Occasionally I get trumped by my expectations. The striking double-exposed photograph of a goat’s head is what initially drew me to the cover of Bruiser, the third album for British indie rock band The Duke Spirit. However it was the type that puzzled me. At first I thought it might be Akzidenz-Grotesk Light Condensed (too square) or Titling Gothic Condensed Light (R too square, S too round). After trying the lesser-known TV Nord Condensed Light I went through our entire list of other News/Trade Gothic alternatives, but still couldn’t pin this one down. The key was the curvature of the spine of the “S”, the height of the waist of the “R”, the not too square/not too round quality of the bowls and the balanced character of the letter forms.

Eventually it struck me that this “simply” is FF DIN Condensed Light, which frankly made me feel like a fool for not recognising it immediately. This is because I originally learned to know the DIN faces as technical and slightly awkward designs in one medium weight and two widths. Albert-Jan Pool improved and dramatically expanded them into today’s immensely popular super family counting five weights in regular and Condensed widths, all with matching italics, and five Round weights.

To make everything a little more confusing some versions of the album sleeve, as well as the cover for the single Surrender for example, trade in FF DIN Condensed for the equally popular Agency FB. This revival is based on a single-weight narrow square sans serif designed in 1932 by Morris Fuller Benton, reworked into a family of also 25 styles by David Berlow (and is a lot easier to identify).

Rational type families with a clear methodology in the succession of weights and widths make typesetting more reliable and predictable. Yet I will always have a soft spot for vintage designs with a little quirk. For example the gaps in the range of weights and widths in Monotype Grotesque force you to think out of the box and work a little harder. Similarly the differences in design between the lighter and the heavier weights of Beton can make the use of this geometric slab serif quite surprising. In the same genre Memphis also has something unexpected – for example the ear of the lowercase “r” becomes a circle in the Bold and Extra Bold weights.

Memphis is used to set the artist’s name on the album sleeve for In Case You Didn’t Know, the second album for the 2009 X Factor (UK) runner-up Olly Murs featuring Rizzle Kicks and Jester as guests. I would have preferred a contemporary alternative like FF Ernestine, Lexia or Kulturista. Although the design is not exceptional, I like that a typographic solution was used for such a mainstream release. The letters cut out in the coloured pages in the background lend the artwork a playful atmosphere which suits the boyish looks of the singer.

White Alternate Gothic No. 1 reversed out of a photograph of off-white paper. What more would you need for an EP called Nothing by Zomby?

Stade 2 is the fourth studio album of Mr. Oizo, pseudonym for French electronic musician and film director Quentin Dupieux – the posters for his latest film Rubber were discussed in the ScreenFonts episode of March & April 2011. The artwork is by Parisian graphic designer/animator So Me (Bertrand Lagros de Langeron), the art director for Ed Banger Records. He already has been featured here on The FontFeed and on Unzipped as he produces very interesting music videos.

Art aficionados will have noticed the illustration on the album sleeve is an homage to David Hockney‘s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). Album title and artist name are truly hand lettered (repeating characters are not identical) in a Century-style serif face, outlined and shaded.

Gary Numan can barely be seen in the photograph on Dead Son Rising, his album of songs that grew from unused demos from his previous works. The image was taken by Ed Fielding. He explains in an interview with Quiet City that working with the veteran new wave artist was a dream come true. Having always been a fan of Numan’s work, Fielding had the opportunity of shooting one of his shows at Leeds for a local webzine. After seeing these photographs online, Gary’s manager – and producer of Dead Son Rising – Ade Fenton asked Fielding to collaborate on his project Artificial Perfect. Gary Numan saw the work and liked the concept, and through this Fielding ended up working closely with Numan.

As Dead Son Rising was Fielding’s first major album with Gary and something he wanted to be proud of, it was a real challenge. Before he heard any of the music, he had a gut feeling that he wanted to shoot in an asylum – the brief was to find a place that was bleak/industrial/barren/sinister. There were some safety concerns during the shoot because the asylum had been closed for a number of years and the place was quite run down and unsafe in areas. There were many rooms and corridors to explore, so the challenge was to get the images safely. On top of that the shoot also was done in winter, so it was very cold and damp with lots of standing around for hours. The resulting images proved to be worth the effort, and can be explored in the CD booklet of the album.

The typography on the Dead Son Rising album sleeve is nicely done. It is set in what looks to be blurred News Gothic caps, with a mirrored N, as well as mirrored 2s and a 3 substituting for the S and E respectively. There’s just the right amount of these substitutions; more would have been overdoing it. A simple red dot above the text provides the finishing touch.

Undun, the 13th studio album by The Roots is a concept album about the life of Redford Stephens, a fictional character who gets involved with drugs. The photograph gracing its sleeve is by Jamel Shabazz, a photographer, lecturer and teacher of the visual arts, whose work spans decades. Shabazz has been documenting the Urban Life for over 30 years. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY he picked up his first camera at the age of 15 and proceeded to record the world around him. Jamel has drawn inspiration from the great James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa, Chester Higgins and Eli Reed.

