Rigsby Hull is in the latter category. Based in Houston, the firm doesn’t have easy access to the big, sexy clients. They work with oil companies, construction engineers, insurance companies, healthcare institutions, financial firms—and do such consistently sensitive, appropriate and gorgeous work that they’ve managed to attract plenty of more-glamorous clients along the way. The work doesn’t challenge convention or jump up and down screaming Look At Me. It’s just really good, time after time. And a large part of this is due to superb typography.

In this column, we look at two pieces from Rigsby Hull. One is understated, almost to the extreme. The other is bold and muscular. Both serve the client and the content very well by establishing a distinct voice. Together, they show the firm’s typographic range. And not incidentally, both were winners in the recent STEP Design 100 competition.

ANTIQUE RUGS & OIL RIGS
“Eight Rugs, Eight Stories” is a catalog for Carol Piper, a retailer of rare rugs (and a client every other firm in Houston probably lusts after). The catalog’s concept is based on a piece of Azerbaijani lore, which holds that “every rug is a sentient being … each grows more complex and beautiful with age, becoming gradually but eternally marked by its human caretakers.” That leads to pairing rugs with stories—excerpts from classic literature. And yes, there is an excerpt from Scheherazade, One Thousand Nights And a Night, paired with an Anatolian rug.

From that beginning, you might expect storybook typography—Old Style fonts at a largish size, with illustrated initial caps, in centered settings with wide margins, and maybe decorative little colophons here and there. But that would compete with the rugs. Instead, Rigsby Hull uses Helvetica light heads and body copy, with tiny labels in Garamond italic for a bit of variety, in a flush-left, flush-right setting.

The cover typography establishes a quiet, contemplative mood. The type is gray, placed very low and set in lowercase. It’s also tactile, because it’s deeply debossed into the thick, soft cover stock. This minimal approach is a bit of a surprise in a piece about antique luxury goods. Then again, the concept is, as the subhead indicates, “a literary sampler.”

Think about that for a moment. There are lots of other options for a piece about rugs. You could do a travelogue, bringing the reader to where the rugs are made. You could simply showcase the rugs (a lot of us would do that—let the goods speak for themselves). You could do a piece on the cultures behind the rugs, or the craft of rug making … but all of those would be about the rugs.

This concept is about the buyer. First, it tells the buyer that he or she is a sophisticated person who enjoys fine literature, as well as fine goods—a deep, even spiritual person who is less interested in ostentatious display than in culture. Second, it is about the relationships between the carpets and their “human caretakers,” which brings the customer into a long-ago romance. The subtlety of the typography supports that tone.

Inside, the stories are presented in a repeating format. Gray title pages with white borders introduce the themes of the stories—“E.M. Forster on rugs and true love,” for instance. The titles are set flush right to point the way to the next page. Then there’s a spread with an evocatively staged photo on the right, again with the white border. The text is on the left, set flush left at the extreme bottom of the page, with the title above on the same baseline as the type on the title page. The broad white expanse between the title and the photo sets up the only visual tension in this understated setting.