Typographics is an annual festival held in New York City that explores the roots of modern typography and current trends in the field. It is presented by Type@Cooper and The Herb Lubalin Study Center at The Cooper Union in New York City.

The identity of the 2024 edition uses a rich palette of typefaces. Boogy Brut (including the Poster, Wild White and Black White styles) from Julien Priez and Bureau Brut, Pastiche Grotesque from Benjamin Tuttle and Order Type Foundry, Konop from Mark Simonson and Hamilton Wood Type Foundry, Dark Academia (Céline’s Version) from Céline Hurka, and Baleze Display from Daytona Mess.

Hercule Studio is a French premium brand dedicated to original designer sporting goods. Driven by a shared passion for well-being and design, they set out to revolutionize the sports world by prioritizing emotion and aesthetics over mere functionality. Their “Exercise Beautifully” philosophy combines design, creativity, and expert craftsmanship, ensuring each product re-enchants the workout experience.

The identity uses an H composed in the BBWB (Boogie Brut Wild) typeface and a wordmark in ABC Ginto Nord. Grand Slang is used for headlines and Ginto Nord for body copy. Based on the myth of the twelve Labors of Hercules, we imagined eleven variations of the H emblem, symbolizing different areas of expression and research for the brand: creativity, aestheticism, timelessness, know-how, sensoriality, durability, desirability, design, well-being, energy, rigor and collective spirit. They are used to design patterns for the textile design of the mattresses.

Photo studio IGO is “specialised in still life with absurd and subtle components”. Alongside their photographic projects, the studio created IGOLOGIE, an experimental lab where you can find objects, books and prints. Their last project Artificially Still is the meeting between their practice and artificial intelligence generating images. From their webshop:

We asked Mid Journey to blend our photos to create something new. And then we designed a photo poster book with 20 two-sided A4 paper format.

The cover of the book is composed in Sigurd (Blaze Type). The studio/publisher logo is based on BBWB (Bureau Brut).

25 Arts Seconde – L’Art à l'Ecran is a festival for screening artists’ films, organized annually by the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (CWB) in Paris. The catalog for the first cycle in 2020 was designed by Joanna Starck, who comments:

Its textured cover, its singer couture binding as well as its hybrid and contemporary typographic character create a setting that already allows to glimpse the singularity of the projections presented.

For the second edition 2021, Starck employed the same basic design featuring Boogy Brut Poster, BBWB, and Neue Haas Grotesk, but now with a black-on-white cover.

What was the societal impact of the CD when it arrived?

Souterrain Records is a music label that is going to use only this musical support to produce the music of its artists. Through the release of the album Six pieds sous terre (“six feet under”), the label will demonstrate how we can create an experience with this object.

The publication includes several formats – a compact disc, an essay and a scarf; the type selection is eclectic as well. Nevertheless, the whole gives the impression of unity because everything is done in a similar red-black-and-white color palette.

For the latest LP of Belgian Metal musician Marc De Backer (aka MNGLT or Mongolito), Atelier AAAAA used a collection of typefaces mixed together in a surprising harmony, accentuated by the monochromatic black printing on a linen cover.

MNGLT’s logo is set in a fake-Hebrew typeface, DS Sholom, which he has been using since at least his 2012 album Acedia. The LP’s title, Pure, as well as most information is set in multiple widths of Jérémy Landes' NaN Success Titling, while smaller credits show both Julien Priez' Boogy Brut and Boogy Brut Wild Black, both chosen for legibility reasons, albeit opposite ones. Overall, a very calligraphic energy leaks out this collection of four different type families.

It can be noted that Priez and Landes are former classmates of the Estienne type design program in Paris.

Cover painting by Valère Bernard, 1898. Photo by Sarah C. Artwork by Atelier AAAAA. Sikscreen by La Défaite.

[More info on Discogs]

Self-initiated posters for the 1979 album All Of Me by Masayoshi Takanaka. I worked with different elements of the Pacific Ocean in reference to the original design of the album.

Koto’s Los Angeles studio sits smack-bang in the middle of the most car-heavy place on earth. Everyone has something we’d rather be doing than sitting in traffic: knitting, fishing, paintballing—or finding time to meticulously set type.

Signals In My Head is DJ Manny’s debut for Planet Mu, an electronic music label based in Hove, UK. The black and white album art features the release title composed in BBWW (Boogy Brut Wild Black). This display typeface was designed by French calligrapher and type designer Julien Priez aka Boogy Paper, in collaboration with Bureau Brut: a small graphic design studio and type foundry based in Toulouse, France. From the typeface information on their website:

The “Wild” versions are designed like initials: far from the traditional “quest for legibility”, they tread the boundaries between graphic design and pure art.