The type is unassuming, centred in the “blank” sky area of this beautiful image. Yet I think there really was no need to resort to tired default faces like Adobe Caslon and Helvetica. Even when working with a classic-looking image contemporary faces work perfectly well.

The artwork for Johnny Foreigner vs Everything, the fourth full-length album for British rockers Johnny Foreigner was created by the band’s long-time visual media assassin Lewes Herriot. The overpainted image features Herriot’s signature ghost figures, like creepy rejects from a twisted Pac Man game. Matching the darkly cartoonish atmosphere, the album title was hand lettered in an elongated upright script and shaded sans caps similar to FF Prater Block.

The album cover for their Danger Mouse-produced seventh studio album El Camino is as straightforward as the music of The Black Keys, with the type in extruded sans caps.

On This One’s for Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark Shawn Colvin, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Lyle Lovett, Willie Nelson, Ron Sexsmith, Kevin Welch, John Townes Van Zandt II, and The Trishas are just some of the singers who contributed to this two-disc tribute to Texan singer-songwriter Guy Clark. I had to call in the help of Typophile’s deadly efficient Type Identification Board to find out the sans caps were Nick Shinn’s Sense. This family is one half of a type system built around a cultural axis, with a modern (Sense; minimalist) and an old style (Sensibility; humanist) variant positioned as the poles of the sans serif genre.

A couple of years ago extremely bold display faces with (almost) disappearing counters were all the rage. Their popularity has waned a little, but they still occasionally pop up on posters, covers and album sleeves. An example of this style can be seen on Back to Love, the fourth release for the soul singer Anthony Hamilton featuring production from Babyface, James Poyser, Kelvin Wooten, and Salaam Remi. The angular typeface is Radomir Tinkov’s Tenshu, which could be mistaken for a seventies design.

The alternate poster for We Bought a Zoo – discussed in the most recent instalment of ScreenFonts – was “Jónsified” for the original soundtrack composed by the Sigur Rós singer Jon Thor Birgisson. The tree-with-animal-paws motif was placed on a textured background, Interstate was swapped for a distressed narrow sans, and smudgy handwriting was added. All these little changes alter the atmosphere just right to match the mood of Jónsi’s ethereal and poetic music.

After having been spotted on the cover for Peter Wolf Crier’s Garden of Arms two episodes ago, Michael Cina’s art shows up again, this time on Headcage, Matthew Dear’s four track EP produced with Van Rivers and the Subliminal Kid. Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Verlag, originally created for the Guggenheim Museum, perfectly suits the subdued and art-like lay-out. Their website explains that this geometric sans was inspired by both rationalist designs of the Bauhaus school, such as Futura and Erbar, and newsier sans serifs such as Tempo and Metro/Geometric 415.

The album cover for This Means War, the third album for the Ohio metal band Attack Attack! which mixes electronic elements in its sound, is appropriately gritty. The double A monogram reminds me of the New Deal typography that was discussed in the June 2009 episode of ScreenFonts. A number of typefaces have similar square capital As – Futura Display, FF Moderne Gothics, Refrigerator Deluxe, MVB Solano Gothic Retro and so on. The band name underneath is set in Brothers with Stylistic Alternates activated. On the FontShop website these can be previewed simply by collapsing the Controls (the cog symbol), which gives access to the available OpenType features.

I couldn’t care less about Futura used on the album sleeve for A Different Kind of Fix, the third album for British rock band Bombay Bicycle Club, produced by Ben Allen along with contributions from Jim Abbiss and Jack Steadman. No, I am fascinated by the pseudo-scientific illustration, like an anatomic plate from a magical parallel universe. Brighton illustrator Katie Scott created this artistic impression of the brain, oesophagus and nasal passage, as well as the drawing on the CD disc itself and other covers for the band. Like Dummy magazine explains, Katie visualises alien and human forms in minute detail through anatomical and nature-themed illustrations, some intended to be more accurate interpretations than others. Her work hints at 50s science book diagrams and H.G. Wells novels, while her sketchbook drawings are hilariously dry but still awesome to look at.

The cover for Emotional Traffic – Tim McGraw’s last album on Curb Records, originally completed in 2010 and featuring Ne-Yo as a guest – had me laugh out loud. Instead of having a genuine quote from an actual review, the country singer put “My best album ever” in ITC Franklin Gothic Extra Compressed on the album cover, a quote by… himself. As if he was going to say anything else!? What a ridiculous thing to do. The script is Brisa.

Another country album, another forgettable mainstream album sleeve. The only thing worth mentioning on 100 Proof by American Idol contestant Kellie Pickler is Richard Lipton’s elegant Sloop Script, which comes in two styles of capitals and three styles of ascenders and descenders. The designer could at least have mixed them up a little for a more lively and sophisticate appearance.

