Halfmoon is an artist-run gallery in a former bakery in Glasgow. The work it shows is difficult and the posters are expected to be difficult with it. So the system looks improvised and is not: every element sits in a cell of the same twelve-by-twelve grid, and the only things allowed to be arbitrary are size, weight and angle.
There is no logo. The name is set in the heaviest weight and placed in a cell like everything else, which is why it can be enormous on a poster and tiny on a card without a second version existing.
Primary lockup, placed in cells 1–8 of the top half
This is the whole argument. The layout looks thrown together until you turn on the twelve columns, at which point every edge lands on a line. Deconstruction with nothing underneath is just a mess, and it stops working after one poster.
Grid hidden · the layout as printed
Every edge above is a column or row line. Nothing is nudged, and nothing is placed by eye.
Three colours, none of them mixed and none of them chosen for how they sit together. They are the defaults a browser hands you, used at full strength, which is the point rather than an accident.
#0C0C0CAll type. Everything is set in it unless there is a reason.#0000EEBlocks and fills. The exact blue an unstyled anchor used to be.#EE0000Dates and numbers only. Never a block, never a background for type.#F2F2F0Uncoated. The posters are photocopied for the window and offset for the mailout.A single grotesque, taken to black and left at regular, with the italic for anything spoken. The contrast is size and weight, never a second typeface, because a second typeface is how this style turns into a pastiche of itself.
A poster, an invitation, a card and the site. Every one of them is the same twelve columns; only the aspect changes, and the layout is re-placed rather than scaled.
A2 poster, photocopied for the window
Card, 85 × 55 mm
Invitation, A6
14 February to 22 March. Free entry, Thursday to Sunday.
Website, same grid as the poster
An artist-run space has no marketing department and should not sound like one. Anything written is a fact about the room, the dates or the money.
Two rooms. Nine artists. Free entry, Thursday to Sunday.
Countable, and answers the three things anybody actually needs.An immersive exploration of materiality and place.
Could describe any exhibition anywhere, which is how you can tell it describes none.The oven is still in the back room. We work around it.
Specific to this building and true, so it cannot be borrowed.A unique cultural destination in the heart of the city.
Written for a funding application, not for a person deciding whether to come.This is the easiest style in the set to fake and the hardest to keep. Four ways it goes, and the first is the one that ends it.
Halfmoon is invented, built as a portfolio exercise in anti-design. Glasgow and Dennistoun are real; this gallery, its programme, artists and dates are not. The work is after Wolfgang Weingart and the Basel typography of the 1970s, and after the studio revival of that language from about 2019. Those designers are credited as influences only. Part of the One Rule Each series.
Twelve columns, twelve rows, on every artefact. Size, weight and angle are free; the position of an edge never is.