OS, and would’ve conveniently appeared in the graphics editor’s type panel. Running text was set in the calligraphically informed Lucida Sans / Grande, whose open structure and legibility led it to dominate the body text of many other websites at the time, including those of Apple and Facebook.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

May 31, 2012. Here, Brandon Grotesque advertises White House petitions, a prototype for what would later become change.org. (This also marks the only use of green on the page.)

In addition to Arial, all-caps Hoefler Text, and Georgia, in 2012 the website designers introduced a technologically mediated “democratic” voice: HvD Fonts’ Brandon Grotesque. First released in 2010, Brandon Grotesque quickly became a trend because of its innovative reappropriation of the low x-height typical of early geometric sans serifs (Erbar-Grotesk, Futura, and many other art deco sans serifs whose elegant, all-caps proportions Brandon Grotesque shares). Combined with explicit calligraphic influences in the form of abruptly angled stroke endings, an unusually small upper loop of the lowercase g, and cutely rounded glyph outlines, Brandon Grotesque balanced an appearance of technological progress with just the right amount of quirk and whimsy to signal harmless nonconformity, winning the hearts and minds of many boutique digital design studios and early design teams at tech startups. The site’s running text also shifted from Lucida Grande to Arial with the classic CSS font stack of “Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif.” This reflects a general trend at the time: shifting away from the humanist sans serifs and toward the sleeker, more subdued and rationalized Helvetica-ish forms.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

November 1, 2012. With Arial as the headline typeface in “An America Built to Last” (intentionally specified in the CSS, not appearing as a fallback font), this version of whitehouse.gov further reduced the amount of serif typography in an attempt to convey a message of technological progressivism.

A later revision of whitehouse.gov under Obama got bolder and more mature in its layout and graphics skeuomorphism. A clear sense of “above the fold” now appeared, featuring splashy images afforded by higher internet speeds and bigger typography layered on semitransparent color blocks – a significant CSS update at the time.

Obama 2012–2016

The second Obama administration’s website kept its outer structure largely intact, but introduced even bolder layouts and lightly interactive features, such as a countdown clock to enroll in ObamaCare.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

March 31, 2014. The headlines (“OPEN ENROLLMENT…”) are set in Brandon Grotesque and embedded in the image asset, while the countdown numerals are set in Helvetica, probably because they have to be live text.

2014 was probably when whitehouse.gov started to use Helvetica instead of Arial in its body text, which stirred an uproar among some type and web designers: Arial was allegedly better suited to small running text because of its looser spacing and manual hinting for Windows machines.

This was the last time we’d see Brandon Grotesque on the whitehouse.gov site – its overindexing on cuteness quickly exhausted its ideological potency.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

April 1, 2014. The page headline “Promise Kept” is set in Whitney, which represented a new wave of humanist sans serifs that did not model calligraphy as strictly as Lucida Grande, but interpreted it in a freer, more structural fashion. The output of KABK’s Type and Media program during this time reflected a similar shift.

Expanding on the Hoefler Text connection, the Obama whitehouse.gov site became a longtime customer of Hoefler & Co., which changed its name from Hoefler & Frere-Jones after Frere-Jones’s departure in 2014. Hoefler products seemed to hit all the ideological sweet spots for a Democratic technocratic White House, blending progressive digitality, humanist approachability, and a carefully curated, nonconservative brand of Americana, all made domestically in New York, NY. On this parallax-scroll page about Obama’s exit from the Iraq War, in addition to Whitney (named after its original commissioner, the quintessentially American Whitney Museum of American Art), there also appeared a gratuitous amount of Neue Helvetica Thin – an obvious influence from the freshly released iOS 7.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

April 9, 2015. The top navigation bar’s typography has changed from all-caps Hoefler Text to all-caps Neue Helvetica. Its background has also “flattened” and lost the bright gradient.

The front page underwent a minor facelift that inched closer toward mainstream web design at the time, incorporating a full-bleed, image-based hero section. The headline “Ask the Surgeon General” was in fact meant to be set in “Hoefler Text A,” which indicates that it was a dedicated webfont loaded in the browser instead of the stock Hoefler Text that came bundled with Mac OS – clearly an attempt to deliver consistent typography across operating systems. It failed to load in this snapshot on the Wayback Machine, but in later iterations Hoefler Text webfonts would occur even more often. The webfont was named “Hoefler Text A” because it only contained partial font data as an anti-piracy measure, to be completed by a “Hoefler Text B”.

Also notable is the progressive simplification of the front page. Earlier versions were quite dense, filled to the brim with blocks of hyperlinks. Not only did the overall navigation become simpler (the all-caps Neue Helvetica Thin still a clear inspiration from Apple), but the entire page now had only one hero section, two individual news items below, a few more service entry points, and then the footer.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

June 1, 2015. Note the correctly loaded Hoefler Text A in the hero headline.

From 2014 to 2015, the Obama whitehouse.gov website didn’t substantially change its graphic design or structure. The only difference was that Whitney now replaced Neue Helvetica in the header, forecasting its increased favorability in later iterations. (The webfont was called Whitney SSm A. “SSm” was Hoefler’s internal product name for “ScreenSmart,” meaning the font files are engineered primarily for screen display instead of printing.)