On Area 52 producer Peter Asher and a 13-piece Cuban orchestra help reinterpret some of Rodrigo y Gabriela’s favourite songs. The illustration mimicking a revolutionary wall painting makes sense, yet I fail to understand why a Cuban-themed album has a motif resembling the war flag of the Imperial Japanese Army as a background and faux-Cyrillic typography.

Just like I was completely enamoured with UK design collective EH?’s innovative sleeve design for Boom Bip’s Zig Zaj last episode, I am spellbound by Jeanette Johns’s cryptic artwork on Provincial, the debut solo full-length album for The Weakerthans’ lead singer John K. Samson. This artist living and working in Winnipeg, Manitoba completed her BFA (honours) majoring in printmaking in 2008 at the University of Manitoba. Johns works primarily in silkscreen and etching, often with the addition of a variety of other techniques such as paper marbling, gold leaf and digital printing. She explores the relationship between observation and aesthetic experience by constructing and layering imagery of maps, diagrams and graphs.

The album sleeve shows Jeanette using geometric patterns in an effort to translate the beauty of order. By colouring in the rectangles defined by the rules and lines in what seems to be an accounting book she creates an image that is both systematic and random. It is an abstract composition of unusual beauty, occupying a realm somewhere between the organic and the mathematical. The type is again Futura, but wonderfully set, so I can live with that. The stamped number 109 in the upper right corner is a nice detail which adds to the authenticity of the .

Attack On Memory, the second album for Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings was produced by Steve Albini. Above the blurry photograph of a lighthouse we find the lovely FF Magda Clean.

I really like the atmosphere in the cover image of Laura Gibson’s latest, La Grande, an album inspired in part by the town of the same name in Oregon. The singer-songwriter, wrapped in a blanket with native American patterns, is photographed standing behind a camp fire. The very deep blue of the night sky creates a gorgeous contrast with the black forest and the red, golden and earth tones in the foreground. Because of the long exposure the sparks in the fire create mesmerizing, almost calligraphic lines.

Although the capitals and some small letters are identical, I don’t think the script is a font but hand-lettered. It resembles a curlier FF Pepe. Identical letters most probably were copy-pasted, a common practice in lettering. The same script can also be found on the covers of her two previous albums, and we see how it evolves towards its present form. It is not exactly what I would call an accomplished style of calligraphy. Nevertheless its naive and somewhat awkward structure suits the artwork.

The album cover for Sinners Never Sleep, the album produced by Garth “GGGarth” Richardson for the rock band from England You Me at Six, made me do a double-take. That board and plastic letters looked strangely familiar…

And indeed, these are the exact same letters as found on TV On The Radio’s Dear Science, discussed a little over three years ago on The FontFeed.

The art that graces the cover of Making Mirrors, the first album in five years from Gotye, was painted in the 1980s by Frank De Backer, the father of the Belgian-Australian singer and multi-instrumentalist (real name Wally De Backer).

Gotye- Somebody That I Used To Know (feat. Kimbra)- official film clip from Gotye on Vimeo.

The graphic style was interpreted by body artist Emma Hack for the official music video of the single Somebody That I Used To Know on which New Zealand singer/songwriter Kimbra guests. Emma’s 21-year career has evolved from beginnings as a children’s face painter and qualified hairdresser and make-up artist, to a body illustrator and visual artist of world acclaim. Directed, produced and edited by Natasha Pincus, the clip shows both artists gradually being overpainted to blend in with the mural in the background. The video took 23 hours to paint and film in stop motion, and it’s quite impressive.

Kimbra herself must have a thing for bodypainting, as the cover for her debut long player Vows attests.

We finish in style with Clay Class, post-punkers Tobin Prinz and Suzi Horn a.k.a. Prinzhorn Dance School’s follow-up to their self-titled debut. Their sparse indie rock sound is visualised with quiet images of (dried) flowers and leaves. It is fitting that all type is set in all lowercase OCR-A, yet each time I see this face used I wonder why some designers are so afraid of “real” type. There are other contemporary options that convey the same atmosphere, like the aforementioned FF Magda Clean and FF Alega and some others.

Oh yeah, there’s one thing I learned on my train ride to Paris Thursday evening – writing at 300 km/h didn’t magically make me work any faster. But at least I didn’t waste any time.

Michael and Meghan’s planning began with a few central ideas and questions. How to translate a conference aesthetic; Who best represents Bay Area design culture, and how to incorporate them and their work? They have since selected a theme and written the first words of introduction to it, landed the venue, hired an intern, set up audio/video, gone through the selections of caterers, managed airfare and hotel accommodations, solicited a volunteer staff, and of course, lined up speakers for the event. I sat down with the two of them recently to find out what the work’s been like.

Meghan Arnold | “It’s been exciting, and personally really interesting working with some of the icons of international design culture.”

