Mark Bradford: Tomorrow is Another Day

Polymode designed the visual identity for Mark Bradford’s 2017 exhibition as the U.S. representative at the 57th Venice Biennale, Tomorrow Is Another Day. The system features book design, invitations, maps, and a responsive website that unify and diverse range of content. Our work harmonizes with Bradford’s body of artworks and supports his mission of social change. Curated by Katy Siegel and Christopher Bedford, the art catalog features essays by Peter James Hudson, Anita Hill, Katy Siegel, Sarah Lewis, Zadie Smith, and excerpts from W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin.

Lead Partner – Silas Munro
Supporting Partner – Brian Johnson
Designer – Michelle Lamb

Poetic Research

Mapping Venice to Venice

The grid of the identity and book flexes with the variety of text styles and lengths and gives considered form to a copious amount of process work from the artist. Harnessing the typography to graphically reference the urban grids of Los Angeles and Venice in a fusion of neoclassical and modern structures that is harmonized with the artist’s mythic vision. The typefaces Portrait Inline Sans and Portrait Text by Commercial type are contemporary typefaces that point to a past lineage of typography connected to Venice, Italy. Portrait text has a humanist serif with sharp construction that point to the edges in Bradford’s compositions as well as the intensity of the social justice issues connected to the abstraction. Founders Grotesk by Klim Type Foundry is a san serif typeface that is a complex revival of early 20th century gothic types that echoes late 1960 editorial and newspaper type that coincides with Bradford’s early life and influences.

    The title type treatment is locked up in a vertical orientation to reference both the inscriptional lettering of classical italy, but also the urban grid of Los Angeles. The text is set in a faded gold foil on the cover and gold ink on the interior. This tarnished metallic captured Bradford’s critique of the cycles of boom and bust, destruction, and reconstruction that occur in society, in particular for Black people in America.
    The floods of black throughout the book embody Blackness as well as serve as cinematic resting points in the book. The endpapers and chapter openers of the book are varnished with a custom pattern designed by Polymode that were modeled on the unique expressive marks of Bradford’s paintings as well as the typical pattern of vencian windows across the city.
    Because of the sweeping time period of Bradford’s vision and body of work, our poetic research process brought us to a range of Neoclassical typography, architecture and printing that are hallmarks of histories in both Italy and America’s founding.
    The typographic system of the show’s identity is able to adapt and work in the book, screen, and in exhibition printed collateral.