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.

Two coun­tries will intro­duce the Euro as cur­rency on Jan­u­ary 1, 2008, Cyprus and Malta. The fronts of the coins look the same as that of all other coun­tries, while national sym­bols are dis­played on the back.

This reminded me of the occa­sion when I got asked by the Ger­man news mag­a­zine Der Spiegel, back in 1999, to design my own ver­sion of the yet to be intro­duced new Euro­pean coins. They also asked a few other design­ers whose solu­tions I can­not show as I have no data for them.

I noticed back then how lit­tle sys­tem­atic thought had gone into design­ing the new coins. While there were and still are three dif­fer­ent types of metal and sev­eral sep­a­rate sizes and bevels, It would be push­ing it to talk of a com­pre­hen­sive design sys­tem. Much worse, how­ever, is the fact that one still can only dis­tin­guish some of the coins by look­ing very closely – not a good idea for money that needs to be avail­able at  – dare I say it – the flick of a coin. One ought to be able to sort one’s change inside a pocket and count it even in the dark.

As you can see, the coins are all of slightly dif­fer­ent sizes, albeit not dif­fer­ent enough to dis­tin­guish by touch only. The 2-Euro piece has a diam­e­ter of 25.75 mm, the 50-Cent coin is hardly smaller at 24.25 mm, while, strangely, the 1 Euro is smaller than the one half its value, 23.25 mm. The 21.25 mm 5-Cent piece is also larger than the 10-Cent coin, which is worth more but only 19.75 mm in diam­e­ter. The dif­fer­ent met­als can only be told apart in good light.
The 20-Cent piece is the only one with a dif­fer­ent bevel, but still hardly dis­tin­guish­able from the 5-Cent piece of almost the same size. Embossed lines are to be found on the right and on the left or at an angle, but too thin and closely together as to offer any hints for prob­ing fin­gers. The out­line of Europe is more of a polit­i­cal state­ment than use­ful for identification.

The backs of the coins are look dif­fer­ent from coun­try to coun­try. That offers some inter­est­ing choices but doesn’t help keep dif­fer­ent nom­i­na­tions apart.

I first dis­tin­guished the groups: Ones, Twos and Fives.
The Ones, i. e. the 1-Euro coin, the 10 Cent and the 1 Cent piece, are sim­ply round and each one approx. 20% smaller than each other. If my Euro were 23.25 mm – as is the present one – then my 10 Cent would be 18.50 mm in diam­e­ter (about the size of the present 2-Cent piece) and 1 Cent would be 16.50 mm – instead of 16.25 now.

The Twos, that is 2 Euro, 20 Cent and 2 Cent, are octag­o­nal with very round cor­ners, mak­ing them dis­tin­guish­able in the hand. They are of the same diam­e­ter as the round coins, but appear a lit­tle larger and weigh heav­ier, while of the same thick­ness as the Ones.

The Fives are as round as the Ones, but a lit­tle thicker and with a hole in the mid­dle, like some Scan­di­na­vian coins have been for­ever. There is no 5-Euro coin as yet, but the sys­tem allows for it because it makes sense. The hole in the coin can be felt with the fin­gers and also looks quite distinct.

Apart from these dis­tinc­tions if shape and size, the nom­i­na­tion is also sym­bol­ized by hor­i­zon­tal lines, of which there are one, two and five (!) The three Euro coins are made from sil­verm the 50, 20, and 10 Cent pieces from “Nordic Gold” and the three small­est nom­i­na­tions are coined from cop­per, as they are now.

At first these coins may appear a lit­tle sparse and empty. The present design is another one of these com­pro­mise as with the design of the Euro ban­knotes. Noth­ing was to be rec­og­nized as a national sym­bol of any coun­try. The map of Europe is really quite con­tra­dic­tory in these cir­cum­stances. It is incor­rect gep­graph­i­cally, as Europe is not an island with clear con­tours. And it is polit­i­cally touchy as the map includes coun­tries that are not part of the Euro­pean Union. And where does Europe end? There are big chunks of land miss­ing in the north and the east, and the smaller Balearic islands have been sac­ri­ficed to small scale.
Clear fig­ures and let­ters are not only less ambiva­lent, but also help when count­ing. And I could always incor­po­rate Greek and Cyril­lic let­ters if required.

