Toronto Tomorrow

From Pentagram:

Toronto’s post-industrial eastern waterfront contains some of the largest areas of underdeveloped urban land in North America. “Toronto Tomorrow” is a proposed masterplan that will transform the location into one of the most innovative districts in the world, developed by Sidewalk Labs, the Alphabet subsidiary that reimagines cities using design and technology. Pentagram collaborated with Sidewalk on the design of the draft Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP), a massive, four-volume, 1,500-page document that details the proposal. The books’ design helps establish a visual identity for the project, using color, typography and illustration to capture the vibrancy of Sidewalk’s vision and balance the technical and the human. […]

The designers wanted a typographic tone of voice somewhere between sharp and technological and warm and human. They looked at the expressive differences between serif and sans serif font, ultimately selecting both, but in unconventional choices. The final suite of typefaces includes Neue Droschke (designed by David Einwaller of The Designers Foundry), an attenuated geometric Grotesk with unusual offcuts, seen in the book titles; the quirky sans serif Beatrice Display (designed by Sharp Type), used for the distinctive numbers on the covers; the standard Beatrice, a highly readable Grotesk, used for text and body copy, and Gliko Modern (designed by R-Typography), an elegant serif, used for headers and pull quotes.