Sprung from the mind of Portuguese type designer Rui Abreu’s imagination and rooted in the Modernist tradition, the Usual typeface is not your “usual” grotesque sans serif (pardon the pun). With an number of stylistic sets to dress the typeface up or down, its expressive range is larger than one would expect. This turns the utilitarian family into a surprisingly flexible typographic tool.

It’s around this time each year the rescued poinsettia on my desk in the San Francisco office starts to push out its tiny red leaves, signaling the end of Thanksgiving and a start to the larger Christmas / Hanukkah / New Years holiday season.