Commercial Type News

Appearances:

CommercialType — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

28 JUNE 2013 | APPEARANCES

Christian Schwartz at Ampersand 2013

Christian Schwartz will be joining Erik Spiekermann, The Guardian's Andy Hume, The BBC's Kutlu Çanlıoğlu, and other luminaries on online typography at the 2013 Ampersand Conference in Brighton. Christian will end the day with a talk called "Webfonts are just fonts". For more information, "a href="http://2013.ampersandconf.com">please see the conference site.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

07 JUNE 2013 | APPEARANCES

Paul Barnes at Newsdesign13 in Zürich

Paul will be speaking at the annual conference of the SND DACH - the Society for News Design Deutschland / Österreich / Schweiz. For more information see the conference site or the SND DACH facebook page.

Custom typefaces, publications: Druk Wide by Berton Hasebe for Bloomberg Businessweek

CommercialType — Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

24 MAY 2013 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS

Druk Wide by Berton Hasebe for Bloomberg Businessweek

Creative Director Richard Turley and his team, with help from consultant Mark Leeds, have refreshed Bloomberg Businessweek from top to bottom for the first time since their major redesign in 2010. The changes through the front section of the magazine are minor, but Etc. has been completely rethought, with an exuberant approach to display typography centered around the extremely condensed versions of Druk that Berton Hasebe drew for their 2011 year end issue, played against Berton's newly drawn Druk Wide.

Druk Wide is not so much an expanded version of Druk as it is a similar approach to the opposite kind of extreme proportion. Druk's starting point was the many anonymous, slightly crude condensed sans serifs offered by all of the European type foundries in the 20th century, usually with generic names that translate as "Narrow Grotesk". Druk Wide starts from a similar source: the anonymous, extremely heavy, and extremely wide grotesks offered by many European foundries during the same time period. Variations on this design were known as Annonce Grotesk, and sold as the widest variants of Aurora and Venus, among others. Dutch graphic designer Willem Sandberg used a small size of Annonce Grotesk for captions in many of his iconic catalogs for the Stedelijk Museum in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This usage inspired Berton to draw a small-size version of Druk Wide, which the Businessweek team was immediately able to put to use. The new section logotype, drawn by Berton in collaboration with Christian Schwartz, took the wide, chunky forms of Druk Wide and made them even wider, heavier, and chunkier.

A less noticeable addition to the type palette is a slightly heavier grade of Publico Text, used throughout the magazine for a darker, softer, and slightly less noisy tone in text—and occasionally for display as well.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

16 MAY 2013 | APPEARANCES

Paul Barnes speaking at TypoBerlin 2013: Touch

Paul will be speaking at this year's TypoBerlin, the beloved international design conference. This year's theme is Touch, and more information is available at the conference website.

Custom typefaces, publications, newspapers:

CommercialType — Wed, 08 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

08 MAY 2013 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS | NEWSPAPERS

Duplex for MittMedia, a newspaper group in Sweden

Danish newspaper design specialists Ribergård + Munk commissioned a pair of headline typefaces from us as part of a sweeping overhaul of well over a dozen daily newspapers published throughout Sweden by MittMedia.

Berton Hasbe designed Duplex Serif and Sans to solve a very specific problem for this newspaper group. A new format was being developed for all of their titles, to decrease ineffeciencies in production and to allow the different titles to more easily share a portion of their stories. However, as publishers of both upmarket and downmarket papers, the owners wanted to keep the general character of each paper intact - louder volume and more of a feeling of immediacy in the downmarket tabloids, and a quieter, more respectable tone of voice in the upmarket tabloids. The solution to this problem was a set of serif and sans serif typefaces with precisely the same spacing, so they could be swapped out to change the character of a page without affecting the copyfit.

A great deal of sleight of hand went into the design of these typefaces. Each weight of Duplex Serif matches with the next heaviest weight of Duplex Sans, so the Sans headlines feel punchier as a whole. Also, the Sans is larger in general, making it feel slightly more condensed, which has the result of making it feel a bit louder.

