Ornamental Portal

Handwerk revives Berthold Wolpe’s early type design, originally called Wolpe Kursiv and cut in metal by Paul Koch in 1932. It first appeared in a 1936 craft symbol book featuring unique blackletter capitals. Due to persecution as a Jewish designer under the Nazi regime, Wolpe’s work faced delays and alterations and was finally released in 1952 in a modified form. Handwerk captures the original hand-lettered feel and includes stylistic sets that reference both the 1952 release and the original blackletter capitals, providing a historical perspective on Wolpe’s type design.

This Handwerk specimen is edited by Hammer (David Schatz & Sereina Rothenberger) with Philipp Herrmann and designed by Rietlanden Women’s Office. It accompanies the release of the same name font on www.outofthedark.swiss.

The book Posting brings together a selection of feminist posters from Dutch archives to reflect on posting as an activist strategy, holding the potential to create counter-publics to mainstream culture and to fight against the erasure, exoticization, or tokenism of bodies and experiences that deviate from normative preconceptions.

As is the case for many professions, in the history of Dutch graphic design the absence of women, non-binary, queer, Black designers is striking. This doesn’t only point back to systematic processes of exclusion in the first place, but also to the biases at play regarding whose work is remembered and archived. While efforts have been made to add forgotten names to the existing canon, the many posters, flyers and other printed matter shelved in queer and feminist archives remind us to question the notion of single authorship altogether and instead study graphic design as a decisively collaborative and transdisciplinary practice, which is especially true for community-led and volunteer-based projects.

The posters featured in this book point to this rich landscape of feminist organizing, and were found at the International Institute of Social History and the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV-Atria) in Amsterdam.

Do you remember the last time you were looking forward to the future? We're not talking about flying cars or floating screens. We're talking about a credible vision of a better time to come. So when was the last time? How did it look? How did it feel?

Have a glance at page 223, about two-thirds in. This is a portrait of Frantz Fanon by Milton Glaser. One of the biggest names in commercial graphic design of the 20th century, painting the likeness of the giant of anti-colonial thought. Let’s leave aside the question of "who's the Milton Glaser of today?" for now, but if there was one, whose portrait would they be painting?

What we’re attempting, in these few hundred pages, is to track our favorite examples of the visual language of revolt and solidarity in the 1960s and 1970s, put them in dialogue with our most beloved works of graphic design of those decades, and celebrate the heroes who made them. 
Creative currents flowing from Paris to Tokyo, Cuba to Milano, Beirut to New York, Berkeley to London, with innovations and revolutions (both political and artistic) happening every year. Causes supported by incredible talent and inspiring design that activated people, uplifted liberation movements, advanced the struggles for social justice, and created bonds of global solidarity.

Sadly this cross-pollination between commercial art and the political ended around the late 1980s and those two worlds are now completely isolated from one another.
Why do movements not produce beautiful and memorable visuals anymore? Why do the biggest image makers of today not lend their talents to the good fights that need their help? We hope that these will intersect again, and the first step is to study their history.Friends, we are here to tell you that fighting for a better world is, in fact, not only extremely cool, but the coolest thing you can do — and we have the images to prove it!

Ramdane Touhami and Émile Shahidi have spent years researching and traveling to assemble a huge collection of books, rare periodicals and radical art that will soon be available for consultation in person and online, and of which this little book is just a taste.

Dear Friend is a monthly letter format publication covering design events, issues, and ideas. This publication distributed via snail mail is initiated by Sandra Nuut and Ott Kagovere.

The publication edited by Sandra Nuut & Ott Kagovere features all the letters from the Dear Friend publishing project, which they initiated at the Graphic Design Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2018. The book includes contributions by Singapore-based design writer Justin Zhuang, designer and writer Else Lagerspetz, and artist Lieven Lahaye. The book is designed by Ott Kagovere and published by Lugemik and Estonian Academy of Arts.

Texts by Justin Zhuang, Lieven Lahaye, Else Lagerspetz

Letters written by Alicia Ajayi, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Claudia Doms, Nell Donkers, Maarin Ektermann, Rosen Eveleigh, Maryam Fanni, Saara Hannus, Eik Hermann, Paul John, Maria Juur, Ott Kagovere, Maarja Kangro, Arja Karhumaa, Kristina Ketola Bore, Nicole Killian, Rachel Kinbar, Tuomas Kortteinen, Keiu Krikmann, Kadri Laas, Else Lagerspetz, Lieven Lahaye, James Langdon, Jungmyung Lee, Kai Lobjakas, Michelle Millar Fisher, Maria Muuk, Sheere Ng, Sandra Nuut, Laura Pappa, Jack Self, Indrek Sirkel, Paul Soulellis, Triin Tamm, Laura Toots, Alice Twemlow, Loore Viires, Sean Yendrys, Justin Zhuang

A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure is a toolkit for writing and remembering queer and trans histories. Expanding on Nat Pyper’s series of fonts whose letterforms derive from the life stories and printed traces of countercultural queers of the last several decades, this new book showcases overlooked biographies alongside previously unseen archival materials, as well as Pyper’s unique approach to designing fonts as containers for memory.

The book debuts a new essay by Pyper, and includes contributions from Paul Soulellis, Claire Star Finch, Silas Munro, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Rosen Eveleigh, and G. B. Jones that offer vital perspectives on queer archival practices, language lineages, design as protest, and love as the basis for research. Part reader, part type specimen, part love letter, these fonts foreground the politics of queer memory while opening up new avenues for writers, designers, and curious readers.

Dear writer,
A Queer Year of Love Letters is a series of fonts that remembers the lives and work of countercultural queers of the past several decades. The series aims to make the act of remembering these overlooked and illegitimate histories accessible to other people, as easy as typing. Better yet: it aims to make the act of typing an act of remembering. That these fonts might be considered typefaces is incidental. They are an attempt to improvise a clandestine lineage, an aspatial and atemporal kind of queer kinship, through the act of writing.
I began making these fonts in order to rapidly document and disseminate the work and ideas that they cite. I pack these histories, or part of them, into fonts for a couple of reasons. First, font files are durable. OpenType fonts (.OTFs) have persisted in their ubiquity since the late '90s and maintain their utility as a nimble and reliable format. Second, fonts have the capacity to contain a hefty amount of information within a tiny package. In under 100 kilobytes, an entire alphabet! In the font’s metadata, a manifesto! Fonts then function as a useful format for ferrying information from one place to another.
I am using these fonts as time machines. These machines take me back—to Robert Ford and Black gay and lesbian underground publishing in early 1990s Chicago; to the Lesbian Alliance, a socialist-feminist enclave in 1970s St. Louis, Missouri; to G.B. Jones and queer punk filmmaking in 1980s downtown Toronto—but they also take me forward to unknown futures through the act of writing itself. In use, these fonts engage the past as a provocation. They engage the past as a verb.

Is this romantic? Yes.

Love,
Nat