When exploring how new fonts work together, we always find ourselves talking about dinner. The world of cuisine offers so many natural parallels for typography, and a robust vocabulary that we're quick to borrow: What does this font taste like? Is it a garnish, or the entrée itself? Is it adding heat, or sweetness, or spice? What might it go with? Food and dining offer indispensable reference points, which by analogy can make it easier to communicate what we see in a piece of design. One designer to another, we've described fonts as "somewhere between the small batch bourbon made in Brooklyn, and the one your granddad drank," or "the menu for an oyster bar, but reimagined without a New England accent."If the type is right, you'll know what you're getting into.Add wine to the mix, and whole new dimensions open up. There's the balance of old and new, and the stance that every winemaker takes toward tradition. A label communicates at once whether a wine is trading on its heritage, or interpreting it in a new way; perhaps it's standing apart from convention, or thumbing its nose at history. Wine labels succeed when they play with the instantly recognizable tropes and clichés of typography, from the engraved foofaraw of an old Bordeaux, to the haute modernism of a New World white. As with all packaging, if the type is right, you'll know what you're getting into.For Discover.typography, we challenged ourselves to see just what kinds of flavors we could coax out of unexpected pairings. Could a pair of brutalist sans serifs be paired with a pattern of renaissance arabesques, to evoke the kind of bottle that your favorite Italian restaurateur brings out at the end of a gathering? Could we project a flavor using just one font, or crashing six families together? Could we take typefaces that we've never seen used on wine bottles, and use them to evoke recognizable flavors? You'll find twenty-two different studies for typographic wine labels today at Discover.typography. Cheers! -JHCheers! From the designers at H&Co.