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

January 1, 2016. Whitney is now used in the Light weight, perhaps inspired by the all-caps Neue Helvetica Thin earlier. Note that one of the footer’s social-media icon buttons points to Google+, a now-defunct platform.

Whitney had now replaced many more instances of Neue Helvetica, probably with the design intention of eventually rendering a body-text typeface everywhere. The design itself was also peak Obama era: a stylistically eclectic combination of typefaces, just a touch of skeuomorphism with light outlines and subtle drop (or white inner) shadows on a visibly off-white background, and all-caps text set in a small size to imitate actual small caps. This coincided with the gradual identity formation of web designers who, as an incipient social faction buttressed by growing tech wealth, no longer saw themselves as just “graphic designers who happened to draw for the screen.” Carefully layering drop shadows, intricately setting text headings, and drawing “lickable” buttons freehand without 3D rendering software formulated a distinct aesthetic grammar that not only demonstrated the designers’ handicraft prowess to employers and clients, but also became a series of group rituals that reaffirmed their professional identity on websites like Designer News and Dribbble.com.

Trump 2016–2020

While the Obama administration incrementally changed whitehouse.gov, it was in fact the first Trump administration that most dramatically improved the site’s richness and modernized some of its infrastructure, since it was approximately around this time that web technologies most advanced, design methodologies stabilized, and Silicon Valley started to gain cultural heft. If Trump could be considered America’s first “Twitter president,” web typography now also became a full-fledged battleground of stylistic connotations, almost on par with TV ads, with each site change across all successive presidencies encoding significant ideological messages.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

February 1, 2017. Both the page headline (“Sign up for updates…”) and subtitle (“Join our movement…”) are still set in Whitney at a generous type size, against the same flat, semitransparent blue background. It failed to load in this case, falling back to Neue Helvetica Light.

A holding page to collect email addresses and zip codes still used Hoefler fonts – the uprightness from the previous administration had apparently not abated. While Obama’s whitehouse.gov used exclusively commercial fonts (in addition to the system fonts Arial and (Neue) Helvetica), the placeholder text on this page from 2017 used the free Source Sans, a forecast of what was yet to come.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

April 30, 2017. Though the site’s layout remained unchanged, the cacophonous typographic hierarchy in the red block (“Let’s Make America Great Again…”) and the awkward “Sign Up to Receive Updates” card imply that the Trump web team could have been working with, or even fighting against, a website CMS that they inherited from the Obama administration.

Largely repurposing the Obama site’s structure, the Trump administration’s whitehouse.gov initially still featured the same full-bleed hero layout and simple card grid below, even keeping the big blue all-caps banner navigation at the top. The most prominent change, of course, was the type: Gone were the “tasteful,” professionally curated Hoefler products. But just as the first Trump administration was unable to shake off the Democratic state apparatus’s inertia of decorum and palatability, it went for Merriweather and Source Sans – both perfectly serviceable typefaces but, crucially, free on Google Fonts.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

April 1, 2018. On this iteration of whitehouse.gov, the editorial atmosphere and use of Google webfonts seem to have taken inspiration from online news platforms.

Two years into the first Trump administration, whitehouse.gov received a significant update that brought it up to date with the common web-design standards at the time, the full-width responsive navigation header being the most notable example. Source Sans took over all of the site’s running text, while display typography was confidently handled by Merriweather at a large font size with appropriate leading (see also this previously published Use). The overall effect could be described as largely influenced by new-media news platforms like the now-defunct Circa (which also used Merriweather and Source Sans), sprinkled with some Americana elements. The littering of small colored bars to reinforce or imply layout hierarchy is a telltale sign of mid-2010s graphic and web-design aesthetics.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

April 1, 2020. Note the straight (“dumb”) quotation marks on the card title.

As CSS standards continued to evolve, the Trump administration’s whitehouse.gov also started to iterate the news items underneath its home-page hero section. While the Obama site featured evenly sized columns, Trump’s whitehouse.gov started using varying-width cards, whose design thinking could be traced back to Google’s original Material Design system.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

April 1, 2020. It’s possible that this minisite’s designers chose Open Sans because the “real thing” for public-service typography – Frutiger or Frutiger Condensed – is not freely available.

A telling comparison is the government’s Covid rapid-response minisite, which surprisingly used Open Sans. Once a tech darling in the early 2010s for its almost gratuitous warmth (and free availability on Google Fonts), Open Sans had long since fallen out of fashion. Since the rapid response was sponsored mostly by tech giants, the temporary return of Open Sans as aesthetic differentiator was unsurprising. In line with that of many other classic government-service bulletins, this minisite’s typography was giant and bold, conveying a sense of simple, down-to-earth immediacy.

Biden 2020–2024

The Biden administration’s whitehouse.gov once again stepped up its design and technological sophistication, perhaps the most systematically architected and thoroughly maintained version of the site so far. Allegorizing an attempt to return to stability, professionalism, and decency, the Biden site exuded a familiar sense of refinement, from layout to color and typography, and even sprinkled on UI animations.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

January 31, 2021. The hero image has been cropped in a rounded rectangle – a friendly graphic motif that punctuates the rest of the site.