Michael Pieracci | “Organizing the logistics behind a conference, I’ve discovered, taps into my own ways of being creative; in making an experience for our speakers and our attendees.”

Audience views Dale Herigstad’s talk at TYPO London 2011. © 2011 kassnerfoto.de

TYPO San Francisco 2012 Main Stage; Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

One aspect of incorporating local culture plays off the contrasts between San Francisco and Berlin; the one being tight, the other loose. Michael continues, “We’ve tried to create a very casual atmosphere here where conference attendees feel comfortable getting up and going for a walk, dropping in on a workshop, grabbing a drink or meeting and talking in the halls.”

Their efforts have not gone unaided. Advised by UX and brand designer Robin Richmond, who last year organized TYPO London, and Benno Rudolf in Berlin, who led and directed all the preceding years’ TYPO conferences, the two have handled the difficult tasks and maneuvered around the pitfalls of conference planning gracefully. Considerable help has also come from the backing of the conference’s facilitators, Erik Spiekermann and Kali Nikitas. Kali chairs the Communication Arts department at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and works as a designer, educator and curator of graphic design work. Erik is of course a co-founder of FontShop, a type and graphic designer, strategic planner and businessman.

Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody onstage at TYPO London 2011. Photo courtesy of FontFont

TYPO San Francisco’s confirmed speakers include design observer and Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, Pixar storyteller Michael B. Johnson, internationally recognized multiple media designer Neville Brody, the newly-local letterer and illustrator Jessica Hische, FontFeed’s own Yves Peters, designer and educator Juliette Bellocq, and local type and nameplate designer Jim Parkinson. It’s been real work, but Michael and Meghan describe the process of lining up speakers as very fulfilling. Reaching out to the international design community they’ve so far gotten a tremendous response, and representing local culture they’ve found nothing but speakers of the same caliber. Check the complete speaker list for the most up to date information on who’s speaking.

And I’ll be there—helping with workshops, like Damon Styer’s signpainting workshop, and making friends.

Timothy Donaldson at Bilston Craft Gallery from Bilston Craft Gallery on Vimeo.

From the scratch of the quill curling across the page, to letters painstakingly chipped and carved from stone, Signs for Sounds looks at the ways that artists use the age-old shapes of letters to amplify the effect of words. This exhibition examines the traditional skills of letter-forming, along with how we use lettering in the modern world – with artists’ films of graffiti and virtual typography where visitors can experiment with Jason Edward Lewis’ virtual typography to re-shape poetry on touchscreen monitors. Featuring examples of outstanding skill in letter-forming by leading practitioners, the exhibition shows how writing communicates meaning and how this is changing with the use of new media in the digital age. Exhibitors include letter-engraver Tom Perkins, calligrapher Ewan Clayton and performance artist Julien Breton, who dances letter forms using light. There is also a family-friendly activity area, and a display of creative writing by local writers’ groups Bilston Writers and Bilston Scribblers on the theme Sights and Sounds of Bilston.

The calligraphy in the video was performed live at the exhibition opening at Bilston Craft Gallery on December 8th 2011. Timothy Donaldson will repeat his calligraphic performance at Signs for Sounds: Contemporary Letterforming and Calligraphy, live in the Harley Gallery on Sunday February 19, 2012, where the exhibition runs until April 2012. Entry is free.

If you want to sample Timothy’s calligraphy as a typeface, download his dynamic script in three weights FF Fancywriting, one of the families that FontFont released to the public free of charge. See also his other typefaces on FontShop.com.

Somewhat related – I would like to apologise to the people coming to tonight’s BNO Romeo Delta evening CUT! in Rotterdam for not showing up. The organisation is looking into rescheduling my presentation at a later date, most probably the next IMG LAB evening on February 20th.

Flickermood 2.0 from Sebastian Lange on Vimeo.

What sets this video apart from most others is the astonishing musicality of the animated typography and the ingenuity of the motion and effects. Whereas many of these typographic animations fall back on the same couple of effects, this one keeps surprising the viewer throughout its entire duration. Sebastian Lange’s Flickermood has been screened and awarded on several festivals and events, and published in numerous magazines and blogs. Enjoy, then get of yo’ lazy ass and shake that booty! It’s party time.

Łukasz Dziedzic (right, with Adam Twardoch on the left). Photo by Dominika Naborowska
Łukasz Dziedzic was born 1967 in Warsaw. Rather than to finish high school, he worked as a sound technician, actor, carpenter helper rebuilding 13th-century churches, singer/bass guitarist and software developer at the Polish patent office. During the first free Polish elections of 1989, he briefly worked as a newsboy for Gazeta Wyborcza, the newly-launched, first independent daily newspaper in the country. A year later, he joined the design department of Gazeta Wyborcza and spent seven years there, co-creating the layouts of the main newspaper and its weekly companion magazine, for which he drew his first typeface. He later worked for several other publishing houses in Warsaw, designing newspapers and magazines. At the same time, Lukasz drew over a dozen typeface families ranging from large Latin and Cyrillic text families to single display styles.

