Oliver Reichen­stein just spoke at TypoBer­lin. While he was there, his (Infor­ma­tion Archi­tects’, that is) lat­est Web Trend Map went to Final Beta, Cos­mic 140. Oliver pointed out that I also made it into the Top 140 of the most influ­en­tial Twit­ter­ers – or is that Twits? You can down­load a free PDF of this won­der­ful piece or buy the lav­ishly printed poster. The names are sorted by #name #han­dle #cat­e­gory #influ­ence #activ­ity.

Over on the Ger­man part of this weblog you can watch a short movie and an inter­view as well as lis­ten to a radio pro­gramme – all in Ger­man and all on the occa­sion of TypoBer­lin 2010. Just click the “deutsch” but­ton above.

It’s been around for a while. As off today also fea­tured on the Spiekerblog: proper type­faces instead of sys­tem fonts.

Copy is set in Espi Slab Reg­u­lar, Head­lines in Espi Sans Bold, Twit­ter Feeds in Espi Sans Reg­u­lar and Bold. Espi is Edenspiekermann’s exclu­sive ver­sion of FF Unit and FF Unit Slab. Done with Type­kit.

Mar­cus Scheller hacked it all together.

You can also see real type in action on the Eden­spiek­er­mann site.

Just caught on online inter­view about web­fonts and copied this snip­pet which men­tions the fact that prepar­ing fonts for the web is a lot of work.
typekit_on_fontfont
Here is the whole interview:

http://5by5.tv/bigwebshow

My col­umn in Blue­print mag­a­zine always cov­ers the main topic of the issue. This time they asked me to write about Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is a car­toon of itself, a stand­ing joke, but with­out the slight­est hint of irony, or self-distance. It is per­haps the most Amer­i­can of US cities, built evi­dence to the fact that big­ger is bet­ter and that bet­ter is big­ger. Noth­ing in Las Vegas started as an orig­i­nal idea, and noth­ing seems older than 10 years, but the sheer amount of bor­rowed images makes the whole totally incom­pa­ra­ble.
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Roberto Bolado sent me this great video about a let­ter­press printshop in his coun­try.

Dito­ria from typometro on Vimeo.

A col­league wanted a copy of the logo for Glas­gow ’99 that we designed at MetaDe­sign Lon­don back in 1997. When I looked for it, I found the movie that we made for the pre­sen­ta­tion at the time. Made in Direc­tor, not Flash, it is already a his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment.

Glas­gow Type­face from erik spiek­er­mann on Vimeo.

This is the sec­ond part of the inter­view with Adrian Shaugh­nessy. The first part was here.

What sort of designer had you become at this point?
Well, I’m not a very good designer; I’m an OK designer. I’m OK when it comes to com­plex things like grids. I like maths. I like geom­e­try. I like mul­ti­ples. How things are arranged on the page. I like that because it’s all about dis­ci­pline. I learnt about type through doing hot-metal type­set­ting. So I know that what is between the black marks is as impor­tant as the black marks them­selves. With metal type­set­ting you have to touch it, it’s not just the return key. So that’s my dis­ci­pline. I’m an art his­to­rian by trade; I’m slightly intel­lec­tual, maybe too intel­lec­tual. When it comes to visu­al­iz­ing things I’m too intel­lec­tual, it becomes too obvi­ous. Neville Brody’s the exact oppo­site of me. We’ve worked together suc­cess­fully. Neville’s a dig­i­tal painter. He just throws it on the page and it looks great, but he can’t repeat it. I’m the other way round. I pro­vide the skele­ton, I make sure things don’t fall down. And he makes it look good, and I’m very happy with that.
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