W magazine, March 2019, “Director’s Cut”
Tying in with its famous collaborations, W magazine produced a special issue called “Director’s Cut”. For this edition, the magazine invited four film directors – Alfonso Cuaròn, Yorgos Lanthimos, Spike Lee, and Marielle Heller – to create a cinematic photoshoot staging actresses they consider as their muses. This led to four different stories where cinema and fashion go hand in hand.
For the four covers, art directors Cian Browne and Jeff Burch chose Proto Grotesk Mono from Production Type. This monospaced version calls to mind what movie scripts used to look like when they were still typed with a typewriter: we immediately fall into the imagery of film, turning the photos into stills.
Proto Grotesk Mono is here mostly visible in caps, where we see some softer details that make up its originality: Where lowercase letters exhibit an assumed mechanical aesthetic, the lightness of the curved capital letters add a humanistic touch to the typeface design. This reinterpretation of monospaced types offers a contemporary perspective, while still keeping their legacy going.
