Friday, 8:00am
13 December 2013
Noted #56
An Advent Adventure, Fedrigoni, the Dutch Type Library and MoetMoet Letterpress, Typodarium, and Studio Hinrichs’ typography calendar
Here are a few festive calendars that piqued our interest this week.
Bob Design makes interesting, often humorous, Christmas ‘cards’ – candy cane striped vacuum storage bags for ‘wrapping those awkward presents’; a clear plastic card that, when filled with water and shaken, overflows with fake snow; and a wax letter fortune-telling kit. This year, Bob has printed a small-format advent calendar, An Advent Adventure, with exposed binding and perforated pages that must be torn apart to reveal parts of Jonathan L. Howard’s ‘seasonal tale’ each day.
The number 1 hangs on a butcher’s hook, a curved blade lies on the number 2, the character Elodie Vesperine links arm in arm with the number 3 and so on. Here, the number 24 is partly concealed by a lavish cloth.
Top: Typodarium 2014, by Lars Harmsen and Raban Ruddigkeit.
An Advent Adventure by Bob Design, London.
Fedrigoni’s 2014 Sirio desk calendar is also a specification tool featuring 22 uncoated pulp coloured papers and boards from 80-700g. Designed by Cornish designer Paul Betowski, it features colour cold glue coupled with an elastic binding and die-cut title pages for each month. January begins with the recognisable pale yellow of Post-it notes and continues into deep reds by the warmer summer months.
The Fedrigoni Sirio desk calendar for 2014, designed by Cornish graphic designer Paul Betowski.
Now in its sixth edition, Lars Harmsen (Magma Brand Design) and Raban Ruddigkeit’s Typodarium 2014 tear-off calendar features work by 232 designers and foundries. It is a series of ‘serendipitous typographic encounters’ encapsulated in a metallic blue box.
Typodarium 2014 (Hermann Schmidt Mainz, €16.80) by Lars Harmsen and Raban Ruddigkeit. Art Direction: Boris Kahl, Magma Brand Design.
The MoetMoet Letterpress studio in Maastricht Netherlands, printed a two-colour 2014 calendar in grey and orange using a different font from the Dutch Type Library for each month.
Detail of MoetMoet Letterpress studio’s 2014 calendar.
Studio Hinrichs’ typography calendar ($29 for desk size, $47 for super size) highlights annual holidays alongside type designers’ birthdays. The calendar, which features twelve typefaces nominated as favourites by members of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), includes a short biography of each type designer and is handsomely printed in red and black.
The designers and their typographic nominations include Alejandro Paul with Poem Script Pro, David Lancashire with Bodoni Classic Roman, Min Wang with Adobe Garamond, Takenobu Igarashi with Caslon, Félix Beltrán with Futura (bold), Pepijn Zurburg with Pictoright (solid), Garth Walker with Constitutional Court, Fritz Gottschalk with Univers 75 Black, Marina Willer with Marian (italics), Mervyn Kurlansky with Runestone, Philippe Apeloig with Apeloig Type Library (medium), and Daniela Haufe and Detlef Fiedler with NormandeBQ.
Studio Hinrichs’ 2014 Typography Calendar features a different typeface for each month of the year, each nominated by an AGI member as being one of their favourite typefaces.
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.