David Bowie is the Subject
Catalog for the David Bowie exhibition at Victoria and Albert museum London, designed by Jonathan Barnbrook’s studio, and set in Albertus and Barnbrook’s Priori Serif for body text.
Designer Jon Abbott on the type choice: “There are a number of reasons for choosing Albertus as the headline typeface. London plays a pivotal role in the story told by the exhibition and we wanted the book to speak the language of London without resorting to Johnston (as fantastic as it is). Albertus seemed like an appropriate alternative: it is used on the street signs in Lambeth, the borough in which Bowie was born. Furthermore, Albertus was commissioned by Stanley Morison (creator of the quintessentially British Times New Roman) and designed by Berthold Ludwig Wolpe (German born, British designer), so the Anglo-Germanic history drew a nice parallel to Bowie’s time in Berlin.”
Read on on Creative Review.
2 Comments on “David Bowie is the Subject”
The self-indulgent use of the discretionary ligatures throughout the catalogue (those little connectors between s & t and c & t, for example, is beyond maddening. Looks junky and is very distracting. Reading a coffee-table book is never particularly pleasant to begin with (when will someone wise up and offer text-only e-versions to go along with the print editions?) why make it worse?
@Liggy isn’t “self-indulgent” exactly how you want the design of a book on Bowie to be?