The wholesale return of Hoefler fonts on the Biden site cannot simply be explained by organizational inertia or prior business ties. Most notably, functional or running small text was set completely in the foundry’s latest offering: Decimal. Although Decimal was never a specific revival of American printed material, its appearance in 2019 scratched a similar ideological itch thanks to its cunning mix of brush-calligraphic tendencies (channeling the down-to-earth sincerity of the mythologized bodega-sign letterer), authoritative letterforms, and an obvious nod to watches and industrial dials. This allowed designers to conveniently short-circuit it with typologically honest, no-nonsense American grit – a variation of the same formula that launched the foundry’s Sentinel into popularity orbit a decade ago. The display type, a spot formerly occupied by Hoefler Text and Whitney, now featured Mercury in its CSS-activated small caps variant.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The site also, for the first time, introduce toggles for high-contrast and accessible options floating to the left. It’s possible that Democrats care more about accessibility – even if only in name – than Republicans.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

January 31, 2021. Clicking the “Accessible” button (the lower of the two floating buttons to the left) strips out the multicolumn layout, and renders the page in a single column with giant images and simplified typography – a helpful feature for mobile-device users and those with reading disabilities.

The Biden whitehouse.gov site not only got a typographic cleanse, but also evolved the modernized foundation that the Trump version established. The information density on the home page again increased, with article titles and preview summaries neatly arranged and carefully typeset in interlocking grids. The inner pages exuded an unprecedented degree of editorial refinement, especially the all-caps, loosely spaced pull quotes, which almost look like they were designed for lifestyle magazine spreads with a red-blue color scheme.

Particularly interesting was the search entry point, which used to be inside the navigation header but was now pulled into a fun, poppy, floating circle, carefully arranged so as not to collide with page content. Upon clicking, the circle animated into a pill shape with the color scheme changing from blue to yellow – the kind of “delight” details now commonly seen in web and app UI design. The sweet, almost poignant pastel color scheme itself was also uncommon, and the only appearance of such a palette on a whitehouse.gov site.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

April 30, 2022. Note the disappearance of top navigation text buttons.

In 2022, Biden’s whitehouse.gov went through small iterations. The navigation header was simplified with only a hamburger menu button. The hero section apparently could now be configured to support overlaying typography on both sides to accommodate photography.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

February 28, 2023. The top navigation menu buttons may have disappeared to avoid looking repetitive with topic menus inside the page (such as “Economic Progress,” “Clean Energy,” “Reproductive Rights,” and so on).

In the second half of the Biden administration, whitehouse.gov matured even more, using web-design techniques perfected in the commercial world. In tried-and-true 80/20 fashion, the sensibly typeset Mercury occupied most of the typographical terrain, and Decimal dutifully took care of the remaining functional chores. Structurally, not only did the site gain a giant, full-screen nav (a design pattern originally evolved at SaaS companies to showcase their ever-expanding product offerings and org structure), but the site breadcrumb, conventionally placed at the top of the page, now sat curiously underneath the article title, perhaps so as not to disturb the top’s graphic simplicity.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

October 24, 2024. On this particular home-page photo, Decimal flooded all of the professionally typeset signs surrounding Biden and Sanders – evidence that a dedicated design team chose and ratified the typeface for its aesthetic expression and ideological connotations.

Biden’s whitehouse.gov remained largely the same during the second half of his tenure, except for the addition of temporary banners that anachronistically used a lightly skeuomorphic blue gradient. While previous administrations’ website designs only “caught up” with the wider public world, this cautious reintroduction of slight skeuomorphic tendencies coincided with the wider commercial trend at the moment with very little time lag – a timeliness that would extend into the succeeding administration.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The whitehouse.gov home page now also featured a giant section introducing not only the people in the current administration, but also “Past Presidents.” This content area would be heavily exploited for a different ideological purpose in the second Trump administration.

And finally, in a dedicated long-scroll storytelling page about the Biden administration’s domestic industry revitalization program, we are greeted with a long-lost typographic friend that fell out of favor for its symbolic cliché – the genre of all-caps American gothic in the form of none other than Hoefler’s Champion Gothic, harkening back to the days of Franklin Gothic in the Bush years. The American gothic as a genre of typographic image gradually faded away as the rest of the Western world deindustrialized materially (and quite graphically too), so its reintroduction as the face of American reindustrialization policies was a no-brainer.

Trump 2024–2028

If the Biden administration’s website team had the most technical and design prowess, the second Trump administration’s counterparts, although occasionally lacking in sophistication and craftsmanship, came with an unprecedented sense of medium awareness, militantly styling and creating new content for whitehouse.gov with ideological urgency. Referencing the most up-to-date stylistic trends and employing the latest web-design techniques, the designers sought to innovate a right-wing aesthetic expression that only incompletely represented Trump’s image but inadvertently mirrored their own.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

January 31, 2025. Compared to the Biden administration’s and even the first Trump administration’s site – both of which prioritized showcasing policy updates and let the graphics do their jobs subliminally – this version of whitehouse.gov’s home page undoubtedly breaks some rules: It says nothing but “AMERICA IS BACK” set against a smug photo of Trump, with the all-caps ITC-Garamond-revival completing the ’90s magazine-advertisement look.

Hoefler products, now hopelessly Democrat-coded, have disappeared from this iteration of whitehouse.gov. Finally replacing decades of neoliberal politeness are Instrument Serif and Instrument Sans, a pair of free typefaces from Instrument, a brand and design agency based in Portland, Oregon, with an office in New York.