I’ll show my pro­pos­als for the backs of the coins some other time. For now, here are two ren­der­ings from my 1999 proposal.

Alexis from Spain just wrote to me about a com­pe­ti­tion the Span­ish gov­ern­ment ran to get a new logo. They just pub­lished the win­ning entry (out of 320) which was rewarded 12,000 euros. On the left you can see the new logo for the goven­ment of Spain. It is sup­posed to be built into a com­plete iden­tity sys­tem by pro­fes­sionell stu­dios. If you read Span­ish, check this link.

Alexis imme­di­ately knew where he’d seen that logo before. It looks exactly like the one for the Ger­man gov­ern­ment that also came out of a com­pe­ti­tion, but more than ten years ago. It was designed by Jür­gen Huber and Lisa Eidt who won an intern­ship at MetaDe­sign as part of the reward. There the logo was extended into a Cor­po­rate Design pro­gramme for all the gov­ern­ment depart­ments. The orig­i­nal type­face, by the way, was FF Tran­sit, but later got changed to Univers Con­densed by another agency work­ing for the gov­ern­ment.
Alexis took the Ger­man orig­i­nal and the Span­ish clone and built his own logo for German-Spanish cooperation.

Next month, com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sion­als from all over the world will be “head­ing for the hills” — the beau­ti­ful hills of Aus­tria. That’s where the infor­ma­tion design action begins this summer.

FIRST: The Inter­na­tional Insti­tute for Infor­ma­tion Design (IIID) proudly presents

Vision Plus 12: “Infor­ma­tion Design — Achiev­ing Mea­sur­able Results,” July 5 – 7 in Schwarzen­berg (Aus­tria). This is THE EVENT to attend if you are seri­ous about infor­ma­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Our keynote speaker, David Sless, Direc­tor of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Research Insti­tute (Mel­bourne) will present what he says are “spec­tac­u­lar results” from a client engage­ment that “very clearly demon­strate the eco­nomic ben­e­fits of infor­ma­tion design for the largest multi­na­tional com­pany in a-high pro­file indus­try.” And that’s just for starters! To see the incred­i­ble agenda,
visit vision­plus

NEXT: The Spe­cial Inter­est Group for Infor­ma­tion Design Edu­ca­tors will be launched at Vison­Plus 12. This ini­tia­tive has the active back­ing of sev­eral promi­nent aca­d­e­mics at uni­ver­si­ties in Europe and the USA.

AFTER THAT: The Infor­ma­tion Design Exchange — idX (Devel­op­ment of Inter­na­tional Core Com­pe­ten­cies and Stu­dent and Fac­ulty Exchange in Infor­ma­tion Design) will meet on July 8, right after VP12 in Bezau, which is just a few miles from the con­fer­ence venue.

THERE IS STILL MORE: The IIID Sum­mer Acad­emy meets July 28 to August 10 in Cal­heta de São Miguel, San­ti­ago, Cabo Verde. The theme for this prac­ti­cal field work­shop will be “Expe­ri­enc­ing Cape Verde: Infor­ma­tion design enhanc­ing sus­tain­able tourism.” For more infor­ma­tion,
visit iiid.net.

AND IN THE FALL: The IIID Expert Forum in Traffic Guiding Systems presents “Customer Information Services for Public Transport,” September 21-22 in Vienna. The IIIID has been commissioned by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Science and Technology (BMVIT) to carry out a study on “Barrier free information in the transport system.” For more information, including the Call for Speakers, please contact Peter Simlinger, the IIID Director, at peter.simlinger@iiid.net.

Add it all up: high-powered programs, international participants, spectacular settings, and the perfect jumping off point for a different kind of European vacation. Yes, the Euro is still strong, but to make this even more attractive, the IIID is offering a special deal: register now and invite a friend along at a substantial discount. Click here now:
iiid-visionplus.

After almost two weeks, my birth­day vaca­tions are over. The ter­ri­ble weather has resulted in Tus­cany look­ing incred­i­bly green even this time of year. The main rea­son I do come back here every now and again are the cyprus trees, the typo­graph­i­cal plants. They pro­vide ver­ti­cal empha­sis along the hor­i­zon­tal lines of the land­scape – black lines on the horizon.