- 31 Dec, 2025 *
The Stavanger Canning Museum, where typography and sardine canning coexist, reveals a striking chapter of life under occupation during WWII. Beyond machinery and production lines, the museum preserves evidence of how visual language adapted under constraint and how letterforms themselves became political. Under Nazi rule, official publications enforced rigid typographic order. Blackletter and heavy serif fonts projected authority and permanence, with symmetrical layouts signaling control before a word was read. Underground newspapers rejected this visual grammar: a clear example is Stritt Folk, a clandestine resistance paper circulated in southwestern Norway, whose typography was irregular by necessity and design, wit…
- 31 Dec, 2025 *
The Stavanger Canning Museum, where typography and sardine canning coexist, reveals a striking chapter of life under occupation during WWII. Beyond machinery and production lines, the museum preserves evidence of how visual language adapted under constraint and how letterforms themselves became political. Under Nazi rule, official publications enforced rigid typographic order. Blackletter and heavy serif fonts projected authority and permanence, with symmetrical layouts signaling control before a word was read. Underground newspapers rejected this visual grammar: a clear example is Stritt Folk, a clandestine resistance paper circulated in southwestern Norway, whose typography was irregular by necessity and design, with mixed typefaces, uneven spacing, inconsistent mastheads, and rough reproduction. Imperfection became a marker of trust, allowing readers to recognize resistance material instantly by what it did not resemble. The canning labels preserved at Stavanger echo this wartime shift, with ornament disappearing and efficiency dominating under scarcity and oversight.
Further Reading
Stavanger Canning Museum, preserving Norway’s sardine industry and wartime visual culture. Public domain.