Letter from Łukasz to his boss Jürgen Thies at Komputer Świat, showing the range of weights and widths in Weekend. The weight progression is based on Luc(as) de Groot’s theory.

What was your earliest experience with type or typography?

Łukasz Dziedzic | “I think the first proof of my typographic perversion was a satirical school magazine that I made by hand at age 10. I drew all text in pencil, trying to imitate Times, typewriter letters and something in the same spirit as Neo Sans or FF DIN Rounded.”

When did you design your first typeface, and how did that become to be?

Łukasz Dziedzic | “My first working typeface that went to print was Champaigne. I designed it in 2003 for a series of supplements to Gazeta Wyborcza, the daily newspaper that I was working for at that time. It was a year before Poland joined the EU, so each issue of the supplement presented a different European country. I started by designing a series of country flags of all EU members, and then based the letter shapes of the fonts on the same style. The font is still used at Wyborcza in the women’s supplement Wysokie Obcasy. It turns out that people liked it: someone scanned and traced an early version of this font and published it on the web as a free font. So I see it pop up in various places from time to time. Recently I even saw a home-made bold variant in a shop window!”

The full range of 7 weights in 7 widths for Weekend, the proto-version of what was to become FF Good.

How did your fascination for letters turn into a profession in type design?

Łukasz Dziedzic | “I spent some ten years working in newspaper design. When I started, I had no budget for fonts, and even if I had, there was no time to research the font market (the Internet was not so great as today is).

When starting to work on a new layout, I often did what older art directors did: I drew some headlines by hand and scanned them, or drew them in Illustrator. I experimented with the right mood, wanted to see different styles and emotion, tried to find the right grey value of the page. When the design was accepted, it often turned out that no foundry offers fonts that would fit those sketches, so the only way for me to implement the design was to draw a new set of fonts.

After a few years, I discovered that designing type is much more fun than designing newspapers. I made my first custom font for the empik bookstore chain and FontFont started to sell FF Clan, a family that I originally designed for a newspaper project and later expanded. It seemed that people liked my fonts so I decided to leave the newsrooms forever.”

First printing of FF Good, then called Weekend, counting 49 styles with no italics.

Do you consider type design more an art or a craft?

Łukasz Dziedzic | “Both. Art, because you need real passion to have the power to do craft. Craft, because passion is not enough to make good type (whatever “good” means in this case).”

Where does your inspiration for new typefaces come from?

Łukasz Dziedzic | “From my surroundings. From shapes-of-everything. I made Champaigne based on the style of the graphic elements that I drew first. From the emotions of the message. It’s how I designed FF Mach and FF Pitu. Mach is readable in small sizes as well as Times, you can set body text with it, but it strikes you with gross simplicity in large sizes. On the other hand, you can’t read FF Pitu, since it’ll slice your eye first. Out of necessity. FF Good, FF More, FF Clan – I just couldn’t buy them.”

How do you approach the design of a typeface?

Łukasz Dziedzic | “ ‘In the beginning was the Word’. That’s a good principle. I draw one word at first. If six days is not enough to define the general shape, then it means either the idea is bad or I am not good enough.”

Two abandoned italic sketches for FF More.

Does the end result usually stay close to your original concept, or do your type designs tend to evolve much during the production process?

Łukasz Dziedzic | “Each time, I know that I’m getting very far from my original concept, but I never know if it’s good thing or a bad thing. I never compare the final product with the initial sketches.

When I finish a project, I’m always disappointed. By that time, I’ve often lost touch with my point of origin. But then some time passes, sometimes a few years, and I discover that someone used one of my typefaces well. And then I realize that that person actually understood my initial idea and used the font in a way that I actually designed it for. I love those moments!”

Do you do a lot of custom type design as commissioned work?

Łukasz Dziedzic | “Not much: I made custom families for Poland’s largest bookstore chain empik and for Getin Bank. Lato started off as custom font for another bank, but they changed the “design direction”. Now it’s free.”

Multi-layer ‘g’, showing how the characters in FF More are drawn for optimal interpolation of weights and widths.

Multi-layer design of basic weight and width in FF More.

While working on FF More Łukasz made a script to inject every generated instance straight into this lay-out. This provided an immediate review of how all the different weights and styles of the typeface behaved on a “real” page (although the page was completely fake).

FF Good & FF More

For its OpenType release in 2010 FF Good was boosted from a mere 9 styles to 60 styles. The versatile straight-sided sans serif has been radically overhauled. The original incarnation of this contemporary alternative for News/Trade Gothic was a rather small family of three weights in three widths, with no italics. The new version however comes in five weights ranging from Light to Black, in Condensed, Regular, and Wide widths, all with matching italics, and small caps for both roman and italic styles.