On a basic, material level, this typeface choice by the whitehouse.gov team constitutes a striking allegory of real social events – that is, on one hand, the unholy alliance between a right-turning tech sector that, in a desperate attempt to rejuvenate its Covid-impacted profit margin, showed its true face with massive layoffs and realignment with the defense sector; and, on the other hand, a populist Republican administration that felt hampered by Democrat remnants and now gets to ruthlessly execute its long-perfected ultraconservative agenda with the former’s tools.

Instrument Sans obviously stands as a commonplace culmination of the archetypal “quirky tech grotesk,” whose two decades of multifold evolution across the Netherlands and California merits a separate essay elsewhere. But it is Instrument Serif, a tragico-farcical rehabilitation of the late 1990s tight-but-not-touching (TNT) Garamond image – once denounced by Michael Bierut for its amateurism – that is worth elaborating on: It is a uniquely American phenomenon without an original Europe import manifest. Its emptily ironic reference to an already referential image (Apple Garamond / ITC Garamond being a high-postmodern “revival” of the Garalde genre) is already registered even in foundry responses, most notably in Sharp Type’s Ghost Text, which referenced the TNT humanist sans of Clinton-era corporate identity.

But this wanton nostalgia, to undertake the briefest chronological tour, was originally given artistic license by late 2010s nightclub promo designs that later became known as acid graphics – an ominous, digitally rococo style whose unapologetic nihilism inspired many offshoots, which then operated around the affect of form as such. Nostalgia is more popular among such derivative forms for its convenient, existing sediment of ironic affect and general referentiality. In the cultural and lifestyle design spheres, nostalgia manifests as the visual regurgitation of capitalist industrial production: fruit stickers, quality-control insignias, miscellaneous industrial barcodes, other tactical and paramilitary motifs, and the eventual emergence of LOT 2046. And if these graphics feel too threatening or authoritarian (or crypto-coded) for the day-to-day tech design scenario, nostalgia for turn-of-the-century tech megacorps – like Apple and Sony – feels just spicy enough as a symbolic attempt from the further right to break through Mercury and Decimal’s neoliberal impasse, while always having a convenient pendulum-just-swung-back surface narrative to back itself when facing scrutiny.

The fact that Instrument Serif is produced by people in so-called Blue states does reveal a deeper shared interest between sects of both parties’ voters, but the more crucial point here is the very formation of this bipartisan sect, namely Silicon Valley’s technocratic intelligentsia, which, having learned all the methods and tricks of Europe’s cultural industry, decided to produce ideology using more cost-effective homegrown ingredients. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that overtightened oldstyle serifs started adorning the brand identities of the Valley’s most recent ideological avant-garde: AI startups.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

March 31, 2025. The display typography uses Instrument Serif; the rest of the text is set in a perfectly serviceable sans serif – now already a common baseline thanks to two decades of advancements in typesetting for the web.

The conventional news area of Trump’s whitehouse.gov stripped down its graphical richness, echoing a similar theme of austerity in the wider world of tech websites. Instrument Serif, forced to live in a sentence setting with little negative letter-spacing, struggles to cohere into word-images.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

June 1, 2025. Note that Instrument Serif has been applied to small running text in “The Story of America.”

The Trump whitehouse.gov design team significantly expanded the “Past Presidents” area in an elaborate attempt to refashion historical material into a contemporary ideology. Recasting Jefferson and Franklin in the style of past emperors (with their oil-painted portraits for period evocation), this effective minisite not only symbolized Trump’s personal fascination with feudal rulers, but also served as a bridge to the so-called “technofeudal” faction within the Valley, represented by people like Mark Zuckerberg with his Caesar-style haircut.

To create brand awareness for the 250th anniversary national military parade, the whitehouse.gov team also created a dedicated “America 250” page with color accents in various shades of red and gold, as well as script type embellishments set in Loren Blake Script. The page itself has a level of handcrafted richness that exudes an almost Randian ideological vigor, but its earnest application of overtightened Garamond and script flourishes inadvertently make it look like a real estate brochure from the late ’90s – fitting given Trump’s personal background. It must be further noted, crucially, the extent to which formal expression now does not imply the signified object (in this case, a military parade) as high modernism would’ve taught us on day one; instead, it speaks to us in a hermetic visual language in parallel (the sophistication of a Manhattan business magnate) that circuitously allegorizes what the signified object also tries to allegorize, as if they operate with an aesthetic echo effect. This phenomenon of circuitousness, of indirect signification based on an opaque ideological message, ultimately comes from an impossibility of representation itself, as the Trump-MAGA world is now composed of such disparate constellations of ideologies and group identities that any direct aesthetic expression would be destined to partial representation. (The same could be said of our contemporary globalized world.) Biden’s whitehouse.gov styled the administration with stable, reliable directness; the Trump administration’s design team critically grasped and exploited this new development with full disciplinary self-awareness.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

October 23, 2025. As seen in the top screenshot, this whitehouse.gov site gives much prominence, both in terms of information hierarchy and literal onscreen graphic real estate, to photo galleries, perhaps out of the cynical assumption that voters are mobilized more by carefully staged images than by cogently written, informational text.

