Just fin­ished print­ing a short run, 2-colour poster for the POINT con­fer­ence in Lon­don with Thomas Maier point­ing a cam­era at me.

Spiek­er­mann Poster Film from POINT on Vimeo.

My first Van­der­cook proof press in the US is a Uni­ver­sal I, all elec­tric. The press is in our garage here in Belvedere, which was built for the big cars of the 50s. The press was so filthy that I have spent the past two weeks clean­ing it. Now the rust and the grime are gone, as are my fin­ger­nails. The paint is partly gone and the blank metal looks uneven, so I had to sub­mit these pho­tographs to quite a bit of Pho­to­shop treat­ment in order to make them at least look nos­tal­gic, if not tech­ni­cally precise.

Paul Moxon ran a two-day work­shop on Proof Press Finesse, i.e. pro­fes­sional prac­tice on a Van­der­cook at San Fran­cisco Cen­ter for the Book. Paul is not only the man behind the Van­der­cook web­site, but also a mas­ter printer and a very nice fellow.

We all learned a lot, got on well together and had a good time. While every­body else was busy get­ting their hands dirty, I took dozens of pho­tos. I did learn to print ages ago and have my own Kor­rex in Berlin, so for me it was more about get­ting famil­iar with the lead­ing brand of proof presses in the US. After the first day, I even­tu­ally gave up con­vert­ing from inches to met­ric and suc­cumbed to the archaic (and aptly-named) Impe­r­ial sys­tem. Duodec­i­mal doesn’t frighten me, as that is what typog­ra­phy is all about, but dec­i­mal inches seem to be a con­tra­dic­tion in terms.

Your own web­site never gets done. That is why, two years ago, we finally sat down and spent 36 hours on a sprint. At the end of it, edenspiekermann.com was in beta. It’s still there, but so are all web­sites, always. We just found that video again on some server or other.

Web­site sprint: 36 hours from erik spiek­er­mann on Vimeo.

Jür­gen Siebert runs the Cre­ative Morn­ings sec­tion for Berlin. He asked me to talk about this topic. So I did, in Berlin, but in English.

Cre­ative Morn­ing Berlin #13: Erik Spiek­er­mann from CreativeMornings/Berlin on Vimeo.

Johannes Berg­er­hausen and his team at the design col­lege in Mainz just released Uni­code, the movie. Takes 2 hours and 31 min­utes to watch the full fea­ture with its 109,242 char­ac­ters. Crazy by Hol­ly­wood stan­dards, sooth­ing if you suf­fer from typomania.

decode­u­ni­code from Siri Poarangan on Vimeo.

The video about my exhi­bi­tion at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin is now avail­able with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles:

schrift­gestal­ten | the face of type | eng­lish sub­ti­tle from Jonas Kamin­ski on Vimeo.

If you cook recipes from a US cook­book, you need to use mea­sure­ments that seem archaic to a met­ri­fied Euro­pean like myself. They use cups for liq­uid mea­sure­ments. US fluid ounces are dif­fer­ent from UK fluid ounces, but that is another story. I made a con­ver­sion chart for our kitchen, list­ing cups, table­spoons (which they like to abbre­vi­ate as TBSP), tea­spoons (TSP) and mil­li­liters. Euro­peans know that one of the advan­tages of the met­ric sys­tem is the fact that liq­uid mea­sure­ments fol­low the same stan­dard as those for other sub­stances. Thus, a liter of water (i. e. 1000 mil­li­liters) weighs 1 kilo­gram (i. e. 1000 grams). I’m using US spelling here, UK Eng­lish would be litre and kilogramme.

I made a pdf which you’ll find in the down­load por­tion of this blog, so you can down­load it, print it out and stick it to you fridge door or wher­ever else you wish. Mag­nets can­not be down­loaded over the inter­net yet.

A bunch of old guys on stage in New York: Roger Black, Matthew Carter, Paul Shaw and Erik Spiek­er­mann. Mod­er­ated by Maxim Zhukov.

FF MetaSerif Pro: char­ac­ter­set runs to 5 pages now with Cyril­lic et al: bit.ly/zwavJI

— erik spiek­er­mann (@espiekermann) Jan­u­ary 18, 2012