SPECIMEN COURAGE / 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.
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.
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
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