Brazen as it is, the black full-width top strip for time-critical messages (in this case blaming the opposition party for a government shutdown) shares the same UX pattern as new-product release banners from tech companies. Stacking yet another red rolling banner on top – this time to showcase “news of nonstop wins” – highlights the almost endearing similarity between Trump’s administration and a dysfunctional tech company’s web marketing team.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

October 23, 2025. The “WHWIRE” text banner slowly and endlessly scrolls from right to left, mimicking the behavior of Wall Street banners. This style might’ve also been inspired by the Drudge Report, whose design has been remarkably stable for over twenty years.

Another conscious maneuver is the creation of White House Wire (styled as WHWire), a rolling news area on whitehouse.gov separate from the conventional press briefings, presumably to create a direct-to-consumer alternative to the “fake news” of mainstream media outlets. Also noteworthy is the floating column of buttons to the left, which hosted website accessibility options for the Biden whitehouse.gov but now prominently features the Trump administration’s social media accounts.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Author screenshot. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

February 1, 2026. Instrument Serif has bled into the Trump administration’s physical signage (as seen in “THE GOLDEN AGE” banner), ditching its status as ironic reference and officially rechristening itself a part of Trump’s visual identity. The Trump signature in the last image is actually a looping gif that animates the pen strokes. The “Exposed” stamp graphic on the website’s Media Offenders page is set in Stencil.

As the Trump administration settles further into its second term, the design update in February 2026 to whitehouse.gov has shifted significantly toward maturity and politeness, even including the sensationalistic “expose the fake media” area of the site. Typographically notable is the introduction of Nord (now Nord Display), a wide, capitals-only sans serif in the Engravers Gothic genre (and, surprisingly for the Trump administration, a paid typeface). Derived from metal-plate engraving, this genre is now commonly associated with banking, alcohol packaging, real estate, and similar motifs of wealth and masculinity, especially with loose tracking. Having jettisoned big, cartoonish typography and bold color blocks, the graphic and interaction design of whitehouse.gov in 2026 strives for a much more solemn tone, featuring a full-screen, video-only homepage and subtle scroll animations between blocks of tiny gray type. If we could characterize the previous site as Silicon Valley’s imitation of late-1990s high class (when neoliberalism indeed started asserting its goal of world dominance with full steam), this iteration appears not only more refined but also more familiar, as if it’s advertising a premium steakhouse chain.

*

Technological kludges like baking fonts and drop shadow into image assets informed the aesthetic tendencies of the Bush Junior-era whitehouse.gov, and their gradual abatement has become apparent over the years. In a sense, advances in internet infrastructure, web technology, and design methodologies over two decades have more or less removed the medium, allowing web design to express ideology in a highly purified format, a luxury previously only afforded to print designers.

The zero marginal reproduction cost and short turnover time unique to the web can now cement a debate in the physical world: that is, the autonomy of style. In Marxian terms, it is also expressed as the classic dichotomy between the economic base and ideological superstructure. It has long been argued that changes in superstructure – art, design, music, or anything cultural – are but a derivative expression of “real” changes in the productive and economic realm, but there are also valid attacks that criticized this reading for being dogmatic and mechanical, discounting specific historical contingencies, the efforts and toils of the individual artists, and the internal grammar and history of specific creative disciplines. Now, what I hope my chronological web design survey has demonstrated is that the same set of powerful technologies – sometimes even the same people – can output vastly different forms, as demonstrated by the stark contrast between the websites of Biden and Trump’s second term. In other words, style has its own history, which can seemingly operate independently.

But I am in no way suggesting a return to New Criticism, to claim that colors, pixels, and shapes somehow truly live their own lives autonomous of social relations. Tracing the design of whitehouse.gov does seem to establish a series of symbolic equivalents between style and political reality in different presidential terms (e.g., “skeuomorphism means Obama and zero interest rates” or “pompous, brash graphics mean Trump”), but these equations are only as useful to us as mnemonic aids. Style does have its own history, but such history is not to be found in the simple succession of one style over another. Rather, it lies in people’s concrete motivations – whether from designers, clients, developers, or the consuming public – which decide that one new style is a better successor than many alternatives.

And so perhaps paradoxically, style is simultaneously the output of political-economic processes and an allegory for them. The same content about domestic industry-revitalization programs appears on both Biden’s and Trump’s whitehouse.gov, but its stylistic renditions could not be more different, clearly to serve different political objectives. In other words, whitehouse.gov’s web design here is an extreme scenario in which everything else (content, technology, design methodology) has receded, leaving style in its purest, most easily observable format in service of sheer ideology.

This process of purification now also signals a new development: The postwar pretension that style somehow has transhistorical neutrality (because it operates independently of historical processes) is no longer viable. After all, proponents of such neutrality would’ve immediately ditched it the moment they saw a swastika or a hammer and sickle. From Bush Junior all the way down to the second Trump term, changes to the whitehouse.gov style strikingly demonstrate that style is, and always has been, an ideological battleground that sees its mirror images in the relations of production. To analyze style as ideology is to trace its history: It is always created by humans under circumstances already given and transmitted from the past, and any new style is always haunted by the tradition of all dead styles prior. And so it is neither content, nor its style, but the machinations of the creative act behind that style, that is whispering the actual political message into our ears.

