The January issue of CR is out this week, with a cover designed in Peru and a theme of 'Inky fingers and sore thumbs'

The cover of this month's issue was designed by Eliot Urcuhuaranga of Publicidad Viusa just outide Lima, Peru. Publicidad Viusa specialises in producing posters for Chicha music events, an urban sound that mixes latin styles with Andean folk music. Chicha has its own visual language created using a unique screenprinting method. Our cover artwork was created using this method which is documented on the back cover of the issue.

We'll be doing a separate post to explain the method in detail, with a documentary film showing the cover artwork being made.

Elsewhere in the issue, we have a profile on Teenage Engineering from Sweden, whose recent proejcts include the Absolut Choir of singing robots and building their own synthesizer.

Plus, we have a report on Love Letter, the latest project from the Mural Arts Program of the city of Philadelphia in which artists have painted a series of love letters to citizens on the city's walls.

Then we feature the analogue search engine that UXUS built for H&M in Stockholm whereby pulleys and ropes replace algorithms and browsers.

And we profile SORT, the Society of Revisionist Typographers.

This month's guest typeface, by the way, is Cowboyslang, a display type family with a Wild West flavour designed by Hannes von Dohren and distributed by HypeForType

Elsewhere in the issue, we also profile French-Canadian director Vincent Morisset, he of Neon Bible, the interactive Arcade Fire video

And, our Crit pieces include a review of the V&A's Decode show

And a look at the role of posters in Europe's democracy movement of the 80s

Meanhwile, for subscribers, Monograph this month provides a record of the beautiful exhibition design done by Bibliothèque for Less and More, the Design Museum's current Dieter Rams show