The jerky rhythm and the bold expressiveness of Boogy Brut Wild Black curves matches perfectly with DJ Manny footwork sound and atmosphere. On Bandcamp Daily, July 27 2021, Miles Bowe reviews Signals in my Head:

Footwork is defined by movement. That movement is often captured in dizzying rhythms and dance battles, but what’s just as important to the Chicago genre is its constant evolution. […]

Manny has long favored smoky, subdued sounds, but he goes further on Signals In My Head, rewiring footwork as something intensely intimate, even romantic. […] Flowing alongside the footwork highlights are stylistic curveballs, like the breakbeat-heavy title track, house banger “Club GTA,” and the DJ Phil collab “Havin’ Fun,” which flings zany vocal samples and a vertigo-inducing sub bass.

The artist name and catalog code are set in a yet unidentified grotesk. [edit: It’s ABC Diatype, see comments.]

Flower Power is a collection of unique T-shirts designed by Martès in collaboration with Boogypaper and Bureau Brut.

This joint work emerges from the original typeface Boogy Brut which is the very core of the project. The aim was to expand its horizons by developing a whole apparel series around its formal features, and cultivating a cross-disciplinary practice while combining everyone’s expertise.

The set makes use of various styles of Boogy Brut in multiple weights and sizes, including Boogy Brut Poster as well as Boogy Brut Wild Black and Boogy Brut Wild White.

From Yoan de Roeck:

Football club Paris Saint-Germain was founded in 1970, successing the historic football club of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, installed at the Parc des Princes stadium. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of “the youngest of the greatest football clubs” an editorial team was assembled with the goal of telling the history of PSG from its supporters’ point of view. The result, extraordinary in terms of volume and content (over 500 full-text pages plus 4 four-colour inserts showing pictures selected from the club’s archives – most of them appearing for the first time in print), was published by publisher Solar Éditions in November 2020.

The density of information and a huge amount of statistical data (prize list, result tables) forced some of the very first design decisions: working with two distinct typefaces and two distinct colors.

As the budget allowed duotone on whole pages, traditional black ink was replaced with the club's historical dark blue. A pure red is chosen as secondary tint, alluding to the vertical stripe added on shirts by fashion designer Daniel Hechter, president of PSG, in 1973 – a visual device inspired by a decorative branding on a Ford Mustang he had seen once!

Meanwhile, selecting the pair of typefaces followed simple criteria: a functional and horizontally thrifty serif as a text face and a sans serif dedicated to quantitative data, playing very opposite roles (bold and condensed, almost always set in red and all caps).

Since the sans serif is only used in small sizes within tables (dates, scores, etc.), its formal details are less relevant than its general behaviour: Berthold’s Akzidenz-Grotesk (Condensed) was finally selected, because its shapes were as far removed as possible from those of Futura, the corporate typeface of the CANAL+ group, who owned the club during the 1990s and until 2006. In addition, AG brought a nice surprise: the eternal letter spacing problem posed by its 1 and the upper serif of its 7 gave it a touch of retro jersey numbers…

The serif type had to include at least two stylistic sets of figures (to distinguish between dates and scores, of which there are many in the book) and have a strong contrast in size between capitals and small caps (for sporting clubs acronyms, in particular). Furthermore, this typeface had to support as many languages as possible to enable the transcription of the name and surname of players from all over the world.

Of course, many contemporary typefaces meet such technical requirements, so we needed other criteria to select the right one. The list of 500 players running over 15 pages at the end of the book informed the final choice of Boogy Brut. The initial letters that punctuate the listing from A to Z had to visually stand out, and instead of increasing weight or size, we chose to invite a third component to the party: a powerful and extroverted blackletter, with no obligation of legibility. Blackletter is naturally a nod to the bad-boy tattoos flaunted when goal scorers lift their shirt in front of supporters.

When Boogy Brut was first launched, it was the first typeface to offer a set of drop caps based on a different historical source from the text weights it accompanies. It is therefore killing two birds with one stone, a perfect roman for the constraints of the text and its Wild Black version for the drop caps.

In addition, the Poster White version is logically used for the titles of the chapter opening pages.

Magazine title set in SangBleu Empire, number in SangBleu Courtesan, subtitle in TheW Clan ODB and fine print in Suisse Int’l.

In the third issue of Type Life, Swiss Typefaces take a look beyond their own work and celebrate contemporary type made by others. The Swiss design studio compiled a selection of their favorite typefaces, licensed the fonts and used them to design a magazine. The resulting specimen of “Non-Swiss Typefaces We Like 1569–2018” comes with a text by Florian Hardwig (Fonts In Use) and is visually enriched with works by lettering artist Julien Priez (boogypaper).

