MOLD magazine

MOLD is “a platform about designing the future of food”, that recently completed a successful crowdfunding campaign to launch a printed magazine. The publication is being designed by Eric Hu and Matt Tsang, making promintent use of The Pyte Foundry’s Gyrator as well as Forgotten Shapes’ digitization of Gerstner Programm.

Eric Hu was interviewed about the project by Emily Gosling for AIGA’s Eye On Design blog, and explained some of the thinking behind the type-centric design:

“It’s about eating bugs and eating dirt—the subject matter is strange and we wanted to create a design that was equally as strange. We also wanted to avoid the tropes of the word ‘future.’ A few years ago it was the highly geometric sans serif, all clean slick lines; but when you think ‘future’ now, a lot of designers try to make it all very dark, or use a bunch of evil corporate logos. We wanted to hold a mirror up to the fetishization of food with its emphasis on happiness and tweeness.”

The Eye On Design article only references Gerstner-Programm as “a slick Swiss sans serif”, and it fails to name or link to The Pyte Foundry as the creator of Gyrator, but it continues with more info on the type choices:

Hu explains that he found the type through a process of “looking for the source of twee, whether that’s Americana or Victorian England. If we go past the 20th century, we can go way beyond nostalgia. It’s taking twee to its most logical conclusion—what do you do when you run out of reference points?”

The Kickstarter campaign for the magazine has ended, but you can still order or subscribe from MOLD’s online store.