The third page of each story shows an entire rug, with a little boxed label—e.g., “plate one detail”—that outlines the part of the rug that’s shown in the staged photo. As the stories progress, the rectilinear boxes turn into funky, curvy outlines. That label is the only element that changes shape and position: It’s the only active detail. Even when doing a quiet, sedate setting, Rigsby Hull understands the need for some tension and variety.

The cycle starts again opposite the display photo of the carpet, with another gray title page. This gentle rhythm sets up a linear narrative, again supporting the literary concept.

Rigamarole is as different from “Eight Rugs” as you can get without smashing conventions or otherwise drawing attention to yourself. It’s a muscular, bold and anything-but-minimalist corporate magazine for Diamond Offshore, the third-largest offshore oil drilling company in the world. They’re in a gritty, hazardous, highly technological industry that is pushing harder and harder to find and extract dead dinosaurs from ever less-accessible reserves. And the magazine’s dense, bold, precise typography expresses this very well.

Rigamarole has a beefy, slab-serifed banner (which makes the somewhat-silly name more purposeful), saturated colors and photography, with multiple variations in the grid and the typography to create a different voice for each article. Within all this activity and detail and variety is a visual discipline that holds the book together. On the cover of the summer 2005 issue, the type frames the dramatic photo simply: flush left with just one indent, two fonts and two compact blocks of type. The contents page is equally simple, with two compact columns of type anchoring the page. It’s the articles that create the energy.

A story titled “Scaling the Peaks” starts to break up the grid with an asymmetrical headline and single, wide text column, maintaining the copy in one block, low on the page, flush left, ragged right. As you move further into the article, each page does something different. There’s a full-spread photo with a flush-right caption showing workers pulling a drill bit. A spread on “The Asian Boom” introduces multiple elements and a complex, carefully managed informational hierarchy—it’s a design for skimming and browsing, rather than for linear reading. Boldface in the sidebar highlights main points. And though it is now back to a two-column format, the text is justified to keep the complicated layout as clean as possible.

The opening spread of the next article, “Ultra-Deep Endeavor,” is completely different. Now there are only a few elements, and the type is centered in a single neat block that balances perfectly with the focal point of the illustration. In the body of the article, the typography continues to be centered, but we now have a storybook device: a big, red initial cap. A pull quote floats above the body of the article, set in the bold, slabbed font with oversized quotation marks, another new device.

“Emblems of Performance,” the following article, introduces yet another visual language. The headline font is a light slab serif, flush right, and set corner-to-corner with the first column of text. The column widths are now based on a three-column grid, though they’re still at the bottom of the page. And the pull quote above the body text is set asymmetrically in a lighter font.

The visual language, and thus the character of the articles, is driven by both the content and the mix of data types it presents (text, image, chart and so on). Each story is delightful in its own way. An executive interview uses big, bold spaces and shapes; an employee profile looks more like a news magazine, with three columns and lots of insets; a spread about Confidence, a deep-sea rig, scatters smaller photos in a dense pattern across the pages; a spread listing all of the company’s rigs is presented as a chart.

What holds the magazine together is the consistency within the variations. It uses just the two typefaces. The underlying grid combines two-column and three-column layouts; when a wider column is needed, it’s two-thirds wide; when a narrow column is needed, it’s one third. Most of the pages have borders, and when a photo is printed full bleed, the border shows up as a white ruled box. But the most important unifying factor is the hardworking personality—and that is established as much by the typography as by the gritty imagery.

As I said, these two designs are as different as they can be. You might not think the same firm did both. But the same typographic and visual intelligence is behind them. These two examples are articulate exponents of the power of plain old Good Typography to express character and support content clearly, appropriately and gorgeously. And both show why this small firm in a secondary market manages to get national attention—and hold on to it year after year.