Lettering and typefaces for Bloomberg Businessweek

Turley and his team realized after nearly a year’s worth of issues that the type palette was missing an important element. They needed something more graphic, a typeface that could have a big presence on the page without them having to work so hard at coming up with an idea. For the initial redesign, Hasebe had drawn condensed numerals in two weights, intended to bring some variety of scale to the dense front section. He also applied six different special effects, though these didn’t survive past the design prototypes because they turned out to be too busy to work well alongside illustrations, charts, and photography.

All business magazines have to deal with the “old white man” problem—unlike pop culture magazines, they don’t always have the option of putting attractive stars on the cover. Illustration can help to Hank Paulson, Karl Rove, Tim Cook, Ben Bernanke. Turley commissioned lettering in a similar style for the cover, to test whether this condensed, blocky style might be the right addition. Quickly realizing how easy this graphic style made it to design covers, Hasebe was commissioned to expand it into a family of 4 heavy weights.

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”. Berton took the family from heavy to heavier, drawing a typeface that required a lot less effort to make an engaging layout.

For the 2011 Year in Review, Turley and his team commissioned three narrower widths of Druk Super, which then joined the designers’ standard toolbox. Druk Wide followed a few years later. This family is not so much an expanded version of Druk as it is a similar approach to the opposite kind of extreme proportion. Like Druk, Druk Wide starts from an anonymous set of extremely heavy, and extremely wide grotesks offered by many European foundries during the early 20th century. 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.

Like Alexander Isley’s exuberant mixing of wide and narrow type in Spy magazine in the 1990s, Turley and his team freely mixed the narrowest widths of Druk with Druk Wide, making for a wild energy in the Etc section.

Neue Haas Grotesk, Druk, and Publico were a solid foundation, but the team found that they needed specialized variants on the typefaces for specific uses. For a special issue on Sport, for example, Turley asked for a stencil version of Neue Haas Grotesk with a lot of breaks, and sent artworks by Lawrence Weiner1 as a reference.

For a special issue on the 2012 presidential election, Tuley and his team commissioned monospaced versions of both Neue Haas Grotesk and Publico Text. The issue centered on comparing life in 2008 with 2012—were people better or worse off since the previous election? They wanted all of the hard data set apart from the rest of the text, and making it monospaced gave the feeling of it being “untouched by human hands”. Publico Text Mono didn’t end up making it into the issue, but found a home in the magazine later on.

Going even deeper into tables of data, an issue on the year ahead published at the end of 2013 compared the top-performing companies in 55 different industries on almost a dozen different metrics, so the team commissioned an Agate version of Neue Haas Grotesk to pack the information in. Schwartz drew on his and Paul Barnes’s experience making agate typefaces for several newspapers to make the necessary adjustments. Though Neue Haas Grotesk Agate was drawn to keep data legible at very small sizes, the optical compensations also make it an interesting typeface for coverlines, when enlarged to display sizes.