01. 05. 13
A spot of ink
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.
01. 05. 13
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.
19. 04. 13
Not sure whether I agree with all the facts or the figures in this chart, but it still makes interesting reading:
Source: static.colourlovers.com via FontShop on Pinterest
23. 02. 13
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…
05. 02. 13
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.



22. 01. 13
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.

20. 09. 12
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.
19. 09. 12
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.
09. 09. 12
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.
27. 06. 12
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.
31. 03. 12
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 19th 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 15th 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.
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