Bifur
Specimen
Bifur In Use
In March 1996 TassinariVetta took over the art direction of Casabella, the historic architectural review founded in 1928. From that moment on the magazine has become part of the everyday life of the studio, where it is designed month after month. Aiming to go beyond the traditional concept of ‘typographic architecture’ – which sees graphic arts subject to the universal compositional rules expressed in architecture – and to offer a new perspective on the world of letters, the 2024-25 cover design sets editorial objectives ahead of graphic ones. Taking advantage of the constraints inherent in monthly publication in sectoralization and serialization, and enhancing repetitive elements—the masthead, headlines, but above all the sequential number—the project brings editorial content to the cover through the choice of the font used to compose the number, its graphic interpretation, and the explanatory note published on the inside pages, which is an integral part of the project itself. Faithful to the magazine tradition, issue after issue, the choice of lettering or typeface moves through the 20th century between avant-garde and modernism, with forays into adjacent spaces suggested by unlikely discards or ambiguous analogies, while exploring the development of the industrial means underlying mechanical writing. With philological respect—using fonts available under license, photographic reproductions of original specimens, or vector redrawing, as appropriate—and with the calibrated use of a color palette consistent with the magazine visual history, the graphic interpretation ultimately aims to bring the historical artifact into the present, contextualizing it in a contemporary and accessible language.
Bifur HD
Casabella magazine, 2024–25
The German cover of Prestel’s coffee table book on Art Deco is a triple Cassandre: It combines an adaptation of his “Normandie” travel poster from 1935 with a title set in Bifur (1929), the first typeface designed by the great French artist. The author’s name is rendered in Cassannet, a contemporary font based on lettering seen on posters by A.M. Cassandre. The English version (see below) is a case of LTypI: The cover of this edition uses a face simply named Art Deco. It was issued by Mecanorma in 1975 and is credited to Mike W. Schmidt. Design: Liquid, Augsburg. Layout: Wolfram Söll, designwerk, Munich. Hardcover with slipcase, 288pp., 260×375 mm, cover design with metallic silver foil stamping and edge coloring.
Bifur HD
Art Deco by Norbert Wolf (Prestel)
Information
Design
Release Date
2024-04-25Team
About this font
Formats
Static (OTF, WOFF2)Language support
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About the designers
«La résignation est neuf fois sur dix une lâcheté déguisée: un sursis que l’on demande à la mort.»
Cassandre
Designer
Cassandre was a major figure in French graphic design, known for his energetic approach to typography and his experiments on legibility in his work. Born with two innate tendencies, a need for formal perfection and a burning thirst for lyrical expression, he found it difficult to reconcile the two.
Glyphs
OpenType Features
Slashed Zero
0123456789
offFractions
1/2 1/4 3/4
offSuperscript
H0123456789
offStylistic Set 1
0123456789
offStylistic Set 2
0123456789
offStylistic Set 3
<>+−×÷=±
offStylistic Set 4
abcdef
off