Type Life 3 showcases 19 fonts from 19 international foundries: 29Letters, Adobe Type, Commercial Type, CSTM Fonts, Dinamo Typefaces, DSType, Extrabrut.Shop, Future Fonts, Hoefler & Co., Letters From Sweden, Linotype, Milieu Grotesque, Or Type, Production Type, Sharp Type, Sportsfonts.com, The Enschedé Font Foundry, Typotheque, and Velvetyne Typefoundry. The selection is a representative sample for the diversity in type design and gives an illuminating overview of the current scene. While the majority of the fonts was released in the past few years, many draw inspiration from all kinds of sources from previous eras. There is blackletter, script, slab serif, sans serif, and more. This – a stress on newness, historical references, and a vast stylistic plurality – reflects three major trends in today’s typography, as Florian Hardwig points out in his introduction. Other recurring themes that he identifies as being symptomatic for 2018 include highly conceptual projects and a quest for extreme aesthetics. At the same time there are functional fonts designed to solve specific problems. Just like the fonts, the type designers who created them have diverse backgrounds, in terms of geography, or how they entered the field. The represented distribution models range from traditional licensing to subscriptions, free and open-sourced fonts, as well as experimental or even unfinished releases.

Each issue of Type Life features a guest contributor. This time it’s the up-and-coming French lettering artist Julien Priez. A graduate of École Estienne, Paris, he’s a member of the international collective High on Type, best known for organizing the annual festival All Eyes on Type. Priez gives workshops at various schools and is an instructor at the prestigious TypeParis program. His work oscillates between the analog and the digital. Alphabets are first calligraphed, then cut in wood, and eventually digitized. Priez is just as comfortable painting meter-high letters with a triple brush on a wood fence as he is animating ornate pixel letters with kaleidoscopic patterns. Type Life #3 shows a range of his repertoire, starting with a still from his animated Nightmare Alphabet and two of his in-progress fonts Boogyroma and Boogylink on the cover. Mandinor Gothic is used to render the word “KING” on top of a kinetic gesture. The next page answers with “KONG”, in letterforms that pay homage to Jean Midolle’s Alphabet Lapidaire Monstre from 1835. With such historical references and the stunning stylistic versatility, Priez’ work is a perfect fit for the content of this issue.

At a whopping 40 pages, Type Life 3 is the most substantial issue so far. It’s printed in three Pantone spot colors plus silver and black, on two different paper stocks including transparent paper.

“Dream” set in Boogyroma and “Chasers” set in Boogylink, two in-progress typefaces by Julien Priez. Foundry names set in TheW Clan GZA by Swiss Typefaces. The caption that mentions the typefaces is set in Suisse Int’l Condensed.

Essay, set in SangBleu Republic (body text) and Suisse Int’l Mono (streamers, side notes). The green type on the left and at the very top of the right page is KOPYME As Uzual.

Galapagos (Felix Salut, Dinamo) and Xprmntal 01 (CSTM Fonts) visiting each other’s page. Typeface names (top) are in KRSNA. In the margins left and right, the foundry names are set in stacked letters from KOPYME (Swiss Typefaces).

Winner (Sportsfonts.com) × Quarto (Hoefler & Co.)

A pattern of Patron (Milieu Grotesque) with a guest appearance by Vincent (Letraset) is juxtaposed with a collage featuring elements from a Caslon Old Face specimen by H.W. Caslon & Co. from 1924.

On the left, a page from the book Il perfetto Scrittore Di M. Gio. Francesco Cresci, Italy, 16th century. On the right, (raster) pattern tiles are mixed with Frank Adebiaye’s Montchauve (Velvetyne).

Perfil (DSType) and Cardinal (Production Type). Cameo: Magnificat.

Julien Priez’ Mandinor Gothic in combination with his lettering.

Pattern by Julien Priez, printed in fluorescent and metallic ink.

Separat (Gunmad, OR Type) on the left, and Azal (Pascal Zoghbi, 29 Letters) as well as a tag lettering on the right hand.

Times Europa (Linotype) vs. Line (Letters from Sweden), with interventions by Good Vibrations and Block Up (Letraset).

Type that looks like it cannot be moved, and type that looks like it couldn’t sit still for a second: Berton Hasebe’s Styrene (Commercial Type) and Jérémy Landes’ Digestive (Triple Studio).

Thesaurus Display (Typotheque) × Respira Black (Sharp Type)

Feature page with Benoît Brun’s Shakotan (work in progress), printed in neon spot color.

On the left, a selection of A monograms (mostly dating back to the 15th and 16th century) shine through their overlying page with a big silver A set in Bram de Does’ Lexicon No. 2 (The Enschedé Font Foundry).

Pull quote in SangBleu Sunrise, printed in silver metallic ink.

Back cover with a sneak preview of the upcoming KOPYME and SuisseU.