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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Text by Liz Far­relly
Visit Berlin, and it won’t belong before you encounter Erik Spiek­er­mann. His graphic fin­ger­prints are every­where – in the type­faces for the Ger­man Rail­ways, the Berlin Under­ground, and the myr­iad organ­i­sa­tions that make use of com­mu­ni­ca­tions designed by his prac­tices over the years.

But there’s a web of con­nec­tions that reaches far beyond Berlin, where it can seem that every other designer has a link to the ‘Metaman’ – whether they’ve been hired, fired, taught, crit­i­cized or cham­pi­oned by him. Many more are linked by human (‘Six degrees of sep­a­ra­tion’) net­works. Spiek­er­mann reigned at the helm of MetaDesign’s inter­na­tional net­work of stu­dios and affil­i­ates for two decades, and has taught and lec­tured through­out the world. Wher­ever you go you can see the fruits of Spiekermann’s ongo­ing work for inter­na­tional brands that adorn the hoods of auto­mo­biles, the fas­cias of domes­tic elec­tron­ics, cul­tural insti­tu­tions and books.

Yet his role as a high-ranking mover and shaker, an éminence grise within cor­po­rate design cul­ture, is only one string to his bow. No analy­sis of his work would be com­plete with­out not­ing his role in the evo­lu­tion of type design. Not only as a designer, but also as an entre­pre­neur, who estab­lished a new model for doing busi­ness, which he grew into a sep­a­rate world­wide net­work in the shape of FontShopIn­ter­na­tional. In that role, he is a prodi­gious talent-spotter, who has helped to nur­ture two gen­er­a­tions of new type­design­ers by pro­vid­ing cre­ative and com­mer­cial oppor­tu­ni­ties for an ever-widening dias­pora of collaborators.

Inside this gate­fold, our time­line plots a net­work of design­ers, type­faces, pub­li­ca­tions and events linked to Spiek­er­mann (ES) over the past three decades. It is far from com­plete – we didn’t begin to list the ex-MetaDesign pro­fes­sors, nor the mul­ti­ple awards – but that’s in the nature of net­works. We’ll watch with fas­ci­na­tion as his con­nec­tions con­tinue to expand by degrees.

You can down­load the time­line here.
The arti­cle is online at eye­magazine.

Human capac­ity to make mis­takes is unlim­ited, as Mur­phy for­mu­lates in the epony­mous law. Bill Hill sent me this pic­ture from Cal­i­for­nia. The fig­ure 3 appears six times. Why are the bot­tom fig­ures upside down while all the oth­ers are the proper way round? Does the per­son who put the fig­ures on that sign know some­thing we type design­ers don’t know?

This com­par­i­son is a lit­tle unfair. The loco­mo­tives of the for­mer Bun­des­bahn (Fed­eral Rail­ways) were painted in a rasp­berry colour which obvi­ously didn’t age too well. The new engines are painted bright red. We don’t know what this colour will look like in 20 years’ time. But the Bundesbahn’s Hel­vetica type hasn’t aged well either. It is far too tightly spaced and any­thing but spe­cific. Using DB Type, Deutsche Bahn’s exclu­sive type­face, sig­ni­fies own­er­ship so clearly that there is no need for a logo. Red and type are enough to brand the locomotive.

I’ve been involved with TCHO, choco­late mak­ers in San Fran­cisco, as a designer and an investor, for a few years now. Susanna Dulkinys, my wife and busi­ness part­ner, has won sev­eral prizes for her work on the TCHO brand and pack­ag­ing. We have been inter­viewed about the design aspects, shown the project at con­fer­ences and talked to other clients about it. The story of how this amaz­ing choco­late is actu­ally made and why it’s dif­fer­ent from other choco­lates is told in a fea­ture in WIRED magazine’s UK edi­tion. As it hap­pens, Louis Ros­setto, CEO of TCHO, was co-founder of WIRED way back in the early 90s.
For bet­ter read­ing enjoy­ment, here is a pdf of the arti­cle to down­load:
Wired_022010_Tcho

Next week I have to fly to China, and I’m already dread­ing the 12 hours or more on the plane. I can only hope that this man won’t sit next to me. He was pho­tographed by a Stew­ardess aboard a flight in the US. These days, we’re charged for every kilo­gram (or pounds or ounce) of extra lug­gage. Some­times I long for the days at the begin­ning of air-travel when every pas­sen­ger – includ­ing women – would be weighed. The pilot had to know the exact weight of the plane in order to guar­an­tee lift-off. Even with my post-christmassy 164 pounds I would qual­ify for a bonus com­pared to some folks…

As this meme has come up a lot recently in con­nec­tion with the hadopi story about a French gov­ern­memt agency using a stolen font for its logo and with Microsoft’s admis­sion of a major secu­rity issue, it might be use­ful to explain where it came from. This video does so.