Just fin­ished print­ing a short run, 2-colour poster for the POINT con­fer­ence in Lon­don with Thomas Maier point­ing a cam­era at me.

Spiek­er­mann Poster Film from POINT on Vimeo.

Not sure whether I agree with all the facts or the fig­ures in this chart, but it still makes inter­est­ing read­ing:

It could be a sig­nal to quit: this is my fourth life­time award since the Ger­man Design Coun­cil gave me their award in 2011, fol­lowed by SoTA (Soci­ety of Typo­graphic Affi­ciona­dos) and the TDC (Type­Di­rec­tors Club New York). The Ger­man Art Direc­tors gave me their award last fri­day here in Berlin. It is a golden nail. Honi soit qui mal y pense…

Thank you.

My first Van­der­cook proof press in the US is a Uni­ver­sal I, all elec­tric. The press is in our garage here in Belvedere, which was built for the big cars of the 50s. The press was so filthy that I have spent the past two weeks clean­ing it. Now the rust and the grime are gone, as are my fin­ger­nails. The paint is partly gone and the blank metal looks uneven, so I had to sub­mit these pho­tographs to quite a bit of Pho­to­shop treat­ment in order to make them at least look nos­tal­gic, if not tech­ni­cally precise.

Paul Moxon ran a two-day work­shop on Proof Press Finesse, i.e. pro­fes­sional prac­tice on a Van­der­cook at San Fran­cisco Cen­ter for the Book. Paul is not only the man behind the Van­der­cook web­site, but also a mas­ter printer and a very nice fellow.

We all learned a lot, got on well together and had a good time. While every­body else was busy get­ting their hands dirty, I took dozens of pho­tos. I did learn to print ages ago and have my own Kor­rex in Berlin, so for me it was more about get­ting famil­iar with the lead­ing brand of proof presses in the US. After the first day, I even­tu­ally gave up con­vert­ing from inches to met­ric and suc­cumbed to the archaic (and aptly-named) Impe­r­ial sys­tem. Duodec­i­mal doesn’t frighten me, as that is what typog­ra­phy is all about, but dec­i­mal inches seem to be a con­tra­dic­tion in terms.

Your own web­site never gets done. That is why, two years ago, we finally sat down and spent 36 hours on a sprint. At the end of it, edenspiekermann.com was in beta. It’s still there, but so are all web­sites, always. We just found that video again on some server or other.

Web­site sprint: 36 hours from erik spiek­er­mann on Vimeo.

Jür­gen Siebert runs the Cre­ative Morn­ings sec­tion for Berlin. He asked me to talk about this topic. So I did, in Berlin, but in English.

Cre­ative Morn­ing Berlin #13: Erik Spiek­er­mann from CreativeMornings/Berlin on Vimeo.

Johannes Berg­er­hausen and his team at the design col­lege in Mainz just released Uni­code, the movie. Takes 2 hours and 31 min­utes to watch the full fea­ture with its 109,242 char­ac­ters. Crazy by Hol­ly­wood stan­dards, sooth­ing if you suf­fer from typomania.

decode­u­ni­code from Siri Poarangan on Vimeo.

The video about my exhi­bi­tion at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin is now avail­able with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles:

schrift­gestal­ten | the face of type | eng­lish sub­ti­tle from Jonas Kamin­ski on Vimeo.

This arti­cle was pub­lished in Blue­print mag­a­zine in 2011 (too lazy to check which issue exactly). It was then re-published by John Board­ley in his Codex mag­a­zine, albeit slightly edited. I re-re-publish it here because the dis­cus­sion about dig­i­tal kitsch and appro­pri­ate metaphors has just come up again, mainly because Apple’s OS Lion now also fea­tures faux leather and adds pseudo-physical fea­tures like ani­mated turn­ing of pages to the inter­face which first appeared on the iPad, a pop­ulist device, not a com­puter that the likes of us depend upon for work.

The list of avail­able fonts on iOS men­tioned at the end may be out of date, but you’ll get the mes­sage. Since I wrote this, the new iPad has appeared, fea­tur­ing the amaz­ing Retina high-resolution screen. Its sharp­ness sud­denly shows up the flaws in type­faces. To me – an old per­son – this reminds me of the dis­cus­sion we had when pho­to­set­ting took over hot metal type in the 70s. And every­body makes the same assump­tions again. Mostly the wrong ones, look­ing for a solu­tion in tech­nol­ogy instead of design.


“A typog­ra­pher who hasn’t found the appro­pri­ate type­face may not have decreased the infor­ma­tional value of a text, but gave up the oppor­tu­nity to con­sid­er­ably increase its effectiveness.”

