Johannes López Ayala
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typographer.bsky.social
Johannes López Ayala
@typographer.bsky.social
250 followers 230 following 180 posts
Design, writing, art, philosophy, jazz, fonts. Lots of fonts. ⦿ Didn’t think I’d turn my profile into a moodboard, but here we go ⦿ Mastodon: https://typo.social/@jla
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typographer.bsky.social
Got a spam mail trying to sell me the ugliest tech gadget ever.
At the bottom of the picture, a rendering of something that can only be described as a horizontal slice of an ugly silver toy race car with an oversized, gaudy magic crystal at the position of the driver (or codriver, depending on your country). The rest of the slice’o’toycar is crammed with yellow/orange, avocado green, and off-white mechanical keyboard keys in an incomprehensible pattern. The top of the picture begs: “UP TO 55% OFF — It’s starting — BACK US NOW”
October 17, 2025 at 9:07 AM
typographer.bsky.social
Book design • UI/UX design • Corporate design
Photo of a Kansas City Chiefs press conference with Andy Reid, Travis Kelce, and Patrick Mahomes. Reid is wearing a gray suit and red tie with a lapel pin. Kelce is wearing a camp-style short-sleeved shirt with a bird print, along with a suede cap, and Mahomes is wearing a white collared shirt, a pink checkered double-breasted vest, and a pale pink tie.
October 8, 2025 at 11:24 AM
typographer.bsky.social
Never heard of Bandsintown before. Noticed them today because they’ve got the best logo I’ve seen in a while. www.company.bandsintown.com/brand-assets
Bandsintown lockup. Icon: light cyan “Heavy Metal Horns” gesture that also doubles as a “b” with a stylized audio bar visualizer above it, composed entirely of rectangular shapes. Logotype below: “bandsintown”, typeset in a a generic geometric sans.
June 21, 2025 at 12:02 PM
typographer.bsky.social
If you're overwhelmed as a designer right now, let's break it down to: What can *you* do?
Lotte Jacobse's slide on what you can do as an individual designer (from her KRUPA design conference keynote): 1. Start from an open and new perspective 2. Know your lens, and your blind spots 3. Center the impact on people 4. Vision with hope, design with realism
May 23, 2025 at 2:47 PM
typographer.bsky.social
Gosh, I’d certainly like to do some rad layout work with my 1993 selection of classic fonts like “Palamino”, “Minstrel”, “Hobby”, or—who doesn’t love it?—“Soutane”.
A 1993 screenshot of a font menu in three colums displaying 21 knockoff typefaces with hilarious names trying to stick close to the original trademark names, e. g., "Palamino" for "Palatino", or "Minstrel" for "Mistral".
May 4, 2025 at 2:01 PM
typographer.bsky.social
Arm Wrestling Meme: ‘Hip-Hoppers’ and ‘Metalheads’ meeting at ‘Illegible Lettering’—no one can decipher those black metal band logos nor those graffiti tags, after all.
April 24, 2025 at 6:10 PM
typographer.bsky.social
OH no Type Co. announce their “new winner for least legible typeface”—Swear Smoke: ohnotype.co/drawer#swear...
A specimen of the OHno Type Co. typeface Swear Smoke showing the words "SHORT WORDS". It's an elaborate connected design that is intentionally hard to read with very high contrast, a noticeable backslant, and some bizarre forms.
April 24, 2025 at 6:02 PM
typographer.bsky.social
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Notebook must be the most impressive working document I‘ve ever seen—carefully cut, pasted, perforated, reinforced, highlighted, underlined, annotated and commented all by himself in what must have been an endless, meditative venture.

archive.org/details/fran...
A screenshot from a clip of Francis Ford Coppola presenting his Godfather Notebook, a massive, completely handmade tome collecting all (and I mean all) his thoughts and notes about the production of the movie. He used this instead of the much less detailed screenplay to direct the movie. A screenshot from a clip of Francis Ford Coppola presenting his Godfather Notebook, a massive, completely handmade tome collecting all (and I mean all) his thoughts and notes about the production of the movie. He used this instead of the much less detailed screenplay to direct the movie. A screenshot from a clip of Francis Ford Coppola presenting his Godfather Notebook, a massive, completely handmade tome collecting all (and I mean all) his thoughts and notes about the production of the movie. He used this instead of the much less detailed screenplay to direct the movie. A screenshot from a clip of Francis Ford Coppola presenting his Godfather Notebook, a massive, completely handmade tome collecting all (and I mean all) his thoughts and notes about the production of the movie. He used this instead of the much less detailed screenplay to direct the movie.
April 24, 2025 at 10:48 AM
typographer.bsky.social
“Rudolf Koch began drawing the Offenbach typeface in 1928 … The type was published posthumously by Gebr. Klingspor foundry in 1935 … pairing wide roman capitals with narrow gothic minuscules … Poem publishes a faithful revival … under the CC BY-ND 4.0 license”

