There will be a launch exhibition and lecture regarding the new issue of Slanted at Paris’ Centre Pompidou on Saturday April 13th at 4pm.

Further info:
Librairie Flammarion
Centre Pompidou
19, rue Beaubourg
75004 Paris

I have a new essay in Slanted #21 about Cuba and Cuban graphic design, as well as a feature of Cuban street photography by myself and Andrea Tinnes shot in Havana and Trinidad.

We just released the new Vaud family of typefaces.

Vaud is a family of 40 weights of neutral, yet formally nuanced grotesk typefaces that takes inspiration from Helvetica, Akzidenz Grotesk, Univers and the original metal types from Switzerland, yet had a slightly larger x-height for more pronounced legibility.

Each weight is designed to be highly readable in print and on-screen. The italic variations are true italics, having a single-storied italic a and have been designed for smooth, fluid reading and text-setting. Lovingly spaced and kerned, the Vaud family works equally well for text typesetting and for display design work.

For a limited time, the entire family of typefaces is available for $49 via YouWorkForThem.

The entire family is comprised of a range of weights and a matching display family that features rounded terminals for large-scale display work.

Sans serif fonts, no matter how neutral they feel, are ultimately formally nuanced. I wanted to add to this legacy, but bring in elements of the grotesks of the Stephenson Blake foundry to add humanizing features, creating a formal and conceptual interplay to delight the senses.

Vaud appears neutral in tone, has an enlarged x-height, works great on-screen and in print.

The lighter weights are slightly slimmer than the regular and bold weights to give the typeface more of a vertical feel, inviting readers’ to rapidly read typeset text with a maximum of contrast and a minimum of optical dazzle.

The entire family was given rigorous testing using Craig Mod’s Bibliotype html-based book layout system for on-screen rendering checks and innumerable print proofs using actual text (not Greek) in InDesign.

The Vaud family is hugely diverse and will work well in a variety of contexts and media.

The complete family is on sale now at YouWorkForThem.

There’s been a date, time and location change:
Idea Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Kiyonori Muroga and I will be giving a lecture and week-long workshop at CalArts. The lecture will be on Thursday April 11th at 7pm in the C-Art classroom.

We recently finished up a redesign of BeBespoke’s website – webfonts, some snazzy javascript and a bunch of wonderful imagery.

Idea Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Kiyonori Muroga and I will be giving a lecture and week-long workshop at CalArts. The lecture will be on Thursday April 11th at 7pm in the C-Art classroom.

I contributed to Karen To’s Dead Words project recently. I was asked to typographically illustrate the  term “ebaptization” – a retired word declaring that someone has not been properly baptized from 1659.

Within, I used Queen Mary’s secret cipher to spell out the word - the language of a woman who changed a church, and in a sense, both de- and un-baptize it.

A dead word rendered in a dead language.

We released a new typeface this week – SketchCaslon Italic - a hand-rendered display typeface with its formal base in the structure of the types of William Caslon.

One can obtain SketchCaslon Italic from MyFonts and YouWorkForThem.

We just released Plural, a new family of 20 typefaces.

Plural is a contemporary, futuristic sans serif that is eminently readable on-screen and in print. It appears to be monolinear due to its hybrid geometric and humanist construction, but actually swells slightly at the curves and tapers slightly at the terminals for pronounced readability.

It features a full Central and Eastern European character set and is offered in five weights: light, regular, medium, semibold and bold. These are offset by matching italic cuts of each weight to give designers more variation.

The typeface also includes five weights of a retro-futuristic display face called Plural Display that bring in more idiosyncratic characters for display setting- a NASA-inspired space age “A”, a decorative “double-V” treatment for the “W”, a flared “M” and a whole lot more. Italic versions of Plural Display are also featured.

Plural is available from MyFonts and YouWorkForThem.

We also just released another typeface, though this one – Raffish – is a lone display face – caps and numerals only (ok, ok, there is a comma and a period in the font, too…).

Raffish is a display typeface with its formal base in Dutch type designer Henk Krijger’s seminal typeface Raffia – the most decorative and handsome of script typefaces. It is ornamental, baroque and relies on a triple-stroke structure that infers weight fluctuation and fluidity, despite the formal base.

Instead of merely copying or reviving, Raffish is an abstraction of the original which poses a question: Can one abstract a typeface from history and make it truly interesting, not just a shadow or slicked-up echo of the past?

Raffish is available from MyFonts and YouWorkForThem.

I found some unused/underused logos I designed for Tokyo hiphop duo Hifana lurking in the crates yesterday – here, a decorative, imperial take on Henk Krijger’s Raffia.

A Thai ornament-inflected logo using a Charles Burns shading treatment.

An unused logo variation for Hifana’s “Connect” LP – the best of the bunch.

You can see our recent work in the latest issue of Frame Magazine.