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 old Riven­dell road bike was stolen in June. I’d had it for a long time and los­ing it did hurt. I think steal­ing a bicy­cle like that is more than just a lit­tle mis­de­meanour; it is a wicked crime and shows really bad character.

The only way I could get over the loss was by going to see Bradley Woehl at the Amer­i­can Cyclery in San Fran­cisco and have him build me a new bicy­cle. The frame is made by Water­ford in Wis­con­sin, the paint job is pretty much the same as my Riven­dell and the parts are mostly Cam­pag­nola. We put 28 tyres on it, which looks less ele­gant than 23, but if you have seen the roads here in San Fran­cisco, you know that even that is too thin.

I’m pub­lish­ing a few pic­tures here as a pub­lic record. If any­body dares steal this bike, there’ll be lots of peo­ple look­ing out for it.

Stephen Coles inter­viewed me about the his­tory of FontShop.

John gave this short speech on the occa­sion of me receiv­ing the Life­time Achieve­ment Award from the Ger­man Design Coun­cil.

John Wal­ters

Andrej Kupetz and Erik Spiek­er­mann

When I went to Berlin a cou­ple of years ago, in prepa­ra­tion for Eye 74, our Berlin spe­cial, I kept run­ning into Erik Spiek­er­mann. Not lit­er­ally, though I did later spend a pleas­ant evening in the com­pany of Erik and his wife Susanna. But I quickly realised that I couldn’t avoid encoun­ter­ing Erik and his legacy. For a start, nearly every per­son I met had some con­nec­tion to him: either they had col­lab­o­rated with him, or worked for him, or they’d been taught or oth­er­wise encour­aged by Erik early in their career. And even peo­ple who didn’t know him very well, or who had never met him, seemed to have an opin­ion about him. They knew him as a designer, as a typog­ra­pher, as a type evan­ge­list and as a writer – chiefly on the sub­ject of typog­ra­phy, but with opin­ions about every other sub­ject: pol­i­tics, soci­ety, cul­ture, art, music and so on. Also, quite apart from all the peo­ple I met, there were traces of Erik every­where I went, on the sub­way, in the signs and the many dif­fer­ent civic and com­mer­cial pub­lic projects that bore the stamp of one of his design prac­tices, or that used one of his typefaces.

So that’s why we called the Eye 74 piece ‘Six degrees of Erik Spiek­er­mann’. We devoted a gate­fold infor­ma­tion graphic to all the con­nec­tions that he had made through­out his career, span­ning the years since 1979, when the com­pany that would become Meta was founded, to the present-day activ­i­ties of Eden­spiek­er­mann. Like Kevin Bacon, Erik seemed to con­nect any­one who was any­one in graphic design, visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion, brand­ing and typog­ra­phy. Yet if our world were Hol­ly­wood, Erik would per­haps be more like Steven Spiel­berg than an actor like Bacon.

Erik is both a gen­er­al­ist and a spe­cial­ist. The first time I ran into him, at an inter­na­tional typog­ra­phy con­fer­ence, he asked me how I could stand to be sur­rounded by so many ‘nerds’? He knows how design­ers and typog­ra­phers think, in the most minute detail, because that’s the way he thinks, too. Yet he’s man­aged to lift his head above the cubi­cle that all too often restricts the graphic design world, and look dis­pas­sion­ately at com­merce and gov­ern­ment and char­i­ties, tak­ing the time to under­stand how they think, too. I have daily rea­son to be grate­ful for Erik’s advice, since his ideas about the Rund­buero, expressed in Unit Edi­tions’ book Stu­dio Cul­ture, helped me make some changes in the way I organ­ise my own office.

William Owen described Erik (in Eye 18) as a ‘con­sum­mate plu­ral­ist’, while also tak­ing on Erik’s own def­i­n­i­tion of him­self as a ‘typo­graphic designer’, who designs ‘from the word up’, a phrase later used for a slim vol­ume on Meta’s work. William also noted that Erik ‘val­ued work of a kind he could never or would never want to do.’ But that is not sur­pris­ing. It is almost the def­i­n­i­tion of a any­one with a rounded inter­est in cul­ture and the world at large: you don’t have to sing opera to value Nixon in China, nor do you have to paint in oils to appre­ci­ate art.