Duplex Sans started off as an adaptation of one of the narrower widths of Guardian Sans Headline, but the Serif diverges far from the Guardian/Publico model for a distinctly different character that borrows more from the variations on Caslon that were popular for news headlines in the early 20th century. The Guardian family fills out the rest of the type palette, with the Egyptian Text and Agate serving as text and supporting types in all of the group's papers.

So far just Sundsvalls Tidning and Dagbladet have launched with the new format, but the rest of the group's titles will roll it out over the next year.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

21 MARCH 2013 | APPEARANCES

Christian Schwartz speaking at Typocracia 10

Christian will be speaking at Typocracia 10 in São Paulo, Brazil, and will also be teaching a one-day workshop on magazine logotypes. More information is available on the conference site (Portuguese only for now).

Appearances:

CommercialType — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

07 MARCH 2013 | APPEARANCES

Paul speaking in Plymouth

Paul Barnes will be speaking to Graphic Design Students at the Faculty of Arts, Plymouth University on 7 March at 4PM. He will talking about his graphic design work, type design and the Commercial Type.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

05 MARCH 2013 | APPEARANCES

Paul Barnes lecturing in Copenhagen

On 5 March, 2013, Paul will be speaking about his general design work and Commercial Type in Copenhagen at the HK Grafisk Kommunication. More information can be found at the school's website.

Then on 6 March 2013, Paul will speak at Danish Faces with Trine Rask of Kontrapunkt. More information can be found at a facebook page that has been set up for the event.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

23 FEBRUARY 2013 | APPEARANCES

Paul Barnes lecturing at "Tell me about editorial design!"

Paul will be lecturing on making typefaces for newspapers and magazines at a conference on editorial design in Munich, fittingly called "Tell me about editorial design!". More information can be found on the conference site.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

20 FEBRUARY 2013 | APPEARANCES

Paul Barnes in Lyon for a workshop and lecture

Paul will be teaching a workshop at Ecole Nationale Superieure Des Beaux Arts Will deliver “You can’t repeat the past”. More information can be found on a facebook page for the lecture series.

Custom typefaces, publications: Schnyder for T

CommercialType — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

17 FEBRUARY 2013 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS

Schnyder for T, the New York Times Style Magazine

Berton Hasebe and Christian Schwartz have designed Schnyder, a new serif display typeface, for the 2013 top-to-bottom redesign of T, the New York Times Style Magazine under new editor in chief Deborah Needleman and creative director Patrick Li and his team of Shawn Carney, Aurelie Pellissier, and Natalie Do. Between Hasebe and Schwartz, this is their sixth custom typeface project for T, but the first they've co-designed.

The initial jumping off point for the design was a piece of pointed pen lettering from Switzerland, recently acquired by Li, which was quite precise in its thick and thin strokes, but had organic and unusual structures for invidvidual letters and great variations in character widths from line to line. Schnyder features two weights, a Light and a Bold, in 3 widths. The stem weights in each weight are identical across the widths, an unusual feature that allows the widths to be mixed freely in headlines, even within single words. Certain characters were given a large number of alternates, allowing the headlines to feel even more like lettering rather than set type. The lowercase draws from German typefaces popular in the the early 1900s. This typeface tests the limits of gravure printing, and has four optical sizes to ensure that its thin strokes can be thin as possible at each size without falling apart.

The type palette is rounded out by Graphik in its regular width and a couple of styles from the X Condensed width. Lyon Text has been replaced as the text face with Imperial, the text face used in the newspaper's main news sections. We found this to be a bold and inspired choice that accentuates the elegance and quirkiness of Schnyder.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

30 JANUARY 2013 | APPEARANCES

Paul Barnes lecturing at Reading University

Publications, lettering:

CommercialType — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

21 JANUARY 2013 | PUBLICATIONS | LETTERING

Custom lettering for Bon Appétit

Christian Schwartz drew a Fellini-esque 7 and handful of ornaments for the cover story on 7 great pasta dishes from brilliant New York chef Sara Jenkins (chef and owner of one of the studio's favorite restaurants, Porsena), for the February issue of Bon Appetit. Art director Elizabeth Spiridakis used xlyene transfers to give a warm and organic quality to all of the display type in the story.

