Design Work Life: Cataloging Inspiration Daily

This past Fall, Fast Company—a mag­a­zine I sub­scribe to and highly rec­om­mend — launched a redesign fea­tur­ing three cus­tom type­face fam­i­lies by Commercial Type: Kaiser, Zizou Slab and Zizou Sans:

Kaiser, a con­densed sans serif in 3 widths designed by Vincent Chan, is used for dis­play and is the pri­mary type­face on the cover. Inspired by 1920s and 30s-era German dis­play type­faces, it is char­ac­ter­ized by tight and reg­u­lar spac­ing, and by a highly sim­pli­fied low­er­case. Zizou Sans orig­i­nally began as Christian Schwartz’s attempt to draw Antique Olive from mem­ory, but ended up with its own dis­tinct per­son­al­ity. Zizou Slab takes a straight­for­ward approach in adapt­ing these forms into a slab serif, result­ing in a sim­ple, per­son­able and com­pact slab serif. These two fam­i­lies are used at a wide range of point sizes for head­lines, cap­tions, side­bars and info graph­ics through­out the magazine.

This month, fast​code​sign​.com also launched a redesign — by Simple.Honest.Work—using web ver­sions of Kaiser and Zizou to visu­ally tie together the offline and online publications.

Both Zizou fam­i­lies will be avail­able for licens­ing from Commercial Type in late 2012. In the mean­time, if you’d like to explore the fonts in use fur­ther, check out this arti­cle to get a closer look.