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.

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

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.

The FAZ, Frank­furter All­ge­meine Zeitung, is Germany’s most pres­ti­gious news­pa­per. Con­ser­v­a­tive in its pol­i­tics, pro­gres­sive (or enlight­ened?) in its cov­er­age of The Arts. For the Fed­eral Republic’s 60^th anniver­sary this week­end they ded­i­cated a com­plete sec­tion to the work of com­mu­ni­ca­tion design­ers. They write about the “face of the new Ger­many” say­ing that (and I quote loosely) Our true ori­en­ta­tion sys­tems are pic­tures from daily life. Over the Fed­eral Republic’s sixty years design­ers have done more for the self-image of Ger­mans than all other professions.

Among the illus­tra­tions is the sys­tem of type­faces that I designed with Chris­t­ian Schwartz and that was awarded the Fed­eral Design Prize because – as the jury put it – “it rep­re­sented a major con­tri­bu­tion to the country’s visual culture”.

The FAZ’s cover page for 23 May 2009 shows a pho­to­graph of a piece of Berlin’s pub­lic tran­sit dia­gramm, “after a design by Erik Spiek­er­mann”. That is true, but only half the story. I lead the team that, in 1990, designed the pas­sen­ger infor­ma­tion sys­tem for the BVG (Berlin Tran­sit Author­ity) in the re-united city. I was respon­si­ble for the main para­me­ters, like type­faces, logos, colours, and over­all design lan­guage. The art­work for the dia­gramme was done by Brigitte Hartwig, now a pro­fes­sor at Dessau. The up-to-date dia­gramme (it is not a map!) is down­load­able here.

We made this movie about Her­ing Berlin’s new brochure and 700-page cat­a­logue:

Porce­lain on Paper from erik spiek­er­mann on Vimeo.

I have never used many colours, apart from the basic typo­graphic black and red. Twenty years ago, how­ever, Alex Branczyk and myself designed the logo etc for FontShop. We thought light and dark would nicely rep­re­sent the dig­i­tal process of one and zero, as well as the process inside the laser printer. Black and white was too plain, so it became black and yel­low. That colour scheme has become syn­ony­mous with FontShop and its prod­ucts, like the Font­Font library.

Nice to be finally rec­og­nized 20 years later by Pan­tone itself.

As even the occa­sional vis­i­tor to these pages will notice, I have switched to Word­Press. We use that pro­gramme at Spiek­er­man­nPart­ners, so I could enlist the help of Mar­cus Scheller who imported most of the old con­tent and built the site. Some of the for­mat­ting needs a pol­ish, and all the down­loads have dis­ap­peared into the ether for now. The ether, in this case, is our server, so it only (!) requires me to find the stuff and re-load it.

As it has taken more than half a year to get this far, don’t hold your breath. I am hop­ing that the inevitable break at the end of the year will allow me to sort this out and also learn more about Word­Press features.

It is still the only blog I know that gets writ­ten by one per­son in two lan­guages. Or is it?

There are a lot of places in Cal­i­for­nia named after saints. And since the Span­ish mis­sion­ar­ies were here well before any English-speaking Amer­i­cans (or the Rus­sians, who came down from Alaska and left their mark on place-names like Russ­ian River), these towns start with San or Santa, depend­ing on the saint’s gen­der. As in San Jose, Santa Bar­bara, San Rafael, Santa Clara, and, of course San Fran­cisco. This one I found on a shop sign near Wash­ing­ton Square.

Never heard of that Saint.

The BBC movie by Stephen Fry has finally arrived on YouTube. It was broad­cast last week but is only avail­able online in the UK. This is the link to the first part:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91smRXrEPRs

It’s already a week ago that I held a lec­ture at the Boston Pub­lic Library. It was the 34^th. William A. Dwig­gins Lec­ture. As lec­tures go, it wasn’t all that spe­cial (apart from it being a great hon­our to be asked to speak in front of all those dig­ni­fied print­ers and his­to­ri­ans), but it was the first time that I had a lec­ture inter­rupted by a fire alarm. I just had the first slide up (see small pic­ture) when the alarm went off.

We actu­ally all had to move out into the street. There was the usual dis­play of emer­gency hard­ware (I always find that on those occa­sions in the US they really like to show every­thing they have) – big trucks with and with­out lad­ders, ambu­lances, patrol cars, dozens of fire­men (who like to be called Fire­fight­ers these days) with hel­mets and axes – until it tran­spired that it had only been a mal­func­tion­ing microwave some­where that caused all this fuss!

Nick Sher­man had the pres­ence of mind to film the moment when the alarm went off. He also took the lit­tle pic­ture here that I just down­loaded from his flickr site. I designed a poster and an invi­ta­tion for the evening. The card is shown below.

I’ve also added a down­load for the pdf that was sent to the print­ers: dwiggins_sheet.pdf.