Earlier this March the German Design Council asked us to design a poster for the German pavilion at La Triennale di Milano in Italy. Blackletter typefaces can only really be used for beer sayings and Martin Luther quotes, so we decided to use it for both at the same time – although this is really a wine saying.
Beer is as German as wine is Italian. During Luther’s time, wine was a divine luxury in Germany and mostly served in church. Luther delivered his sermons in German, not in Latin, and he used common language to speak out against the sad state of things. In German, we say he spoke in “Fraktur”, the blackletter type of his time. This quintessentially German type is the obvious choice to visualise one of Luther’s famous sayings.
Besides having a limited edition of posters available at the triennial we also decided to showcase the forme that we used to print the posters – giving some insight to our working process.
