From 1950 to 1978, the Royal College of Art published a magazine called Ark that was very influential for two decades. After it was discontinued, the college went years without a student publication.



Arc is a recent attempt to fill this gap. It is published three times a year and during our period at the college we were part of the team that worked on issues 9, 10 and 11. For the latter, we designed a typeface called Modo.



Modo was born from the need to have a stronger identity in the magazine. When designing it, we took care in bringing a graphic feeling as that particular issue had great amounts of text and not many images. Our way to achieve this was to design a type family that allowed mixing several variations in each title while still achieving a harmonious look.

These variations came from the theme of Arc 11: parallels. Every article in the magazine had a parallel one, hence the double spines. This informed the design of the characters, so the cuts have different distances between the vertical lines — including a version where they overlap completely.



Modo made its sole appearance in Arc 11.