Even better, the expanded suite of 30 styles is now also available in a Headline version, with shorter ascenders and descenders to allow for more compact setting. All the fonts have been augmented with Latin Extended and Cyrillic Extended character sets. Little bits of trivia – proportional lining figures have become default, and the typeface has three ampersands, ideal for fine-tuning headlines.

It’s easy to find sans serif typefaces with multiple widths and weights, but large serif families are much less common. The 30-font FF More fills this void. Five weights in each of Condensed, Regular, and Wide widths answer every need of publication design, from strong headlines to readable text and space-efficient information graphics. FF More’s sturdy serifs and gentle contrast withstand the rigors of magazine and newspaper design – retaining clarity despite size, background, or substrate.

Łukasz Dziedzic built FF More to work alongside FF Good, resulting in a powerhouse super family, versatile in both its function and aesthetic. Both are available in OpenType Pro characters sets, including Cyrillic.

Overview of all the weights and widths in (from top to bottom) FF Good, FF Good Headline, and ff More.

So, what is the story behind FF Good and FF More?

Łukasz Dziedzic | “Some four years ago, I was working on the redesign of the Polish edition of Newsweek. It was more conceptual work, we didn’t have a specific deadline, so I had lots of room for experimentation. They were using Knockout, which is very strong and very… memorable, together with some delicate serif type. Some headlines were rock stars. Others, and the body, were guys in suits.

When I was working on the new layout, I also wanted to find a new pair of sans and serif that would be more balanced. I wanted the sans to be less crazy than Knockout, and I wanted the serif to show more personality and more strength. The sans could be a bit more constructed but the serif was supposed to be more lively, organic. And strong!

Things came as usual: I couldn’t find anything suitable in the foundry catalogues, so I decided to draw my own pair. I started with the sans, which was the starting point of FF Good. When I had a good basis, my bosses asked my to redesign Komputer Świat, the Polish edition of Computer Bild. There, I saw dozens of tables. It was a sea of cells and rows, without any design principles. You know: which hard drive is faster, cheaper, more silent and has more capacity, but sometimes longer passages about some special features. To give it some structure, I decided to use my new sans.

I defined a family of 49 styles, with widths from “Cmprssd” via “Compressed” all the way to “Extended”, and with weights from Thin to Black. The grey value of each width was the same, so if there was little space in one table cell and we needed to fit in a longer explanation, I could use the “Cmprssd” style, while in other, in another cell I could use the Regular with no visible change of gray. It worked.

Some weeks later, Newsweek landed back on my desk. I had the sans, tested in some really tough environment, and few hand-made drawings for the serif face, which would later become FF More. I drew the “o” with a very characteristic counter. It may seem a small detail, but as it is visible enough I decided – let’s keep it. Then I was searching for the weight for the serifs. I checked the details and the grey value of the serif and of Good side-by-side, but I never tried to design them as twins. I think of FF Good and FF More as friends or a couple rather than brothers or sisters. My ideas for Newsweek never saw the light of day, but a narrow version of FF More is used in a Polish Catholic weekly paper Gość Niedzielny.”

Invitation for the event designed by Villadinamica

Four 20-minute presentations are programmed.

• Art director and production designer Ben Zuydwijk is an independent set designer for film and television productions, and helped making numerous commercials successful.
• Shosho designs visual effects and animations for film and television, and develops interactive programs for cultural institutions and businesses. Joost Hiensch will present; together with Susanne Keilhack he is responsible for title sequences and movie posters, many of which have been awarded.
• Submarine Channel produces innovative web documentaries, motion comics and transmedia productions, and launched Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, the first online collection of beautiful title sequence design. Title design geek Remco Vlaanderen, web editor and creative producer at Submarine Channel, tells us all about this project.
• I will talk about Two Decades of Trajan in Movie Posters.

Admission is €5 (€3 for BNO members and students). Doors open at 20:00; there are no reservations, so if you’re in Rotterdam and would like to attend the evening, come early.

To whet your appetite a little, here’s my take on last month’s movie posters.

As Christophe Courtois teaches us on his blog Le Sibère Carnet de Christophe Courtois, black-and-white posters with a red accent or flame burst identify stories with conflict – action movies, war films and so on. Coriolanus literally pits the two main protagonists against each other. In the movie poster the gritty portraits of Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler were treated as if they had been photocopied or faxed. What at first appeared like tribal marks or war paint turns out to be transparent red silhouettes of machine guns, overlaid on the raw and uncompromising renditions of their profiles. This design is perfectly in sync with the approach of the film – a contemporary interpretation but keeping the original texts by Shakespeare. It’s just a shame about the tame Futura; something a little more edgy, with a little more bite would have been nice.

