Going through this blog at the end of 2023 reminded me of the work we did for De Gruyter, a publisher of science books in Berlin, in 2011. After we (at Edenspiekermann) had finished designing layout templates for the science books, Ralph du Carrois and I designed a family of typefaces for these books which would need mathematical and chemical symbols, letters for extinct languages (!) and many more very specific applications. They are extensions of FF MetaSans and FF MetaSerif, each with four weights, and each one of those with approx. 2500 glyphs.

As always, our friend and typographic expert, Andreas Eigendorf, did all the quality control on the fonts and produced this “spitter”: a document with all the characters in it. I made it into a movie, which is the least painful way to see them all.

True typomaniacs will notice that quite a few characters hadn’t had their overlaps removed at the time.

Ever since I used my first numbering stamp as a schoolboy, these clever mechanical devices have fascinated me. I now print one on every piece that leaves our workshop, even though they are really difficult to print on a proof press. They require a lot of pressure and the plunger will eventually destroy the cylinder because it is much higher than type and will also print on the trip back (if you don’t understand this jargon, this may not be for you).

Which didn’t stop me from trying to build a forme with 60 of these little suckers. It’ll take a lot of arrangement, adjusting the makeready and other parameters to get them all to print fairly evenly, but I am not going to give up easily. These photos are from the first run which hasn’t yielded any presentable results so far.

The cool thing will be that every time it prints, all 60 stamps will rotate by one digit. Every print will be randomly unique.

(the two top pictures are by Max Zerrahn)

The UX team at Firefox has just sent me some screengrabs from their work on a smartphone using the new OS. The Fira typeface will be available under and Open Source license. The version currently on GitHub is not the final one. We made some small changes before we officially shipped our final fonts. Those should be available soon.

These are small reproductions of reproductions. The real screens are much sharper, of course.

Not sure whether I agree with all the facts or the figures in this chart, but it still makes interesting reading:

It really wasn’t designed for small sizes on screens. Words like milliliter can be very difficult to decipher. If you ever had to read or write a password with 1, i, l or I, you know the problem. That little comparison below is also available from the download page.

This seems to be a “trending topic”. Just read about seven tips by Mark McGuinness to avoid Creative Block (yes, captitalized) and went on to look what I had written to Alex Cornell two years ago when he asked me “What do you do to inspire your creativity when you are in a rut?”

I sent my answer in a short email, without thinking about it too much, mentioning only six strategies. I have since added a seventh. BTW: Alex is writing a book about the topic, to be published soon by Princeton Architectural Press.

I have seven strategies for this situation:

1. Avoid
Do something else, wash the car, back-up your data, do errands…

2. Think
Sit back and think about the issue, just let your mind go…

3. Research
Look up stuff, go through your old projects, but avoid Google — it takes too long to find anything useful…

4. Collect
We all have lots of stuff; there must be something in there that is waiting to be used…

5. Sketch
Drawing is great, even if you have no talent. Just visualising the simplest things makes them come alive…

6. Deconstruct
Take the problem apart, look at the parts and then put them back together…

7. Talk
Find somebody to talk to. I cannot really think unless I talk, and as I do, ideas come up.

I have uploaded a little brochure from the series that we publish at Edenspiekermann now and again. This one features the essay by Heinrich Kleist “On the gradual completion of thoughts during speech”. The brochure has the text in German and English, and the languages start at either end of the printed piece. The PDF, therefore, needs to be turned around to read it properly in English.

MyFonts obviously have no quality control whatsoever. Or they would have noticed that the typeface they published under the name Silkstone was not only a blatant imitation of my ITC Officina, but that even the data is bad.



The copyright field in the font information shows no credit, but the perpetrator didn’t even bother to delete the date which shows when the original version was released, in this case 2003. (There have been various updates and new versions of Officina since its original release in 1989)



In order to either hide the source at least a little bit, a few letters were changed, e.g. the dot on the i was made square and the serif removed. But the j is the give-away: surely those changes should have also been applied to it as well? The same applied to the n and m. A little manipulation here, none there.



And, finally, this is how it was done: the complete font was extrapolated automatically, probably to make it look different. The result is a thinner and smaller letter (the red outline), with bad data where the automatic procedure would have required manual intervention to make it good. Obviously too much trouble for someone who’d rather pretend to be original than to actually do original work.

A new typeface that is introduced with such bad grammar (it should be “elegantly styled…” and “sophisicated” instead of “sophisticated” is a dead give-away) is off to a bad start. It only takes one look to see that this description
… The Silkstone Sans font was originally created to fill a void in the typeface market and is aimed at people looking for a classic elegant styled modern typeface suitable for a vast array of projects and designs. Designed and produced by Paul O’Connell of POCT, it is a sans serif typeface created with many flavours and influences, but still manages to retain its originality and is a tribute to many of today’s modern fonts …
is a load of bollocks. Silkstone Sans is an unashamed rip-off of my ITC Officina. Raising the crossbar on the e a little and straightening the top left on the n hardly constitutes a redesign (the m has been left alone), neither does extrapolating the face to a thinner weight. Making the i-dots square instead of round and taking the serif off the i takes away some of Officina’s strong character without adding originality, so why bother?

I am surprised that no-one at MyFonts saw this. It didn’t take very long after its release that lots of people saw it, recognized the deceit and tweeted about it. I am surprised that Paul O’Connell has had the nerve to so publicly expose his lack of shame. Or has stealing someone else’s work suddenly become something to brag about?


The original:


The fake: