Café Sé — built from one weight, one colour, no logo.
How Mariana Costa rebuilt the identity for a 22-table café in the Alfama using a single typeface, a single ink, and not a single logomark.
— By Joana Almeida · 11 minForty years after the Swiss-school orthodoxy was declared dead, a new generation of designers is quietly rebuilding their practices around the same constraints. Eight conversations, one specimen, three case studies, and a manifesto from a Tokyo studio that bills clients in millimetres.
The opening essay — fifteen pages on why grids quietly came back into fashion, and what that means for the next ten years of practice.
The Tokyo book designer on why she bills every project in millimetres, refuses Helvetica, and only takes commissions she can sketch on the back of an envelope.
A Lisbon café, a Zurich publisher, and a Glaswegian pharmacy — all rebuilt their identities by deleting more than they added. We unpack the spec sheets.
The bureau redesigning every Estonian government document from scratch, in a single system, on a five-person team.
Eight pages dedicated to a new revival of Frutiger Stone, with notes on tracking, pairing, and where it absolutely will not work.
The closing piece, from the editor. Twelve sentences. Twelve pages. Read it slowly.
By Catherine Reuss · Editor-in-chief, Zürich
Forty years ago, the Swiss school was declared dead. It had been pronounced dead by every design quarterly, every art-school theory class, and most loudly, every American agency creative director under the age of forty. By 1996, the verdict was so settled it almost felt indecent to dispute.
And yet — and we're being slightly mischievous here, but only slightly — the most interesting work coming out of Lisbon, Tallinn, Tokyo, Mexico City, and now (finally) Glasgow in the last six quarters looks, if you squint, exactly like 1959.
Read the full essay →How Mariana Costa rebuilt the identity for a 22-table café in the Alfama using a single typeface, a single ink, and not a single logomark.
— By Joana Almeida · 11 minThe publisher who issued a strict typographic system to twelve illustrators and waited to see what would happen. Spoiler: very good books happened.
— By Niklaus Frey · 12 minHow three designers and one pharmacist rebuilt the wayfinding for a 380-bed teaching hospital in seventeen weeks, using a palette of three.
— By Calum MacRae · 11 min"A book is a piece of furniture a person carries with them. It must therefore be built. Not styled."
Mariko Aizawa's studio occupies the second floor of a small concrete building three minutes from Yoyogi-Hachiman station. There is no signage. There is no nameplate at the door. There are, on the day I visit, four people working in absolute silence, two of them barefoot, all of them under the age of thirty-five.
Aizawa herself is fifty-five and has the slight, calm presence of someone who has long since worked out which questions she will and will not answer. She has designed somewhere over four hundred books, exclusively for Japanese publishers, exclusively in the span of the eighteen years since she left Yoshihara & Tsuji to open HHK on her own.
She bills her clients in millimetres. This is not a metaphor. Her invoices contain a per-millimetre rate for every cover, every spine, every page-margin decision. "It is honest," she says. "If a publisher wishes to pay less, they may make the book smaller. If they wish to pay more, they may make it larger. Either way, the rate is constant."
I ask her if she has ever turned down a commission on this basis. She thinks about it for some time. "Yes," she says. "A great many."