Sociotype Journal Issue #3 – Home

Sociotype Journal is a new platform for thoughts on culture and society, that also happens to be a type specimen.
We believe type should start conversations and spread new ideas. Above all, it must communicate. So rather than create our specimens with the customary pangrams or pithy dummy copy, we’ve founded Sociotype Journal; a type specimen, but so much more besides.
Each issue we invite some interesting people to help us explore a single theme, inspired by (and typeset in) a particular type family from Sociotype. We believe type only really comes alive when it’s engaged with culture, so our contributors are largely from outside the world of type design. Typography may be our bread and butter, but the Journal is only about type insofar as that’s how we tell our stories. The rest is up for grabs.

Welcome to Issue #3 of Sociotype Journal, the type specimen for designers who like to read. Our theme this time is Home. What makes a home? Or a home away from home? And how does power (or a lack of it) change the concept and the reality of what ‘home’ means?
Join us for a top-down and bottom-up tour of domesticity, from geometrically pristine masterplanned utopias, to an altogether more DIY approach: unplanned and off-grid, into the margins, into ruin, and into hiding in plain sight. We’ll look at Potemkin villages and replica cities, McMansions and sham castles, cube farms and hot desks; spite fences, coffin homes, hippie communes, suburban malls, Cold War-era radar stations and more.