Tutto il mio amore (“All My Love”) contains a corpus of poems written with the help of I.L.Y. (an acronym for I Love You, 2021), an artificial intelligence trained by Numero Cromatico to write love poems. Tutto il mio amore is part of the Rètina collection and the second volume of a trilogy, made up of Poesie sulla fine (“Poems About the End”) and Il futuro è qui, da qualche parte (“The future is here, somewhere”).

The book measures 13×19.5 cm, runs to 128 pages and is written in Italian. It was Risograph printed on Favini recycled paper.

Nick Sakagami’s Sushi Master: An expert guide to sourcing, making, and enjoying sushi at home was first published in 2019. The 2023 edition, designed in-house at Quarto and published in their Chartwell Books imprint, features Epitaph by Frere-Jones Type for the title design. The secondary typefaces are Martin Majoor’s Scala Italic and Underware’s Auto.

Author Nick Sakagami is the only person outside of Japan to earn the designation osakana meister, or fish master. In this book he shares his vast knowledge of all things sushi, including sourcing, evaluating, and preparing fish, plus delicious recipes for sushi, soups, vegetable dishes, and more, that are perfect for the home cook.

Front cover and spine

A limited edition hardback for the 2023 publication of Crooked in the Car Seat, a playscript that was written and staged in 1970s Ireland. The book was published by Duras Press and contains an introduction by the playwright Brian Lynch and a preface by the author Colm Tóibín. The cover was printed in single colour on Colourplan Hot Pink.

The title is a reference to a scene in the play in which a character drunkenly mishears the words of Van Morrison’s “Cyprus Avenue” – And I’m conquered in a car seat, And I’m staring straight at you. The song is about attraction and unattainable love and these themes are reflected throughout the play.

The three bars that reveal the photo on the cover are representative of the original lyrics that are misheard:

Conquered
in a
Car Seat

The typeface Castle was chosen for the title as it was a good representation of humanist sans serifs of the time. The cut used was produced by URW in 1985, but is a close match for the original version produced in the 1960s. A similar typeface was used on the programme for the 1979 production that was staged as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival that year (see an image of the original programme at the end of this post).

The main interior pages are typeset in Scala and Scala Sans by Susan Waine of Ashfield Press, later including Castle for section headings. Nexus Typewriter (designed by Martin Majoor) was chosen as the secondary typeface on the cover and then carried through on several interior styles (subheads, running heads and captions).

A monospaced typeface that emulated a typewriter-style seemed the natural choice for reproducing a playscript that would have been originally created on a manual typewriter. Luckily, in this context, Nexus works well with Scala (also designed by Majoor).

Flat open cover

Interior spread

Original programme for the 1979 production that was staged as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. The fonts in use are Helvetica Bold, the Selectric version of Univers, and what looks like a phototype version of either Castle or Optima for the title.

Scala is paired with custom lettering for a booklet (in English and Turkish) about Erol Ata’s Clock Museum. 60 Yılın Ardından Anıları ve Zamanı Biriktirmek (“60 years of collecting memories and time”) presents his private collection of clocks, as shown in the headquarters of Ersa in Ankara (Türkiye).

In 2020, Wout de Vringer handled the book design for Borealis: trees and people of the northern forest. The project was initiated by photographer Jeroen Toirkens and journalist Jelle Brandt Corstius, who travelled to these forests, looking for the stories of the people living there. Their mission turned into eight very different journeys, to Norway, Scotland, Canada, Japan, Alaska, and Russia. The book was published in conjunction with the exhibitions Borealis, life in the woods at Fotomuseum Den Haag, the Netherlands, and Anchorage Museum, Alaska, United States. A limited cassette edition was produced as a crowdfunding project.

The light weight of the paper creates beautiful transparencies and makes the grid of images and text appear, reminiscent of the delicacy of snow. The typography pairs BVH Baldinger with Scala.

“The event design of the exhibition, posters, leaflets, merchandise, window lettering, catalog and website were designed by Studio ItYt in collaboration with designer Ilina Catana, who went for a typographic solution.

In particular, they used two very different fonts which are paired in each of the media, and which shape the visual identity. On one hand there’s the angular, radical font BRRR by Swiss Typefaces, on the other hand the seriffed FF Scala, designed by Martin Majoor.

ItYt’s Melanie Rosenauer and Kiriakoula Kremantzouli explain that within the printed matter, ‘texts and images are crowded together and fill the available space, type is rotated or set vertically, images are placed without gutter, they tilt or bleed off the page.’ This approach creates whitespace and areas of high density.

The title ‘In Your Face’ is presented in stacked initials, giving rise to a vertical typographical axis that is picked up in all media. This axis is just as idiosyncratic, irritating and immediate as the photographs shown.” — Sabine Danek, PAGE

Many of the academic books published by Manchester University Press are set in Photina, the seminal typeface created by the late French typedesigner José Mendoza y Almeida in 1966–1971. This example, The Trial in History, was first published in two hardback volumes in 2003. Coinicidentally, the book covers use the FF Scala series by Martin Majoor, who co-authored the monograph about Mendoza (Ypsilon Éditeur, 2010), together with Sébastien Morlighem.

The books were typeset by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong, and printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton.

Unfortunately, the digital Photinas don’t come with proportionally spaced lining numerals. Here this shows in “1200–1700” where the tabular 1 leaves a gap in the year dates. Photina MT is equipped with an alternate 1 with smaller sidebearings, but it is PUA-encoded and as such hard to access and of little use.

