In April of 2018, designer, educator, and historian Alexander Tochilovsky asked me to come up with a design for the Lubalin Center’s “Lubalin 100” project. It was a simple idea: every day for 100 days, they would post an article, detail a piece of work, host a lecture, upload a video, or give some bit of content to the world that tell’s a part of Herb’s story, or honors his collaborators. The initiative needed a logotype, so Alexander and I discussed all the possible missteps one could take in such a project. Aping Herb’s known favorites would have been fairly low hanging fruit so we tried to introduce something that was loosely inspired by the work of his illustrious team of letterers like Tony DiSpigna, Tom Carnase, Alan Peckolick, and John Pistilli. The challenge was to refrain from aping their style.
Lubalin 100
Completed
Client
Creative Direction
Deliverable
We tried many possibilities of combining “Lubalin” with “100”. I wanted a clever solution to work and make me look like a genius, but nope.
From the wreckage, a single style emerged. Alexander had the good sense to ignore my lame attempts at some wanna-be clever typesetting.
By squishing an existing fatface I had designed to about 40% height, and then dragging the thin serif out to slab-land, a sketch at a sort of reverse contrast thing appeared.
At that point, it was simply a matter of getting the lines to fill the same horizontal space—Lubalin style. I always loved how in his type specimens Lubalin’s team would shave serifs, bend letters, overlap, and pull all kinds of acrobatics to get good justification. Here, it was just as easy as changing some widths, but the result is a slug that hits you right in your gut.
The Lubalin 100 website. Design by Lubalin Center.