Note: Given the current political climate, the author did not feel comfortable publishing under their real name. —Ed.

Visual identity for Martl, a nail studio in Madrid that moves away from the conventional codes of the industry and proposes a different way of seeing: nails not as an accessory, but as language and expression.

The identity is rooted in hands as a point of contact with the world. In the fingers, their movement, and the spaces created between them. That is where the structure lies: in space and silence. The visual system is built around this gesture, incorporating elements from the universe of nail art such as diamonds, glitter, and stickers.

The identity reflects a sober and conceptual brand that combines precision and sensitivity. It exists in a balance between mature femininity and a raw, almost underground attitude. A brand that avoids perfection and the promise of transformation, choosing instead to focus on what is already there.

Photography by @zooooooooooooooooe.

Sterne im Garten des Himmels (“Stars in the Garden of Heaven”) marks the eight installment of the “Schauen” project: an ongoing series of poetry and photography books created by young immigrants in Switzerland. Published at the end of the school year by the Berufswahlschule (BWS) of Horgen near Zurich, the book is the result of a workshop led by poet Svenja Herrmann and photographer Thomas Keller. Each year, students open a window into their personal experiences through words and images, offering readers an emotional and deeply human insight into their lives, dreams, and reflections.

The 2025 softcover volume shows a collaboration between visual and literary expression with the student-created poetry and photography creating a moving collective portrait. The project is not only a celebration of artistic growth but also a gesture of recognition and empowerment.

For the second consecutive year, the book design was developed by Thomas Keller. The cover features a bold color gradient with Swiss Typefaces’ Euclid Mono set prominently for the title and the author credits on the back. Inside, the same typeface appears again for the contributors’ names, placed at the bottom left of each spread and paired with the author’s full-page portrait on the facing page. From the same family, Euclid Flex Medium is used for the foreword title, while Adobe’s Minion provides the serifed body text.

A notable detail is the all-caps subtitle on the cover set in Swiss Typefaces’ Only Extended. The font makes here its first documented appearance after its release in June 2025.

A mini book by designed by Julie Bassinot, introduced as follow:

A book no taller than an ear of wheat.
6 × 4 cm, 244 pages, bound with linen thread.

Text by Élise Demeulenaere and Christophe Bonneuil: ‘Sharing Seeds: The social and identity-building of a “peasant” collective centred on alternative seed-saving practices.’

Cooking Memes, published by Krisis Publishing, is a book that treats food memes as historical documents of the present. Curated by Alessandro Mininno, it brings Marc Bloch’s 1935 insight about the “jam problem” into the digital age. In a world where pizza, carbonara, matcha, and vegan sushi circulate as images, slogans, and remixes, culinary memes become lenses into sociopolitical friction, identity, and power. This open archive collects fragments without deference, suggesting that even the most ramshackle food meme can function as a historical document of our time.

The book was designed by Francesco D’Abbraccio who picked Minion for body text and Ramboia for everything else.

Have you ever opened a book and felt a whole household breathe?

At Plantain, we transform lived histories into beautiful, bespoke books. With the Ferreira family volume, a chorus of voices, memories, and carefully kept artefacts finally found a home between covers.

When we started this project, we were invited to step into a living museum: rigorously researched family histories, earlier interviews, photographs softened by time, vinyl records, Granny’s garlic pork recipe, and artwork by masters such as Louison and Hinkson. Our brief was simple but exacting: make it coherent, honest, and beautiful – a book future generations would actually want to hold.

Over months, we conducted interviews, shaped a narrative, and curated more than 65,000 words and 437 images into a 356-page volume.

The design draws on the geometry of Portuguese azulejos, reimagined as grids and rhythmic layouts, with layered blue accents inspired by the Caribbean Sea. Warm creams and soft greys temper the palette, while a restrained typographic system lets the family’s voices sit easily beside photographs and ephemera.

Regions covered: Portugal, Trinidad, the United States.

Fish Butchery. Mastering The Catch, Cut And Craft is a book by Josh Niland. It was designed by Daniel New. Titles are set in Kobe from VJ-Type. The body text is in Robert Slimbach’s Minion.

Fish Butchery won the 2024 ABDA award for Best Designed Cookbook. From Niland’s website:

James Beard award-winning author and culinary game-changer Josh Niland returns with the ultimate guide to the art of Fish Butchery, with expert techniques and groundbreaking recipes that are an urgent call for action on culinary sustainability.

Josh’s multi award-winning debut The Whole Fish Cookbook created a new blueprint for fish cookery, while its bestselling sequel Take One Fish unpacked 15 different species to reveal their true gastronomic potential. In this latest book, Josh continues to open our eyes to the potential of fish in the kitchen.

Presented in three stunning sections―Catch, Cut and Craft―it’s both a challenge to the food industry to do things differently and a dazzling manual to the eye-popping potential in each and every fish.

Im Herzen der Katze by Jina Khayyer is a German literary fiction novel published by Suhrkamp Verlag (Berlin). The cover design and illustration were created by Barbara Thoben of the Cologne-based studio Lübbeke Naumann Thoben, while the book’s typesetting was handled by Satz-Offizin Hümmer in Waldbüttelbrunn. The audiobook, published by Der Audio Verlag, is also available on CD, read by Pegah Ferydoni. The novel was nominated for the German Book Prize 2025.

