SPECIMEN COURAGE
Visual Identity & Specimen, 2022
Visual Identity & Specimen, 2022
Client: ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage is an educational centre in Hanover dedicated to the city's society under National Socialism. Built around the question "Mitmachen oder Widerstehen?" — join in or resist? — it presents 46 biographies of Hanover residents from the period: those persecuted, those who resisted, bystanders, and perpetrators. Opened 2021.
Assignment: Identitätsstiftung developed the institution's visual identity around Courage, a typeface by Sascha Bente that moves between Blackletter and geometric sans serif. My part of the project: the type specimen and a series of applications — poster, key visual, exhibition catalogue cover — that present Courage and carry the identity into print.
Solution & Process: The typeface carries the argument; the layouts step back to let it speak. Blackletter — a script weighted with German tradition and its 20th-century corruption — meets geometric sans, the visual language of post-war modernism. Both forms live inside the same design. The specimen and applications hold that tension on the page: dense Blackletter against open geometric forms, historical weight against contemporary clarity. Composition stays structural and quiet, so the typeface, not the framing, does the work — the right register for a project whose subject is decision-making under historical pressure.
Assignment: Identitätsstiftung developed the institution's visual identity around Courage, a typeface by Sascha Bente that moves between Blackletter and geometric sans serif. My part of the project: the type specimen and a series of applications — poster, key visual, exhibition catalogue cover — that present Courage and carry the identity into print.
Solution & Process: The typeface carries the argument; the layouts step back to let it speak. Blackletter — a script weighted with German tradition and its 20th-century corruption — meets geometric sans, the visual language of post-war modernism. Both forms live inside the same design. The specimen and applications hold that tension on the page: dense Blackletter against open geometric forms, historical weight against contemporary clarity. Composition stays structural and quiet, so the typeface, not the framing, does the work — the right register for a project whose subject is decision-making under historical pressure.
YEAR: 2022
ROLE: Specimen design, typographic composition, applications
(poster, key visual, exhibition catalogue cover)
CLIENT: ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage, Hanover
AGENCY: Identitätsstiftung (concept, art direction)
CUSTOM TYPEFACE: Courage, by Sascha Bente
AWARD: European Design Award, Gold & Jury Prize, 2022
ROLE: Specimen design, typographic composition, applications
(poster, key visual, exhibition catalogue cover)
CLIENT: ZeitZentrum Zivilcourage, Hanover
AGENCY: Identitätsstiftung (concept, art direction)
CUSTOM TYPEFACE: Courage, by Sascha Bente
AWARD: European Design Award, Gold & Jury Prize, 2022