I think it is Erik’s abil­ity to work and show curios­ity at both micro and macro lev­els (and all points between) that makes him a good writer, as well as a good designer. His writ­ing is clear and to the point, whether in a col­umn for Blue­print mag­a­zine or in an email con­tain­ing direc­tions to his house. Even if he had done lit­tle else, the book he wrote with E. M Gin­ger, Stop Steal­ing Sheep and Learn How Type Works, would be an inter­na­tional call­ing card of huge pro­por­tions, since it’s one of the few gen­uinely infor­ma­tive, enter­tain­ing and read­able books about type writ­ten in the past few decades.

When I first watched the DVD of Gary Hustwit’s Hel­vetica, whose extras sec­tion includes an extended inter­view with Erik, I was amused to hear him say how much he liked being an ‘unknown designer’. Today’s cer­e­mony seems an odd place to talk about Erik’s lack of recog­ni­tion. Yet he was mak­ing an impor­tant point about the role of design – graphic design, type design and typog­ra­phy in par­tic­u­lar – in civic life. As Erik explains in that doc­u­men­tary, neatly divert­ing the direc­tor from too many ques­tions about a type­face he doesn’t much care for, a nation’s cul­ture, the stuff that sur­rounds us, is made of good archi­tec­ture and build­ing, good food and cafes and sup­pos­edly nerdy things like the small type in timeta­bles for pub­lic trans­port, or the signs in sta­tions, or the lit­tle details that make your iPhone work intuitively.

Erik gets a kick out of being the unknown author behind some of this stuff, even when the money is ter­ri­ble, and he has to fight ‘the system’ – the con­ven­tional way of doing some­thing – to make things just a lit­tle bit bet­ter. Few peo­ple might notice, or remark out loud that the timetable has acquired more leg­i­ble, read­able type, or bet­ter nav­i­ga­tion, but as Erik would say, ‘That is the point.’ Many design­ers get a kick out of mak­ing things bet­ter, or find­ing a solu­tion, or being part of the team that did that, whether their name is on the fin­ished prod­uct or not. So I think we could regard this prize as one that Erik can share, just a lit­tle bit, with all the unknown design­ers out there, who play their part in mak­ing our lives bet­ter, our small print more legible.

Around the time I became edi­tor of Eye, we pub­lished an updated ver­sion of Ken Garland’s ‘First Things First’,* call­ing on design­ers to exam­ine their pri­or­i­ties. The new man­i­festo included these sen­tences: ‘Unprece­dented envi­ron­men­tal, social and cul­tural crises demand our atten­tion. Many cul­tural inter­ven­tions, social mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, books, mag­a­zines, exhi­bi­tions, edu­ca­tional tools, tele­vi­sion pro­grammes, films, char­i­ta­ble causes and other infor­ma­tion design projects urgently require our exper­tise and help.’ Erik was one of 33 design­ers who put their names to ‘First Things First 2000’, and that state­ment sounds just as rel­e­vant today – throw mobile devices and social media into the mix and it still holds good.

I agreed to come here on the strict under­stand­ing that the Design­preis would not sig­nify or her­ald any slow­ing down on Erik’s part. He still works at a furi­ous pace. He even has a proof­ing press in his house, where he’s cook­ing up plans to com­bine dig­i­tal and ana­logue, mak­ing plates with a laser cut­ter. And in addi­tion to all the usual client work, he is pub­lish­ing a series of book­lets of writ­ings that he likes, and more lit­tle red books of his own work – the thoughts of Chair­man Erik.

These thoughts are worth shar­ing. Erik is con­cerned about nerdy details, yet he loves to con­struct the big pic­ture. He’s a great advo­cate of design’s role in civilised soci­ety, all the bor­ing, behind-the-scenes stuff, but he is also quick to spot what is new and cool, and to cham­pion and men­tor young tal­ent – the new Eden­spiek­er­mann schol­ar­ship is a sig­nif­i­cant addi­tion to this aspect of Erik’s life and work. For all these rea­sons, Erik is a wor­thy recip­i­ent of what­ever awards get thrown his way – and they won’t go to his head.

By John L. Wal­ters, edi­tor, co-publisher, Eye mag­a­zine, 2011

* Pub­lished simul­ta­ne­ously with sev­eral other design mag­a­zines, includ­ing Blue­print, Form and Emi­gre, see http://bit.ly/FTF2000

Not the best audio or video qual­ity, but a Spiek­er­mann inter­view online. 60 min­utes if you can bear it!

design­chat

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.

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.