Translated from the book summary on the publisher’s website:

Im Herzen der Katze is a family and love story that questions notions of nationality and belonging, of womanhood and freedom. With poetic intensity, Jina Khayyer tells of courage, solidarity, and responsibility, and of the lingering echoes of a homeland that cannot be shaken off.

The hardcover book comes with a jacket that pairs Swiss Typefaces's TheW Clan RZA on the front with Adobe's Minion on the back. RZA’s condensed, angular forms give the title a bold, contemporary edge, while Minion’s classical serif provide balance and a refined, timeless feel to the overall design.

Ulysse. Voyage dans une Méditerranée de légendes aims to demonstrate the influence of this character on Western culture and the history of the arts. This exhibition catalog is in partnership with Département du Var.

Titles and subtitles are set in Love from VJ-Type; the serif used for body copy appears to be Adobe’s Minion.

The exhibition and catalog are conceived as an Ulysses journey around the Mediterranean. Sculptures, ceramics, drawings, photographs and paintings from antiquity to the present day.

The design talks to an architecturally literate audience, but also one that understands the significance of this publication. Contemporary typography as well as a bold palette of orange and blue underlines a fresh approach and new appreciation for the content. The minimal and generous pages create respectful space between the layout and the photographs, but the warm paper stock and fresh colours invite a non-academic audience. For us it was important to make this book appealing as a beautiful object so that it remained out of the bookshelf.

Nachtdier (“Night animal”) is a novel by Dutch author and DJ Joost van Bellen: “A sincerely lied autobiography”, published by Podium in 2021. We designed the cover using our own font GS_2021 and adjusted the title by manipulating it while scanning.

The book interior including the inner flaps is set in Minion. This part wasn’t designed by gebr.silvestri.

From Wikipedia:

The Return (Russian: Возвращение, romanized: Vozvrashcheniye) is a 2003 Russian coming-of-age drama film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev and released internationally in 2004.

It tells the story of two Russian boys whose father suddenly returns home after a 12-year absence. He takes the boys on a holiday to a remote island on a lake that turns into a test of survivability of almost mythic proportions. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival (as well as the award for the best first film) and was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. The film was also selected as the Russian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 76th Academy Awards, but it didn't make the final shortlist. It received widespread critical acclaim.

The Russian movie poster uses Minion in roman caps and in italic lowercase letters. The letterforms of the title are filled with the image of the sky above the sea. Note the treatment of the descending bit in the letter Щ (Shcha). The nominations at the Venice Film Festival are added in a bold condensed style of Myriad.

The light novel series of The Apothecary Diaries uses Black Chancery for the covers of its English translation.

Black Chancery is a typeface from the 1990s who naive quirkiness seems to have given it enduring qualities. Here, it’s consistently used in white over the image, with a shadow blur effect the colour of which varies from cover to cover.

Netflix have also opted to use this timeless typeface for their title cards. Classic.
The y of “Apothecary” has a small inline highlight, which suggests a typeface modification; also copied by Netflix’s use.

Credits are added in Minion and Tangerine.

See all issues at J-Novel Club.

Detail from the Netflix page for The Apothecary Diaries

With this project Sally Paschmann founded item Magazin—a collaborative platform for young designers that allows them to publish their work to a broader audience and gives them the opportunity to explore the field of editorial design by publishing their own student magazine. After the implementation of item I was offered a lectureship at the Design Department at HTW Berlin. Within this annual teaching assignment the students design and publish the ongoing issues of item Magazin under my guidance. The project is officially funded by the university and has become an essential module of the curriculum.

The typography of issue #1 features Funktional Grotesk and Minion, alongside Source Code (not shown here).

Specialising in the design of furniture, objects and space, Studio Röder’s essence lies in the beauty of clarity and reduction. Their works focus on reduced forms and calm spaces by distilling them to their most essential structure, material and function by eliminating unnecessary factors and emphasising single materials.

Their identity reflects this approach and is built upon their their primary disciplines. Multiples of three are used as a subtle, yet consistent visual language throughout the website, portfolio and printed matter.

gris tormenta •⁠ Colección Editor

gris tormenta Publishing is a workshop that conceives, edits, and publishes distinctive collections of books at the contemporary intersection of writing, reading, and editing. Through literary essays and memoirs, it delves into the very concept of the book itself, exploring its possibilities, components, and structures.

Each collection—and every title—is a response to a question, an idea, or a debate sparked by the publisher itself. Rather than just discovering new writers, it offers fresh perspectives on texts, concepts, and authorship.

Published between 2018 and 2024, the Editor collection aims to uncover rare discoveries and original narratives delving into the inner workings of the modern literary landscape—a captivating odyssey guided by the inquisitive spirit of an editor.

In the typographic design of this collection, typefaces are meticulously chosen to blend elegance with modernity by Sé, taller de ideas (Querétaro, Mexico), led by designer Mauricio Sánchez. Didot LT Std (51pt) commands attention for the author's surname, while Brandon Text Regular (9pt) by HVD Fonts ensures readability for the author’s name. On the cover, Brandon Text Black (17pt) grabs attention for the title, with the Medium (7pt) variant offering a brief summary. The publisher logo, in Minion (14pt), adds a classic touch. Inside (not shown here), Stempel Garamond (11.40pt) is used for text paragraphs, ensuring both readability and a classic aesthetic.

