I can­not pos­si­bly even start to share all the per­sonal, orig­i­nal, funny, ana­log, dig­i­tal greet­ings, post­cards, phone-calls, text mes­sages, let­ters and pack­ages. Two of them have to be enough to show how inge­nious my friends can be.

Markus Hanzer reminds me that twins (i.e. gem­ini) have two lives at any rate, so that I am really only 30, if twice.

Kristin Laufer sent the pic­ture we all know: a yel­low sticker on the screen. Ana­log meets digital!

Thank you both, and all the oth­ers who obvi­ously are bet­ter at keep­ing their data in order than I am. I miss most birth­days, even those of other gem­ini. Markus, by the way, cel­e­brated his on May 31^st.

Some of my friends know this:
I’ll be 60 on May 30^th this year. To avoid mil­i­tary parades, pub­lic addresses and medals from the wrong insti­tu­tions, I’ll be in Italy for that day and then some. Back in Berlin on June 9^th. There will be a proper party, but a lit­tle later. And those that need to know about it will find out.

Just did a quick work­shop in prepa­ra­tion for a proper work­shop at the Uni­ver­sity of the Arts in Bre­men. Those are the peo­ple who gave me the Pro­fes­sor title. While they don’t pay me for the work, it feels good to go back and con­front young stu­dents now and again. We’re try­ing to come up with a con­cept for a big event this sum­mer which will be under the head­ing of “Phan­tasy”. Not the type that gave its name to a film genre, but the stuff that con­jurs up images of rain­bows. The stuff that us rule-based design­ers have a hard time relat­ing to.

foto: johannes ellmer

Jür­gen Siebert of FontShop Ger­many has just announced the result of the search for the 100 best type­faces. The web­site, 100besteschriften, will be online very soon. The brochure in pdf form is already avail­able for down­load at 100besteschriften. So far, there is only a Ger­man ver­sion, but with plenty of pictures.

I can proudly announce that three of my faces made it: ITC Offic­ina at num­ber 8, FF Meta at 18 and FF Info at 53. This occa­sion seemed appro­pri­ate to repub­lish a few remarks about the his­tory behind Offic­ina Dis­play.

It cer­tainly seems that way if you look at this site using IE 7 or even IE 6 (!), as a some peo­ple still may be doing. I use a Mac, of course, wirh Safari and Fire­fox, and in both browsers I see things exactly the way my very lim­ited HTML and CSS knowl­edge allow me to build them. Under IE, how­ever, images either dis­ap­pear or turn up in the wrong posi­tion.
Joely and I have been work­ing on improv­ing this. I have removed a lot of old tags from the import of my pre­vi­ous blog and a few days ago, the site val­i­dated under the w3 val­ida­tor. As, how­ever, I do not have IE installed and have no access to a Win­dows machine, I still can­not see what it really looks like for the rest of you.
Now that the com­ment func­tion has been turned on in my blog, I’ve already got quite a few use­ful hints. You can also email me directly, see con­tact.

Yes­ter­day I saw the first house­num­bers in Real Life, on Jane and Louis’ office in Berke­ley. The num­bers are gen­er­ously spaced to allow for con­di­tions here in the USA, where peo­ple tend to sit in cars, look­ing for num­bers quite far away. The num­ber com­bi­na­tion here presents a worst case sce­nario: two Ones which don’t need a lot of space and have a strong hor­i­zon­tal bar at the bot­tom, next to a 6 and a 9 that have to over­shoot at top and bot­tom in order to look right.
Louis didn’t have a ham­mer drill, which made it very dif­fi­cult to drill into a hard brick wall. That is why not all the holes are as pre­cisely posi­tioned as the tem­plates would have allowed for. The 9 hangs too low. On paper, one would have to indi­vid­u­ally adjust the space between 1, 6, 1, 9. That, how­ever, would be ask­ing too much of your reg­u­lar DIY home­maker, so I was not allowed to include kern­ing tables in the pack­ages. Louis, on the other hand, is a jour­nal­ist with more design savvy than a lot of design­ers I know, and he would have managed.

Nor­mally, elec­tric drills are not tools that type design­ers con­sider when plan­ning for appli­ca­tion of type on media.

These are the Con­tem­po­rary num­bers, made from grey anodised alu­minium, based on FF Meta Bold.

Jür­gen Siebert’s Font­blog shows the count­down for the 100 best type­faces of all time. The cri­te­ria are dis­cussed there – if you read Ger­man, that is. I can proudly announce that my ITC Offic­ina came in at num­ber 8, ahead of Gill and Univers, no less. There’s a new announce­ment every day, so in a week’s time we’ll know all the win­ners. The pic­ture shows me in 1989, hold­ing the first print of what was still called ITC Correspondence.

This may sound unfair when seen from Europe, but win­ter here in SF can be quite pleas­ant. The occa­sional rain makes sure there’ll be enough water next sum­mer, but most of the time the sky is as blue as the pic­ture shows.

At long last: only a few days into ’007, and my new blog goes online. The itin­er­ary is up-to-date and now has its own page. The con­tact page is also new, and for good rea­son: my design stu­dio moved to a new address last year. As of this week, it has also changed its name. UDN | United Design­ers Net­work is now Spiek­er­man­nPart­ners. The but­ton on the top of this page goes right to the new home­page. Which, how­ever, will not be online for a few days yet. You know how that goes: dead­lines in the online world are as flex­i­ble as CSS stylesheets.
The new name is our answer to a recur­ring prob­lem. After more than five years, clients and col­leagues alike still think that I am with MetaDe­sign, the com­pany I founded back in 1979. The stu­dio appear­ing under my own name should send a clear mes­sage to every­body that I am out of Meta.
The new blog runs under Mov­able Type. We haven’t found any soft­ware that runs two ver­sions par­al­lel with just the text part being dif­fer­ent. Seems there aren’t many blogs in two lan­guages, if any. So we have to run two entire blogs on the server and I have to edit every­thing twice. Spiekermann.com/mt is Ger­man, spiekermann.com/mten sends you straight to the Eng­lish lan­guage site. Joely Hegarty, friend and col­league in Lon­don, built the tem­plates, learn­ing blog­ging as he went along. Piece of cake for a proper coder like him. Thanks anyway.

The sys­tem of type­faces designed by myself and Chris­t­ian Schwartz for Deutsche Bahn, the Ger­man state rail­ways, just won the most pres­ti­gious design prize in the coun­try.
You don’t sub­mit to this com­pe­ti­tion, you get pro­posed by one of the offi­cial design insti­tu­tions in Ger­many. The actual medals will be handed out by the Fed­eral Sec­re­tary for the Econ­omy on 9 Feb­ru­ary, and offi­cially we don’t know that we may have won the top prize in the com­mu­ni­ca­tion cat­e­gory. Only 25 prizes were awarded out of 950 sub­mis­sions. This, appar­ently, is The Prize of Prizes. It is as much an award for the polit­i­cal achieve­ment of per­suad­ing a large bureau­cratic insti­tu­tion to even com­mis­sion their own type­faces, as it is for the design work.

And here is some evi­dence of our work: an ad before and after, i.e. Hel­vetica on the left, DB Type Head on the right.