www.poem-editions.com/products/off...
"Gestaltung" set several times in Offenbach with different stylistic alternates used per line.
April 22, 2025 at 8:44 AM
typographer.bsky.social
I love I Love Typography’s typography. There’s a whole inspo moodboard if you didn’t know yet. And it’s just been expanded. → ilovetypography.com/font-inspira... via @ilovetypography.bsky.social
April 7, 2025 at 7:57 PM
typographer.bsky.social
A 1998 businesswoman holding a PowerMac 7100 at gunpoint with a heavy automatic rifle or something in a generic 1990s US-American small business interior. Caption: “How your email finds me”
February 27, 2025 at 4:22 PM
typographer.bsky.social
There’s a whole category for “19th century glasses” on Wikimedia Commons, though—for the accomplished fashionista: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Categor...
Count Alexander Kuschelew-Besborodko, portrait painted by Franz Krüger in 1850 Benjamin Henry Latrobe, portrait by Rembrandt Peale, USA 1815 Josef Abel (1764–1818): young man (probably Franz Schubert, aged 17), portrait from c. 1817 Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873): author Dr. John Allen, portrait from 1836
February 26, 2025 at 1:13 PM
typographer.bsky.social
I demand a comeback for 1830s eyewear fashion.
“Nathaniel Olds”, portrait painted by Jeptha Homer Wade in 1837
February 26, 2025 at 1:06 PM
typographer.bsky.social
What I see:
A statue of Bernd das Brot, the beloved children’s TV show character from Germany
February 22, 2025 at 9:03 AM
typographer.bsky.social
What I see:
Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, 2010 Performance 3 months. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY 2010 © Marina Abramović / Bildupphovsrätt 2016
January 31, 2025 at 2:09 PM
typographer.bsky.social
What I see:
A Ray and Charles Eames-designed leg splint made of plywood from the V&A museum collection
January 24, 2025 at 4:13 PM
typographer.bsky.social
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature: “Ringi is a sans serif design whose horizontal as well as vertical strokes have the same width – a true monolinear design … Ringi’s (very) slanted styles are truly just slanted without any correction of the curves”

www.futurefonts.xyz/inga-plonnig...
Ringi typeface specimen: 100 Units (Almost) Everywhere Ringi typeface specimen: Truly Slanted, No Correction of the Curve
January 23, 2025 at 5:15 PM
typographer.bsky.social
It’s a Calypso apple!

Calypso (1958) by Roger Excoffon: fontsinuse.com/typefaces/31...
“Tout le monde connait Roger Excoffon”, exhibition poster typeset in calypso and Antique Olive Nord, designed in 2011 by Extrafine.
January 11, 2025 at 12:52 PM
typographer.bsky.social
Movie/art trivia: a knockoff version of Brâncuși’s ‘Bird in Space’ has been used as a prop for the set of ‘Padme's quarters on Coruscant‘ in ‘Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones’ (2002).

(Image source: www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetai...)
A knockoff of Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși's ‘Bird in Space' sculptures as seen in ‘Padme’s quarters on Coruscant’, a set design from the film ‘Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones’ from 2002. Sculpture/prop circled red so it’s clearly identifiable against the busy backdrop.
January 11, 2025 at 5:31 AM
typographer.bsky.social
‘Something else caught his eye …: an obscure variant of a logo Mr. Lubalin designed for Mother & Child magazine in the 1960s. … “It’s genius … He’s using type as a metaphor. He’s distilling an idea into a word. That’s what it’s about: You have to think about how the letters can represent something.”
Proposed Mother & Child magazine logo, 1966, by Tom Carnase/Herb Lubalin/Alan Peckolick, designers
December 31, 2024 at 12:20 PM
typographer.bsky.social
(iMessage chat) Them: What’s the Christmas song that be like “the lease knobby dot” Them: it’s Spanish Me: Are you serious?
December 24, 2024 at 4:56 AM
typographer.bsky.social
December 23, 2024 at 4:49 AM
typographer.bsky.social
It’s a good day, it’s an OHno Type Co. font release day: ohnotype.co/fonts/polymath
A playful and detailed b/w specimen graphic for “Polymath” from OHno Type Co., an alternative-laden “geometric sans ready to shakeup the entire industry”
April 16, 2024 at 6:50 AM
typographer.bsky.social
A trip to the docks.
“Kaltwasser” lettering on an old dockland building “JUMEX” lettering on an old dockland building “Kaltwasser” lettering above a blue door on an old dockland building Elephant head with octopus tentacles. Streetart on a dockland building
April 14, 2024 at 2:44 PM
typographer.bsky.social
They painted the top part of (only) this electricity tower —why? Certainly not for planes? Some things seem weird but more often than not, it’s by design.
A gunmetal electricity tower against blue, cloudy sky at dusk. Its top part is painted red and white.
April 9, 2024 at 6:18 PM