The table of contents feature Photina’s much-lauded italics for the author names, economically set inline and separated from the titles by a larger whitespace.

Levande Litteratur, the classics imprint of Swedish publisher Natur & Kultur, is now entering its eight decade of print. Their current run of quality hardbacks share a template introduced in 2006 with the reprint of Dante Alighieri’s literary masterpiece The Divine Comedy.

The volumes feature a consistent, classical proportion among all its titles, with interiors slightly modified to fit. Large illustrations occupy most of the covers, featuring historic interpretations of the different works. Majoor’s Scala once again proves to be the go-to for digital neo-classical typesetting, a simultaneously modern canonical ethos. Instead of a blurb, a famous passage greets and inspired the aspirant reader.

Following the lead of the website that came before, Janet Vicario used Platform for the printed version of Atlas Obscura, with the slightly modified logo for the title.

Laser engraved maple wood skateboards by Old Skateboards, with a combination of different fonts, 1800s style. Creative Direction: RM Sulzbach, Michael Frick. Text: Tom Zeller

The Interstate family is the main sans serif typeface used in AQUA magazine. It was especially highlighted in this issue. Interstate has been an outstandingly versatile font and all styles from Compressed, Condensed and Regular are often used in the same issue. FF Scala also appears as the body face on a few pages.

Book designed inside and out by Quemadura, which is apparently a one-person effort by Jeff Clark of Ypsilanti, Michigan.

The advance program (in English and Spanish) for the 1995 conference of the Association Typographique Internationale. The logo is by Javier Mariscal and the rest of the booklet was probably designed by his studio as well.

Read two opposing views of that year’s event from Allan Haley and Albert-Jan Pool. The ATypI conference returns to Barcelona this year.

Detail: Seria and the upright Seria Italic

Detail: The manicules indicate releases of 2014. All these hands and many more can be found in FF Scala. “Most of the hands […] are based on those employed by Bruce Rogers.” — Martin Majoor

via Martin Majoor and @Kioskfonts

Book design for the 15 year anniversary of Wiertz Personeelsdiensten (employment agency). The book is titled “Een Terugblik Op Vooruitzien” (Dutch), in English it would sound like “Looking Back To Looking Forward”.

An important part of the book's identity is a subtle design combination of the FF Scala Serif and the FF Nexus Sans font. The bolder Nexus Sans (bold) on top of the more classic FF Scala Serif (regular) – by using transparent gradients – creates a modern and colourful touch. 

Magazine published in Geneva, Switzerland for owners of Patek Philippe timepieces.
Brief history of Max Miedinger's creation by Michael Naumann.
Art Director: William Scott

Readmill is an e-book reader with “social features”. (The app is in invite-only beta, but the developers have offered Fonts In Use readers a batch of invites.) Sharing the books you’re reading, especially discussing excerpts with friends, is a swell idea, but what excites me most about Readmill is its thoughtful design. The brand is a lesson in how to create a consistent experience across multiple devices.

A book detail page from the Readmill website. Click to enlarge.

The library screen from the Readmill iPad app. Click to enlarge.

The website and app are a uniformly pleasant experience with elegant typographic touches on nearly every page and screen. This is due in large part to FF Scala. The typeface, served as a webfont, is used throughout the website for all text, and embedded in the iPad app for all UI elements and the book text itself. This makes Scala an integral part of the Readmill identity.

The digital Bembo (Adobe, 1990), a typeface frequently used for book text, is much more delicate than FF Scala, often falling apart on even the printed page, let alone low-res screens.

The small caps from FF Scala Sans supplement its serif companion throughout the site and app. Used for UI elements and small labels and other bits of text, the font offers sufficient but not jarring contrast to Scala.

As for the reader itself, Readmill keeps things simple:

There isn’t an infinite number of fonts, margins, line-heights and number of columns to choose from. We have taken everything we have learned so far into consideration and made three options: small, medium or large.

Readmill offers three type sizes, but the amount of text per line remains the same, resulting in a very narrow column.
Click to see at actual size.

In theory, I admire this approach. Just because e-books let the user format text however they want, doesn’t mean one should overwhelm them with options. Unfortunately, I can’t agree with all of Readmill’s decisions. The linespacing is good, generous but not too airy. You’re forced into full justification — a mistake Apple made with iBooks and corrected later by offering a (albeit hidden) ragged right option — but there is hyphenation, keeping word spaces generally even. The bigger problem is Readmill’s fairly narrow line length that is the same in all three text sizes. It seems like the designers are overcompensating for the excessive line lengths one gets in other readers when reducing the font size. The measure they chose is ok for short passages — like those we read on the web — but it’s too narrow for book text. An ideal page would have a font size between Readmill’s small and medium with 50% smaller margins. Hopefully they’ll consider this in a future version.

The good news is that Readmill has none of the silly physical metaphors that plague iBooks. The standard view is free of page turning animations, binding curve effects, or edges of a fake book cover. All you see are simple setting and navigation buttons in the top margin and a position indicator at the bottom. With a tap, even those bits disappear and you are left with nothing but the text. There is no landscape view yet, but with the app in early stages of development I’m sure it’s not far off.

The Readmill logo, designed by Viet Cuong Truong, uses FF Super Grotesk, an interpretation of an East German design by Arno Drescher. With angled terminals on a few of its caps and alternate humanist ‘a’ and ‘g’, Super Grotesk is a warmer Futura. In fact, Super Grotesk was the DDR’s Futura as the original was unavailable in that part of Germany.