Custom typefaces, publications, newspapers: 3 new families for Helsingin Sanomat

CommercialType — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

08 JANUARY 2013 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS | NEWSPAPERS

3 new families for Helsingin Sanomat

Helsingin Sanomat is Finland's major daily newspaper, with a circulation of around 400,000 on weekdays. A broadsheet since its founding in 1905, the paper made the switch to tabloid format on 8 January 2013. We provided all of the type for the new design: Sanomat, a serif family for headlines in 8 weights, designed by Paul Barnes with Berton Hasebe; Helsingin, a sans family for display use in 9 weights, designed by Christian Schwartz and Vincent Chan; Helsingin Text in 6 weights, for captions, sidebars, info graphics, maps, and listings; and text is in a custom grade of Publico Text which has been fine-tuned for the Helsingin Sanomat's presses. The redesign was conceptualized and executed internally, headed up by group creative director Sami Valtere along with art directors Hannu Pulkkinen and Ari Kinnari.

The tabloid layouts are built on a strong grid of square elements. Sanomat is designed to play against this, with organic forms that warm up the coldness and precision of the underlying page structure. Sanomat is an unusual hybrid: a serif face with flared sans terminals, influenced by 'serifless romans' like Optima and Albertus. The sans influence is even more visible in the italics, which lose almost all of their serifs in the lowercase. This almost inscriptional quality helps the typeface look serious and decidedly upscale—very important traits in maintaining the feel of a quality broadsheet in the tabloid format. The serifs are quite short, particularly on the diagonal characters, because of the preponderance of 'vv' and 'yy' pairs in Finnish. The word for 'goodness', hyvyys, is a good example of diagonal-diagonal combinations. The debut issue of the redesign featured a section explaining the new format, with all of the Sanomat headlines painstaking recreated in felt-tipped marker by the creative director.

Helsingin is a fairly straighforward geometric sans serif, tempering the quirkiness of Sanomat. The pointy terminals reference the iconic geometric architectural lettering in Helsinki's main square, close to the Helsingin Sanomat's offices. To counter the potentially monotonous texture caused by the many repeating letters in Finnish words, we made the bowls a little asymmetrical, more like a humanist sans than a typical geometric. In addition to the newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat has two very popular additional publications: a monthly magazine called Kuukausiliite and a weekly entertainment and nightlife magazine called Nyt. The design of these had evolved in very different directions from the daily paper and from one another. One aim of the redesign effort is to coordinate the design of all of the print products more closely, while still allowing each to keep its individual personality. The wide range of weights in the Helsingin family grew directly out of this aim: punchy bold weights for the younger readership of Nyt and elegant thin weights for the more literary flavor of Kuukausiliite. Additionally, a set of alternates allows the family to be even more flexible.

The new typefaces have debuted in the 8 January edition of Helsingin Sanomat, and will make their way into the magazines, mobile apps, and website soon.

While we did discuss redrawing the nameplate, it was ultimately deemed to be untouchable. There's no other newspaper nameplate like it in the world, and we wouldn't have wanted to ruin it.

Custom typefaces, publications:

CommercialType — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

02 JANUARY 2013 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS

A rounded sans revival for Bloomberg Businessweek

Paul Barnes's revival of a rounded sans serif originally produced by the Caslon foundry around 1839 provides levity in a special issue on investing, the final edition of Bloomberg Businessweek for 2012.

Press:

CommercialType — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

01 DECEMBER 2012 | PRESS

Article in hiut magazine

Commercial Type was featured in the latest issue of hiut, a small-format magazine on typography and type design pulished in Seoul, South Korea. The issue also featured an in-depth review of Atlas Grotesk and Atlas Typewriter, notable because it's the first non-Hangul typeface they have reviewed.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

29 NOVEMBER 2012 | APPEARANCES

Paul Barnes lecturing at the KABK

The Beatrice Warde memorial lecture, "You Can't Repeat the Past", makes its first outing in mainland Europe at the KABK in the Hague, the Netherlands. Paul Barnes will be showing how his work relates to the past, and will be showing rarely seen images of the Caslon foundry, sans serif from 1806, mono line letters from the 18th century and much, much more.

