Common Monnem

Today we would like to share with you the “supergraphic” Common Monnem—Together Mannheim by Florian Budke. A large graphic that was installed in Mannheim, Germany, on the public space ALTER.

Mannheim, a medium-sized city, is known for its grid-plan city layout, its baroque palace and its architecture—but also, and above all, for its ethnically and culturally diverse population. This mix of people can be experienced, among other places, in Neckarstadt East and West, two districts northwest of the city centre.

The cultural link between is ALTER, a public space situated next to the Alter Messplatz, which, with its free sports and cultural activities, is a place to meet, pass time, and get together.

A graphic has been installed on a sports pitch at ALTER that tries to express all the positive qualities of this community-creating space: a “supergraphic” that seeks to visually represent and strengthen the existing cohesion of the people and its atmosphere. The project also aims to set a marker for the preservation of public cultural spaces.

The 38 × 16 meters “supergraphic” follows a typographic approach. The oversized lettering “Common” forms the focal point of the graphic. The letters are oriented towards the centre of the pitch—analogous to players who gather together in a circle before a game begins: They hook into each other in a circle and thus form a unit. The colored filling of the spaces in between is meant to reinforce this community-creating image. The lettering is supported by the words “Alter” and “Monnem.”

The intended theme of active togetherness was already present during the realization of this project. Numerous interested people spontaneously responded to the public call for help on a daily basis. Thus, while the super graphic was being created, the declared goal of the project was already being realized: Common Monnem.

Common Monnem

Design: Florian Budke
Area: 520 m², 38 × 16 meters
Created: 2021
Photographs: Marius Heimburger

Find out more about the project here.

Witten Lab Magazine #02

The second issue of the Witten Lab Magazine #02 deals with the topic of networking and connecting. The magazine’s design was made by Stuttgart-based creative agency thekitchen and it was published by WittenLab. Zukunftslabor Studium fundamentale of University Witten/Herdecke.

Witten Lab Magazine #02 is all about connections and networks. The design is a mix of bold color blocking, ligatures, and recombination of diverse typefaces, different structured papers, and text-in-text layouts. The editorial can be read on each page of the magazine. This connects all the pages in the magazine. The cover design creates a pattern, which can be recombined in multiple ways.

The new issue of the magazine just got released in August, 2021. It is a bilingual magazine with German and English texts in a DinA4 format.

Witten Lab Magazine #02

Editors in chief: Johannes Wiek, Lara Perski
Editors: Sebastian Benkhofer, Jonas Brockmann, Renate Buschmann, Gina Graefe, David Hornemann von Laer, Britta Koch, Hannah Kümper, Lara Perski, Guilia Priol, Linda von Velsen, Katja Weber, Johannes Wiek
Art Direction and Design: thekitchen
Publishing: WittenLab. Zukunftslabor Studium fundamentale

Format: 297 mm × 210 mm

The magazine can be downloaded on their website.
A printed magazine can be purchased by donation.
Buy 

Practica Program

Apply until January 23rd, 2022, and join the Practica Program — Typeface Design Course in spring 2022 and dig deeper into typeface design: Spend 14 weeks immersed in the world of type design while surrounded by the support of industry professionals and a community of like-minded typophiles. Students begin the course ready to work on a typeface they’ve begun outside of the program. Through a series of lectures, feedback sessions, Q & A sessions, and mini-workshops, they’ll learn how to expand their typeface through the process of interpolation. They’ll also visit some of the finer points of the craft, like refining their drawing and spacing skills, while also discussing the macro issues, like what makes a typeface successful or how it responds to the culture it springs from. Join spring 2022 and dig deeper into typeface design.

Lead Instructors: Nicole Dotin and Sol Matas
Visiting Instructors for the third edition: Cyrus Highsmith (Occupant fonts), Minjoo Ham (Hypertype Type), Thierry Blancpain (Grilli Type), Sara Soskolne (Hoefler & Co), and Aleksandra Samuļenkova

Several topics will be covered in the course. For example, evaluating fonts using objective and subjective standards. You learn to understand the type design palette and to structure multiweight families, and to create new weights and styles by interpolation. At Practica Program you are taught to extend character sets and design diacritics. You’ll also learn to gain control over the Bézier curves of your glyphs and clean up your font files. You get individual feedback on your typeface and also support from lead instructors outside of class. Participants receive an extended trial license and can purchase their own full license at a discount.

Practica Program

When?
February 22nd to June 7th, 2022
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, 7 p.m. (Berlin), 12 p.m. (Chicago)

Apply now!

All sessions are held live via Zoom. For those unable to attend in real time, lectures will be recorded. The feedback sessions, on the other hand, must be attended live in order to benefit fully from them.

CMYK Typeface

CMYK is the reunion of two things that interest me a lot: modular typography and printed things. From a simple grid, the marks of the printing process, usually invisible in the final products, become modules placed randomly in the construction of the font, thus giving a more expressive and experimental aspect to the design.

