A col­league wanted a copy of the logo for Glas­gow ’99 that we designed at MetaDe­sign Lon­don back in 1997. When I looked for it, I found the movie that we made for the pre­sen­ta­tion at the time. Made in Direc­tor, not Flash, it is already a his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment.

Glas­gow Type­face from erik spiek­er­mann on Vimeo.

Human capac­ity to make mis­takes is unlim­ited, as Mur­phy for­mu­lates in the epony­mous law. Bill Hill sent me this pic­ture from Cal­i­for­nia. The fig­ure 3 appears six times. Why are the bot­tom fig­ures upside down while all the oth­ers are the proper way round? Does the per­son who put the fig­ures on that sign know some­thing we type design­ers don’t know?

This com­par­i­son is a lit­tle unfair. The loco­mo­tives of the for­mer Bun­des­bahn (Fed­eral Rail­ways) were painted in a rasp­berry colour which obvi­ously didn’t age too well. The new engines are painted bright red. We don’t know what this colour will look like in 20 years’ time. But the Bundesbahn’s Hel­vetica type hasn’t aged well either. It is far too tightly spaced and any­thing but spe­cific. Using DB Type, Deutsche Bahn’s exclu­sive type­face, sig­ni­fies own­er­ship so clearly that there is no need for a logo. Red and type are enough to brand the locomotive.

This naïve ren­der­ing of Claren­don is a good exam­ple for how the mate­r­ial makes the shapes.
Also an exam­ple for blog­ging from the iPhone, includ­ing what lit­tle photo edit­ing there is.

Arial is an ugly type­face, most of us would agree. For non-designers, how­ever, there may prac­ti­cal rea­sons now and again to use it as a quasi non-typeface.

But why use this ugly sys­tem­font in metal, stone or another durable mate­r­ial? I see more and more of those appli­ca­tions, and I can­not think of one good rea­son why any­body should do this.

The exam­ple below is an appro­pri­ate use of Arial. Set­ting a Zim­bab­wean ban­knote for 100 Bil­lion Dol­lars in any­thing else would have been an insult.

Good to see that I am not the only one who has to pho­to­graph num­bers wher­ever I see them. War­dour Street in Soho ist still home to many colour labs, film-, sound– and design-studios. Some­one dec­o­rated this facade by print­ing out hun­dreds of num­bers and stick­ing them on the win­dow.

Before we had cheap dig­i­tal print­ers and every­body started set­ting their lit­tle shop notices in Arial, there were ded­i­cated sys­tems for dis­play­ing mes­sages in shops, bars and cafés. One of these were black boards with holes in them and let­ters with the appro­pri­ate pegs. You took them from a box, stuck them into the holes and had fairly neat rows of words and num­bers. A shop in Lon­don redis­cov­ered this old way of mak­ing type, mak­ing art out of neces­sity: If you don’t have enough type in one size or colour, take another one, but do it deliberately.

This sign show­ing the brands avail­able was “art-directed” by Richie Crago at The Three Threads in Char­lotte Road, Shored­itch.

Appar­ently there is a trend to make por­traits from let­ters only. I was very sur­prised to find my head in a list on typog­ra­phy por­traits, right above that of Obama. The designer, Thierry Eamon, calls it, not sur­pris­ingly, “… a trib­ute to Erik Spiek­er­mann”. I have taken the lib­erty to copy this pic­ture and show it here.

Under down­load above you can still see the bad copy of the Typo­ma­nia video that I did for the BBC almost 25 years ago. Two fel­low typo­ma­ni­acs have taken the sound track from that video and remixed it into Type­faces give us sig­nals. See and hear for your­selves:

Type­faces give us sig­nals from erik spiek­er­mann on Vimeo.

My con­tri­bu­tion to the world of spread­sheets is called Axel. It has been writen about quite a bit already, like here, but the nam­ing still seems to need explain­ing. As the illus­tra­tion shows, Axel saves space while still being leg­i­ble, mak­ing it a wel­come typo­graphic alter­na­tive for those poor peo­ple who have to work in Excel and other spread­sheet apps every day. So these users tell me. But one of them, Dan Reynolds, thinks it could have been even bet­ter by being called Axl.

All my type­faces have four-letter names: Meta, Info, Unit. ITC Offic­ina came ear­lier and is the excep­tion. I wanted to name this one Exel, but the peo­ple at FontShop in Berlin were a lit­tle afraid that the big com­pany in Seat­tle might take excep­tion to the obvi­ous ref­er­ence. I don’t think that would have been a prob­lem, but then I am not the dis­trib­u­tor. Axel is homo­phone with Excel, and it has four letters.