Sommersemester 2026, BA/MA Visuelle Kommunikation VK_Startseite
Hellvetica; Hallucination of the Normal
by Jaemin Oh
Across the world, the menus of specialty cafés have come to look the same. The logos differ, but the design converges on a single quiet template: a plain sans-serif, set lowercase with even spacing, abundant white space, no ornament, and English in place of the local language. This project reads that template as typographic evidence of what Kyle Chayka calls Airspace, the convergence of spaces into one recognizable, globally circulated style. Airspace is not confined to space; it operates just as forcefully in graphic design, and the menu is where it becomes most legible.
Collected from a range of cities and set side by side, these menus are nearly indistinguishable. The homogenized café becomes what Marc Augé terms a non-place, a space without identity or history, and its typography is the first thing to declare it so. Rather than resolve this condition, the work sets it in view: what is gained when every menu can be read anywhere, and what quietly disappears when it can.