In the French poster for Sleeping Beauty Emily Brown looks into the viewer’s eyes with a soft, dreamy gaze. While this solution may seem adequate, it actually belies the uncompromising topic of the film – “a haunting erotic fairy tale about a student who drifts into prostitution and finds her niche as a woman who sleeps, drugged, in a ‘Sleeping Beauty chamber’ while men do to her what she can’t remember the next morning.” The image is way too innocuous, and the Reanissance script used for the movie title doesn’t help.

In the pre-Unicode days no less than 21 fonts were needed to make the 1413 glyphs of Poetica Chancery conveniently accessible. Since the typeface has become available as a single feature-rich OpenType Std font its price has dropped to less than a fifteenth of its original price, while its functionality and ease of use have exponentially increased.

The main poster is far more appropriate. Emily Browning’s naked body, partly covered by luxurious sheets, and her detached stare as she looks over her shoulder strike the correct tone. The colour scheme is gorgeous; the muted tones of the set beautifully complementing the actress’ creamy skin and hard to define hair colour. Again the typography is entirely Futura.

And this third example of a light Futura set in all caps this month makes me wonder if this could be a typographic trend for intelligent, slightly edgy films – just like all lowercase Helvetica. Shame also covers a sex-related topic. Even more subtle than the design for Sleeping Beauty above, its movie poster broaches the subject of sex addiction in a tactful and clever way by showing its aftermath. I like that the photograph is somewhat ambiguous. A fast and easy interpretation would be that this is the bed where two people just had sex. I however think this image suggests the person left the bed in the middle of the night to compulsively search for non-commitive sex. Paradoxically the rather small spaced out white capitals filling the empty space where the body of the protagonist had been lying don’t whisper but shout. Do they accuse and stigmatise… or is it a desperate cry for help?

While they don’t cross over into the realm of crass commercialism and exploitation the localised posters for the French and Italian markets are less strong. Somehow showing Michael Fassbender diminishes the impact of the design, and the larger type comes across less powerful.

The fourth example of this film genre relinquishes Futura in favour of Univers. The movie poster for We Need to Talk About Kevin thoughtfully translates the subject matter in a subdued image that – silently – screams with pain and anguish. The simple structure, tinted black and white image, and light sans serif give the poster a distinct Modernist flavour.

With this alternate poster the design shifts from Modernism into hyperrealism. How can you make a person that has been emotionally hollowed out cry? By placing her behind a window with rain drops running down, one of them serendipitously from the corner of her eye down her cheek – a trick also employed in Toy Story 3 for the key scene where Lotso discovers he has been replaced by a new teddy bear. The typography is lovely; a vertical zone holding all of the text set in Akkurat suggests a curtain from behind which Tilda Swinton peers outside.

This final version by Mojo with its duotone image in greenish grey and plum is quite creepy. This impression is strengthened by the use of Perpetua. Its classic serif letter forms remind of Trajan, since a couple of years the default typeface in colaterals for horror movies and thrillers.

The latest instalment of My Type of Music featured an album cover cum poster for Superheavy designed by Shepard Fairey, and here’s a movie poster by the street artist turned… well, artist tout court. While the original poster for The Lady is completely forgettable, this version boasts Fairey’s signature style, inspired by propaganda posters from the early 20th century. While he already was a household name in art and design circles, his posters for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign propelled him to international fame. He keeps expanding on this style, tirelessly perfecting it. However, because he uses mostly the same graphic devices and colour combinations I sometimes wonder if he is on his way to become a one-trick-pony, a brand. Only time will tell.

The custom lettering is reminiscent of the Arts & Crafts movement; like a blend of P22 Victorian Gothic and Sweet Square / Sackers Square.

Forget the sucky distressed Helvetica – this alternate poster for Autoreiji (Outrage) is seriously badass. Blood splatters and smears; a grainy, high-contrast photograph of Takeshi Kitano discharging his gun, barely contained between the edges of the poster; a dirty background with semi-transparent katakana characters; hot pink type… this explosive design fires on all cylinders.

The graphic treatment of the movie poster for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is very interesting. The spy theme is cleverly visualised by rendering Gary Oldman’s portrait in numbers, and then have single words hidden within this sea of digits. Besides the noticeable white tagline “The enemy is within” and red release date “Winter” other words are to be found, turning this poster into an amusing hide-and-seek game. The typeface is the now-conspicuous H&FJ Gotham.

Strangely in the character posters, while the portraits are still rendered in Gotham, the condensed squarish typefaces are Agency for the actors’ names and some other square sans serif I can’t seem to pinpoint, like a less tall Regency Gothic or a squarer Alternate Gothic.

I really like straightforward, efficient concept posters. Take this oversized realistic recreation of a cigarette pack for Addiction Incorporated. While it features different graphic elements and the brand name is not literally spelled out, it is easily recognised as a spoof on Marlboro products. Every type element is repurposed to hold new information related to the film. The use of the corporate face Neo Contact, together with the obligatory Helvetica and wide gothic / grotesque, perfects the illusion.