Thus wrote G.W. Ovink, Dutch typog­ra­pher and his­to­rian, way back before he knew any other media besides paper.

Every medium has always had con­straints for the type that goes with it. Whether you design a news­pa­per, a poster, a stamp or a web­site: you have to con­sider the tech­ni­cal envi­ron­ment, the reader, the client, the con­tent. As the sur­faces of sub­strates used for print­ing got smoother, the res­o­lu­tion of type went up along with it. If you look at a Guten­berg Bible through a mag­ni­fy­ing glass, you’d never believe the craters, bumps and blotches that look like gor­geous let­ters from a safe read­ing dis­tance. Bright and shiny, smoothly coated paper for high-quality off­set print­ing requires the let­ters to be sharp and well-defined, even though the human eye doesn’t like too much con­trast. Tech­nol­ogy, being what it is – a means to pro­mote itself if not mankind – kept pro­vid­ing more res­o­lu­tion and thus invis­i­ble detail than we ever needed. Once print­ing could hardly be more refined, along came the Cath­ode Ray Tube, and all the high def­i­n­i­tion that the sup­pli­ers of type­set­ting and print­ing equip­ment had declared not only inevitable but vital, was bro­ken down into crude bits of colour, red, green and blue only. Type sud­denly looked like Lego bricks when com­pared to the refine­ment a printer like Bodoni had been capa­ble of at the begin­ning of the 19^th cen­tury, long before pho­to­set­ting and off­set print­ing, let alone coated stock.

The web has always just been bad paper. Now it’s start­ing to look like good paper and design­ers will have to treat it as such. But as always at the begin­ning of a new par­a­digm, we have to imi­tate the old one while we get used to the new pos­si­bil­i­ties that peo­ple over a cer­tain age always con­sider a chal­lenge. Apart from what tech­nol­ogy will allow us to do, there are phys­i­cal laws — our eyes, our brain, light, con­trast; we can­not ignore those if we want to com­mu­ni­cate. Cul­tural para­me­ters like read­ing habits, lit­er­ary cul­ture (or lack of) – our deeply embed­ded fear of change, all these give an excuse to imi­tate the old, even though there are no tech­ni­cal rea­sons to do so. But we read best what we read most.

Every new medium raises the same ques­tions. Things which were thought mature in one media will take a while to mature in a new one. Look at the new elec­tronic books, par­tic­u­larly those on Apple’s amaz­ing iPad: a book is pre­sented as a repro­duc­tion of the tra­di­tional stack of bound pieces of paper. Going from one page to the next is accom­pa­nied by an ani­ma­tion of it being turned, even with the sound of paper being rus­tled. While you keep thumb­ing pages, how­ever, the stack stays equally thick on either side, turn­ing the metaphor into a lie, into dig­i­tal kitsch. It feels wrong and it is wrong. Metaphors are use­ful because we do not really want to know what goes on in the dig­i­tal maze under the bon­net that the oper­at­ing sys­tem hides. Super­flu­ous visual noise doesn’t make the read­ing any eas­ier, it just pre­sumes that we’re too stu­pid to notice the dif­fer­ence between a stack of glued paper and a battery-driven piece of plas­tic. If peo­ple really wanted to emu­late the whole phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence, why not give us the musty smell of old books, the scent of print­ing ink?

Worse than those mis­guided and patron­iz­ing metaphors is the fact that pub­lish­ers can no longer decide which type­face their text is set in. Apple pro­vides just five (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times, Ver­dana), and only one of them (Palatino) can be con­sid­ered a book face suit­able for read­ing on a screen. Some­how, the dichotomy seems weird between cool alu­minium shapes, high-tech dis­plays and amaz­ing tech­nol­ogy on the one hand, and wooden book­shelves on the other, as a metaphor for an online book­shop which pro­vides books that look older on screen than they do in the real world. Per­haps the indi­vid­ual design depart­ments respon­si­ble should talk to each other? The indus­trial design­ers cer­tainly seem to be ahead of the User Inter­face peo­ple at Apple.

Still, while elec­tronic books have a way to go (the Kin­dle is actu­ally a lit­tle fur­ther ahead in typo­graphic mat­ters), there are signs that the web will soon allow the same degree of typo­graphic refine­ments that we’re used to on tra­di­tional paper. Not only can we use every exist­ing type­face to be dis­played in a browser, but new mark-up lan­guages will give us typo­graphic treats like lig­a­tures, small caps and old style fig­ures that print­ers in the 15^th cen­tury devel­oped for their books which we still con­sider bench­marks today. If only some­body could invent a bat­tery that lasted as long as paper does.