Custom typefaces, publications:

CommercialType — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

19 NOVEMBER 2012 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS

Publico Monospaced for Bloomberg Businessweek

Christian Schwartz created a monospaced version of Publico Text for Bloomberg Businessweek. Originally drawn (but not used) for the election special issue, it found its way into the November 19-25 2012 issue, in an article about the shady world of compounding pharmacies.

Publications:

CommercialType — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

14 NOVEMBER 2012 | PUBLICATIONS

Atlas Typewriter in IL

Creative director Francesco Franchi recently added Atlas Typewriter to the type palette of IL, a monthly magazine published by Il Sole 24 Ore, a business newspaper in Milan, Italy. Atlas Typewriter is used for covers and display typography in addition to being used for hard data in complex information graphics.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

07 NOVEMBER 2012 | APPEARANCES

Workshop and Lecture by Christian Schwartz in Mexico City

Christian Schwartz will be teaching a workshop entitiled "Diseño de tipograf&iactue;a: de la calle al estudio" ("Type design: from the street to the studio") in Mexico City, hosted by Grupo Horma. Please click here for more info (in Spanish).

Appearances:

CommercialType — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

20 OCTOBER 2012 | APPEARANCES

Paul Barnes to speak at TYPO London

Paul will be speaking at TYPO London 2012, which has the theme "Social". Although this is just two days after his lecture at St Bride, he promises to deliver a completely different talk. Tickets and other info can be found on the TYPO site.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

18 OCTOBER 2012 | APPEARANCES

Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture by Paul Barnes

Paul Barnes will be giving the annual Beatrice Warde Lecture at the St Bride Foundation, 14 Bride Lane, London. Entitled "You can't repeat the past", Paul's lecture will address how important the past has been in his work, how it has influenced many of his designs and what we can learn from it in making contemporary typefaces. He will be showing Marian and signing copies of Marian, une collection de revivals (a bilingual edition, published by Ypsilon Éditeur) afterwards. Tickets available now.

Appearances:

CommercialType — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

17 OCTOBER 2012 | APPEARANCES

TypoCakap with Christian Schwartz in Kuala Lumpur

Christian Schwartz will be lecturing on type design at Dasein Academy of Art in Kuala Lumpur on the afternoon of October 17. Details and advance registration on the Facebook page for the event.

Custom typefaces, publications:

CommercialType — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

12 OCTOBER 2012 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS

Bloomberg Businessweek Election Issue

Bloomberg Businessweek put out a special issue on the US presidential election this week, once again completely upending their standard format to tell a story in depth. For this graphics-intensive issue, we created a monospaced version of Neue Haas Grotesk (not planned for future release), for use in typesetting the issue's data. A set of alternates gives the face the ability to feel more like computer output or like typewritten information, as needed.
Cover by Justin Metz.

Custom typefaces, publications:

CommercialType — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

11 OCTOBER 2012 | CUSTOM TYPEFACES | PUBLICATIONS

Oboi for Wallpaper*

Wallpaper*'s November 2012 issue is the final of their for BRIC specials, each of which featured a custom typeface used throughout the issue. Christian Schwartz and Vincent Chan designed Обои (Oboi, Russian for "wallpaper") in one weight with support for both Latin and Cyrillic. Schwartz says, "It was difficult to come up with a typeface that looked distinctly Russian without falling into various clichés, or looking completely unremarkable once it's not in Russian anymore. I haven't been to Moscow, but when I went to St Petersburg a few years ago I noticed a particular style of all-cap stencils all over the place on everything from buildings, signs, and vehicles to the space travel equipment on display at the Cosmonauts Museum. Although the letterforms were based on a simple rectangular structure, the stencil breaks were inconsistent in a very inventive way, sometimes with the same letter being broken in completely different ways on adjacent lines. We adopted this approach and drew multiple versions of each letterform with the aim of playing the simple, regular structures against the inconsistent breaks for an interesting overall texture."