Responses by Isabella Ahmadzadeh, designer, and Zetafonts.
Background: OFFF Tel Aviv, the Israeli branch of the worldwide renowned festival for visual culture and design OFFF, reached out to us to design the catalog for its 2022 edition. The book had to include the guest artists showcase while also representing the edition’s theme: OFFF*UCK, celebrating mistakes. Making mistakes is an essential part of our work as a type foundry, as well as the common ground of the creative community of OFFF enthusiasts.
Design thinking: We decided to follow a lesson from one of designer Erik Spiekermann’s postcards: “better done than prfect.” Imperfection was the key, and we decided to go for it, celebrating our humanity and our will to experiment and take risks. We designed a book that would collect all the possible mistakes by graphic designers: low-resolution images, missing glyphs, misaligned text, bad overprints, lorem ipsum leftovers and even an upside-down cover for the book with a slanted cut. It was time to celebrate all the things done wrong that ended up looking beautiful in their own right.
Challenges: One might think that the most difficult part of a graphic design project would be the graphic design aspects, but that wasn’t the case. What decided the fate of our beautiful mistakes was the shipping! The books, printed in Italy in record time by printing company 4Graph, had to reach Tel Aviv by the beginning of OFFF in mid-September. They were released by Israeli customs only on the day of the festival’s opening—phew!
Favorite details: First of all, the typefaces used in the book are Zetafonts’s original designs, including three custom fonts we proudly made exclusively for the book. Second, we put the results of our research through a neural network–generated typography using technologies developed only months before the book’s design. We had the chance to work with a beautiful portfolio of artwork by some incredibly talented creators. We could interact with many of them in the “manifesto” section, playfully disrupting their contributions with some of the most glaring reproduction mistakes designers can make. Finally, we decided to make the book look trapezoidal! The diagonal cut makes it impossible for the book to fit precisely on any shelf, but it’s like a big paper butterfly in your hands when you open it. Simple—and wrong!
Divergent paths: We would definitely have put more mistakes in the book. As a neural network once told us: “The only wrong is not enough.”
Browse Projects
