Wilde Elbe

Published October 21, 2025

For more than two years, 29 passionate photographers from the Society for Nature Photography went on the road for the illustrated book, Wilde Elbe. They followed the river from its source – located at 1386 meters in the Czech part of the Giant Mountains – through the rugged Elbe Sandstone Mountains and wide glacial valleys to its mouth in the Wadden Sea. The resulting publication by Knesebeck is a unique portrait of the river, its landscapes and biotopes.

The 200-page photo book was designed by the Munich design office of Schmid/Widmaier, which has been working for brands, companies, museums and publishers since 2001. The team was enthusiastic from the start: “The book shows the last wild and remote places around the Elbe. The pictures sometimes make you think that you are somewhere in another, distant country.”

Of course, the impressive nature photos are first and foremost the focus of this book. It was, therefore, all the more important that the headlines and captions came into a harmonious balance with them. They are set in the Regular, Bold and ExtraBold weights of West, which was published in 2021 by Fontwerk (designed by Daniel Perraudin). Thanks to their lightness, West’s subtle typographic accents do not push themselves into the foreground. Instead, they interweave with the photographs to form a harmonious flow. The body text is set in SangBleu by Swiss Typefaces.

Read full story.

WRITTEN BY

FontsInUse

An independent archive of typography.