Each book in the series has 76 to 113 pages, measures approx. 4.7×7.1×0.2 inches, and weighs about 110–165 g. The books come in paperback binding with flaps.

The Editor series is edited by Jacobo Zanella and Mauricio Sánchez. Here’s an overview of all thirteen titles:

#01 Perder el Nobel by Laura Esther Wolfson (2018)
#02 Las posesiones by Thomas Bernhard (2019)
#03 Una vocación de editor by Ignacio Echevarría (2020)
#04 Ilegible by Pablo Duarte (2021)
#05 Dentro del bosque by Emily Gould (2021)
#06 Editar «Guerra y paz» by Mario Muchnik (2022)
#07 Fallar otra vez by Alan Pauls (2022)
#08 El atuendo de los libros by Jhumpa Lahiri (2022)
#09 Un texto en camino by Javier Jiménez Belmonte (2022)
#10 El color favorito Valeria Tentoni (2023)
#11 Un cuento de Navidad by Alejandro Zambra (2023)
#12 Momo en los infiernos by Guillermo Espinosa Estrada (2023)
#13 El tiempo de la mariposa by Selma Ancira (2024)

See them all on the website of gris tormenta.

El color favorito by Valeria Tentoni

Un cuento de navidad by Alejandro Zambra

Fallar otra vez by Alan Pauls

I am not quite sure how to refer to […], and that is the point. “I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination,” author Fady Joudah told Electric Literature. “The ellipsis in brackets highlights the space in which a Palestinian speaks and others listen.”

Cover designer Mary Austin Speaker worked closely with Joudah on all aspects of the design, noting that they wanted the cover to reflect the silence underlying the poems.

[A]s we considered several busier cover designs, we began to see that this book required a minimalist cover in order for the pictographic title to be the focal point. This book is very much about silence—the majority of the poems in the book are titled, simply, “[…],” and we wanted a cover that offered that silence in a very direct, highly visible way.

I designed the package to carry the colors of the Palestinian flag when it’s viewed in full, and added a cloth texture not only to summon the flag but also to signify the interweaving of lives the book illustrates: what appears to be separate is actually woven of the same cloth. The front cover uses only green and black, while the back cover is a red field featuring a single poem. It was Fady’s idea to bisect the cover with two colors, which I agreed lent itself to the very idea of division that this book seeks to subvert with complexity, trouble, history, names, art—all the things that get subsumed by silence—represented here by the ellipsis in brackets as well as Fady’s name in both English and Arabic. The black field offers a space for grief, while the green field below represents land that remains alive despite besiegement. We made the decision to represent Fady’s name in both the English and Arabic letterforms in order not only to render Fady’s presence as Arab and as Palestinian American immediately legible to an American audience, but also to push the boundaries of book cover conventions—Arabic script is beautiful and illustrative, but of what? Printing the author’s name in Arabic invites us to try harder to overcome our gaps in understanding. It’s a start.

In an email to me, Speaker elaborated on the type:

I used Manofa because of its calligraphic look, and because it offers a condensed heavy weight. I wanted a bold, strong, expressive look for Fady’s name, so that it would complement the Arabic script rendering of his name and set with it as one visual unit together. I did offer a version of this cover with the title set in Manofa Medium Condensed as well, but the author preferred Minion for how it reads as more typically Western/English. This book is very much written from a liminal perspective between American and Palestinian perspectives, so the blending of typefaces, with a skew in the direction of Arabic (e.g., title = Western/English, author’s name = English with a calligraphic / Arabic-honoring typeface, author’s name in Arabic = Arabic) speaks directly to the author’s experience as a member of the Palestinian diaspora, speaking to diasporic Palestinians, non-Palestinian Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians all at once—not to limit the audience, but to put a finer point on those whom the book addresses explicitly. The poems arise from these addresses, and address a much larger, more international audience and some astonishingly big subjects (time! nation-building and how it shapes people! love!), but I think it’s safe to say the events that occasioned these poems grows directly out of Fady’s experience as a Palestinian-American.

The Modernist Corpse. Posthumanism and the Posthumous by Erin E. Edwards was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2018.

Edwards reorients critical accounts of modernism by showing that the status of the human and the nonhuman is one of its central concerns. The book explores the porous boundary between the “life” of human and nonhuman bodies in modernism, focusing on works by William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, W.E.B. Du Bois, Rainier Maria Rilke, Mina Loy, Man Ray, director James Whales, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein.

Food and Fashion is a book edited by Melissa Marra-Alvarez and Elizabeth Way and published in January 2023 by Bloomsbury:

[The book] accompanies a major exhibition at The Museum at FIT, New York’s only museum dedicated solely to the art of fashion. This beautifully illustrated book featuring over 100 enticing full-color images, from fashion runways to fine art photography and period cookbooks, examines the influence of food culture through the lens of fashion over the last 250 years.

The cover photo shows a dress by Jeremy Scott for Moschino, fall 2020. The title on the cover is set in IvyMode Regular. Headlines inside book are set in New Century Schoolbook, with Minion for text.