Analog Animation “LEGO”

I created these analog motion graphics to find a different approach to the field of animated typography. Going back to the roots of animation with stop motion and creating frame by frame have an huge impact about the aesthetic of the videos. The animations feel much more lively, rougher, have more character through their imperfection. For me, the right counterpart to the same straight computer-generated motion graphics I made during the last years. It’s very refreshing to work on this growing motion series alongside the commissioned projects and to keep exploring new ways to create analog and typographic animations.

Analog Animation “SQUARE”

I created these analog motion graphics to find a different approach to the field of animated typography. Going back to the roots of animation with stop motion and creating frame by frame have an huge impact about the aesthetic of the videos. The animations feel much more lively, rougher, have more character through their imperfection. For me, the right counterpart to the same straight computer-generated motion graphics I made during the last years. It’s very refreshing to work on this growing motion series alongside the commissioned projects and to keep exploring new ways to create analog and typographic animations.

BAMA Exhibition – Branding

BAMA was previously only an internal university code for the joint Bachelor’s and Master’s exhibitions at the end of the semester. But in January 2019 the acronym will become avant-garde exhibition title. The content becomes the topic. And so we communicate the cryptic coding with the audience, the recipient, no – the whole world.

Not only the title is radical reduction, but also the design concept. Because here, too, the content becomes the theme. We present the work of our Bachelor and Master graduates on the largest possible stage. Because they deserve nothing more than the best possible presence. Their works show the diversity of the Communication Design course at Mainz University of

The World’s Best Typography

The beautiful book The World’s Best Typography features over 500 full-color images of international graphic design and type design. It shows the winning designs for the Type Directors Club’s competitions.

The World’s Best Typography is the only awards annual devoted exclusively to typography. It presents the winning designs for the Type Directors Club’s two respected annual competitions: the 67th annual communications design competition (TDC67) and the 24th TDC Typeface Design Competition.

The World’s Best Typography features over 500 full-color images of international graphic design and type design in a wide range of categories, including books, magazines, corporate identities, logos, stationery, annual reports, video and web graphics, and posters. Created each year by a different agency, this year Juan Carlos Pagan of Sunday Afternoon took over the book design.

Type Directors Club members throughout the world receive this publication as part of their annual membership, and everyone is encourage to join the TDC.

The Type Directors Club is the world’s leading global typographic organization. It holds an annual international design competition that celebrates the World’s Best Typography. The international judging panel consists some of the most revered names in the world of graphic design and typography.

The World’s Best Typography–The 42. Annual of the Type Directors Club 2021

Publisher: Verlag Hermann Schmidt
Design: Juan Carlos Pagan of Sunday Afternoon
Language: English
Finishing: Hardcover with high and low embossing and gloss varnish
Release: 2021
Format: 21 × 28 cm
ISBN: 978-3-87439-961-6
Price: € 69.–
Buy

TYPEXCEL – Variable font

Half-day workshop designed for high school students, on the occasion of an open day at the academy of design and visual communication Abadir.
The goal of this workshop was to create a first contact with the graphic design but most of all with typography, using an Excel spreadsheet, therefore a modular grid composed of editable and variable cells, instead of professional software which require specific knowledge.
The cell pattern allow to create letters, icons and glyphs. A stimulating exercise that helped the students to discover and train their own design and creative skills.

We Are Family

We Are Family is an interactive, typographic installation that make use of unsettling images and fragments from found on-line political, brutal, pornographic and other videos to create a new kind of typographic visual language.
Replacing traditional typography with image-based typography re-infuses the letter with endless meanings. Viral, available and widespread images, particularly those viewed by millions of people, focusing on violence, sex and politics, now comprise a new typography. The image functions here as a type of Ready-made that serves as a platform for the new design.

Art vs. Design

Art vs. Design is a typographic installation that make use of certain elements from known artworks to form letterforms.
This work addresses the complex interaction between imagery and typography. How do we handle reading without reading, or deal with typography without typography? In the virtual war that transpires between type and imagery, it appears that the latter wins the battle by knockout. In this aspect, the work demonstrates that, akin to the rumour of the end of books, speculation as to the demise of typography is apparently premature.

Middle E.