These minimalist posters for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol were designed by Matt Owen. A few weeks ago for the IMAX release Paramount commissioned two event posters; the one on the left was handed out to audience members of the midnight release only, and the one on the right was intended for audiences the following week. The design combines a lit fuse with the silhouette of the Burj Khalifa building where some of the action takes place. The graphic language can be seen as an homage to Saul Bass, whose lettering style it reappropriates. It reminds of director Brad Bird’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille.

The main problem with the promotional campaign for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is that it lacks its own recognisable identity, making it look like a continuation of the campaign for the previous movie. The movie posters use similar visuals, a similar colour scheme, a similar image texture, and the same Clarendon. It fails on all fronts.

I originally wanted to draw a too-clever-for-my-own-good connection between the American eagle in the background of the Cook County poster and the beaks in the typeface Warnock, but then I realised I am not that desperate for material…

The posters for the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were designed by one of my personals Kellerhouse. I like this version as it beautifully overlays and cut outs the portraits of Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, including the dried flowers that play a crucial role at the beginning of the story. The movie title is set in a custom typeface designed by Neil Kellerhouse, based on or inspired by Trade Gothic Bold. The elegant serif caps are Jupiter Pro. Neil explained to me that director David Fincher had something very specific in mind, and he presented him many different options, from his own custom font to more traditional looks. Neil really enjoyed working with Jupiter, experimenting with its many ligatures and character options.

On her blog Flick Filosopher Maryann Johanson rightfully shreds the teaser poster apart, as it completely misrepresents and objectifies the strong female character that is Lisbeth Salander. Worth a read.

While the main poster for Albert Nobbs is quite ordinary, I really like the typographic treatment. The movie title set in all caps Bauer Bodoni nicely rests on the serving tray held by Glenn Close. The actors’ names in Neutraface are strategically positioned left and right on her jacket.

The use of Trajan on the alternate poster – with Helvetica as secondary face – is just as uninspired. Very much inspired however is the image itself, a surprising juxtaposition of the male and the female side of the main character. The restrained lay-out and careful lighting make this a sophisticated, beautiful poster.

While the main poster is nothing special, Arsonal created a nicely stylised alternate poster for We Bought a Zoo. The tree looks like it was cut out in wood-textured paper, its crown composed of paw prints. Those simple shapes against the pristine white background produce a striking image. The typography is an integral part of the design, composed in different widths and weights of Interstate. And the red kite is a colourful detail that provides the finishing touch.

The movie poster for the lovely Minoes (Miss Minoes / Undercover Kitty), based on the 1970 novel by iconic Dutch children’s author Annie M.G. Schmidt, is an obvious Adobe Photoshop concoction. The playful serif face Fontdiner.com hits the right tone, yet the identical repeating characters somewhat negate the fun. It’s a pity the designer simply set everything out of the box instead of customising the typography, shifting the baseline here and there and rotating individual characters.

Intelligent feature-rich OpenType fonts can do that automatically. See for example how the type looks set in the reworked FF Fontesque. In Engaging Contextuality, his article on I Love Typography, Nick Shinn explains how Fontesque’s Contextual Alternate (‘calt’) feature in two parts – Toggle and Proximity – manages to get the best possible result with only one set of alternates.

After a family movie and a children’s film we dive into the dark regions of the human condition. Angeline Jolie’s directorial debut In the Land of Blood and Honey depicts a love story set against the background of the Bosnian War. The movie poster defines the silhouette of the two lovers with a pool of blood on a map. Although it is not the archetypical ITC Machine, the peculiar faceted display sans suggests lettering on army equipment. Other examples of faceted sans serifs are Mashine, FF Pullman, Brothers, Taktical, and Tremble.

We started this episode with war in black and white and red, and this is how we’ll ends as well. Half a year after the US release of Chinese war drama Nanjing! Nanjing! (City of Life and Death), another film set against the atrocities of the Rape of Nanking in 1937 hits the movie screens. The collaterals promoting Jin líng shí san chai (The Flowers of War) however use a very different approach. The international poster melds the two opposites from the movie title into a surprising visual. A dark red bullet has become the heart of the flower-like shape created by its impact; a hard and broken object as a metaphor for a thing of delicate beauty. Death and decay, the outcome of war, is suggested with a distressed compact sans serif.

The Chinese poster is far more traditional, with Christian Bale overseeing the destroyed city floating-headwise. The red butterfly shape was lifted from…

… the Chinese concept poster; a simpler and in my opinion better design. The absence of distracting elements around the shape makes it easier to identify it as red fluid, like blood. Blood is a recurring graphic element, also found in the cherry blossom in the top left corner and in the calligraphy. The resulting artwork is very painterly, and strikes a delicate balance between the fluidity of the butterfly shape and rough brush strokes on the one hand, and the faded image of destruction in the background on the other hand.