Rendering of the cover for the book Identity is Variable, published by XYZ Type and designed by Polymode

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Identity Is Variable:

Essays, Interviews, & Reflections on Identity and Typography

Identity Is Variable explores the intimate connections between who we are and how we express ourselves through type. Design studios XYZ Type and Polymode collaborated to invite fifteen diverse voices from the design world to discuss the ways their personal and cultural identities resonate with typography, through personal narratives, critical essays, and lively conversations.

Contributors include artist-technologist Mindy Seu, designer-writer Elizabeth Goodspeed, multidisciplinary artist Diana Guerrero-Maciá, designer-poet Sadie Red Wing, and collaborative studio WORK/PLAY. Collectively, the twelve entirely original pieces in the book underscore the fact that typography is never neutral, but rather deeply personal and political.

Identity Is Variable is offset printed in two spot colors, expressively designed by Polymode using the namesake variable typeface XYZ Type created for them.

The book includes:

“While graphic design’s most stalworth practicioners reckon with a rather nasty entanglement between modernist ideals and colonial strategies (or don’t), this book scraps the modern era for parts and begins the impossible and necessary task of renegotiating its terms.”
—Riley Hooker.

“Reading Identity Is Variable felt like moving through one of Polymode’s exhibitions, as if attending a series of programming over its run. You move from an opening lecture into poetry, then into conversations and panels, before the cycle repeats. While it’s framed around typography, the book reads as an intimate, communal archive of how people understand themselves and one another through language, presented with the same care and clarity that defines Polymode’s work.”
—Tré Seals

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