Middle E. is a series of screen-printed works of the letter ‘E’ that has absorbed the spirit of a beaten and murderous Middle East.
The E is not (just) a letter; it is an entity, a mood, it is a sponge that has absorbed the spirit of the times. It is the soul of the Middle East, ‘photographed’ at a particular moment. It is my Middle East, that of my ancestors – but now it is battered, burnt, beaten, murderous. Russia and America, Iran and Turkey, what remains of ‘Iraq’ and what remains of ‘Syria’, Kurds, the ‘Islamic State’ and Hezbollah, Shiites, Sunnites, Alawites, Christians and Druze all act in the tragedy that once was called ‘the Arab Spring’… how ironic.
More: https://bit.ly/33h991J

Veining

Veining is a design fiction comprised of a 3d text surgically implanted, integrated into the body’s circulatory system and enhanced via a UV injection of a fluorescent liquid to create a ‘living neon sign’.
In the Veining project I invite you, the viewer, to dream about an alternative future for type – one where text is not confined to a two dimensional existence, viewed merely as an external record of human culture. Instead, I imagine type as an integrated part of ourselves and the living systems that surround us.
These typographic transgressions fuse letters to animate, changeable and embodied systems in ways that give words a whole new communicative power.
More: https://bit.ly/3GskA54

Craft sticks at random

The challenge of this experiment was to generate random compositions using six craft sticks painted in the colors red and white; black and white; and black and red. Each set of sticks was cast a hundred times at random on five different backgrounds, in a total of five hundred images.
Black and white images were chosen to compose the word “pandemonium”. The letters were formed following the alignment of the sticks.The process of photographing the images, tailoring them and positioning them, took a few weeks; the pauses between each activity did not mean the end of the project, but the continuation of a new phase of experimentation.

Typographic collages

Creation of visual compositions that presented the word “pandemonium” from the juxtaposition of letters and symbols identified on posters, leaflets, packaging and objects found on the street.
While working beyond the limits of image resolution, noise and distortion started to appear and were incorporated into the compositions.
Creation is not just about trying to conceive something totally new. Placing elements borrowed from different universes together can result in the creation of new ideas.

adidas analog letters for toolkit

The adidas brand department asked for an analog letter set inspired by handwritten notes. They wanted a letters for a brand communication toolkit, to be used on posters and for web designs. They specifically asked for a feminine style. So I decided feminine is round, bold, strong, loose, dynamic and exiting. A real woman is not perfect, which is the most interesting about her and so are the details (lines overlapping, splashes) of the letters.

Typeface of the Month: Show Me the Mono

The new year has begun and it is time to present you our first Typeface of the Month: Show Me the Mono. It is a monospace typeface from the Berlin-based type foundry Mota Italic.

Show Me the Mono began in Mumbai, India, in 2020 at the start of the pandemic. It was initially intended to be a fun distraction from the hard lockdown (“hard” as in not leaving a tiny studio apartment for almost six months). After a few months of focused work, the fonts were well underway, but nowhere near complete. To help get the newest fonts onto designer’s computers quicker, Mota Italic began their Beta Fonts Program in May 2020. This allows customers early access to WIP designs at lower prices; and, of course, early licenses also include all future updates for free. By its final release on December 31st, 2021, Show Me the Mono had five rounds of beta font updates.

Monospaced fonts are often assumed to be intended for coding. However, there are already enough other great fonts for this purpose, and Show me the Mono is not ideal for the programming category. Even though it is quite clear, simple, and legible, there are many idiosyncrasies (and an extra offbeat italic companion) that make it more fitting for quirkier tasks than for coding. It’s best suited for general design purposes like texts in magazines, catalogs, posters, or websites. It would be right at home working for a wide range of cultural institutions, art galleries, or funky startups. The first beta version was unexpectedly used for the branding of a food nutritionist. There will be no shortage of imaginative uses you will surely find for these fonts.

Contrary to most of Mota Italic’s other font families, this design has “only” the Latin script—yet it is still super extensive and supports more than 400 languages. And while the family is compact with six individual weights, the two additional variable fonts let you also access every other weight between the Extra Light and Extra Black. Further customizations can be accessed via eleven stylistic sets, as well as many other OpenType features to help create flexible and advanced typography.

Beyond the cornucopia of letters, there are also heaps of useful and funny emojis, arrows, symbols, shapes, and misc extras. There’s so much to discover inside these fonts, it’s difficult to concisely cover everything. We’ve not yet even mentioned the four sets of enclosed letters and their simplified diacritics that can typeset all the supported languages. This is truly a fun typeface to use and will inspire your creativity while hopefully also distracting you from the never-ending pandemic.

Typeface of the Month: Show Me the Mono

Foundry: Mota Italic
Designer: Rob Keller
Release: 2021
File Formats: .OTF, .WOFF2, Variable .TTF + WOFF2
Weights: 6 + Italics
Price 2 Packs: € 60.–
Price 4 Packs: € 99.–
Price Full Family: € 199.–
Light + Light Italic are free
Buy

Palinopsia

Palinopsia (Greek [pælɪˈnəʊpɪə]: palin = again and opsia = seeing) is an animated typography experiment that challenges commonly held notions of legibility.

In this exercise the circular shapes animate along paths to complete the form of known glyphs, leaving visual artifacts. Since individual letters will never appear complete at any given moment the viewer is required to focus in a way that is foreign to the usual act of reading.

A new kind of “reading” however can be achieved with a rapid succession of individual letters where the viewer remembers the previous letters to form the intended word. Resulting in a process similar to when a child first learns to read.