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.

A Ger­man daily paper sets its head­lines in FF Unit and uses the alter­nate cut for another level of hier­ar­chy. It makes for a sub­tle dis­tinc­tion, and that’s obvi­ously what they wanted.

On the one hand I’m always flat­tered when I see a big Ger­man news­pa­per (Süd­deutsche Zeitung in this case) use one of my type­faces. Espe­cially so, when it hap­pens to bring out one of its good char­ac­ter­is­tics, like being very leg­i­ble in small sizes on rather coarse paper, as with FF Unit shown here.

On the other hand I am a lit­tle sur­prised that they would have used the alter­nate cut, the one with the round a and the single-decker g. That may have been delib­er­ate although I don’t think that the round (Futura-)a is par­tic­u­larly leg­i­ble. I do have my doubts about the design­ers’ typo­graphic knowl­edge. When design­ing a table like this (and a TV pro­gramme is just a table) they must have real­ized that FF Unit both in the Type 1 and the Open Type ver­sion not only pro­vides alter­nate char­ac­ters but also a few dif­fer­ent sets of fig­ures. For a timetable like this it would have been much bet­ter to use Tab­u­lar Fig­ures, so that all the hours and min­utes would be posi­tioned neatly under­neath each other. That does not only look neater, it also makes things more com­pa­ra­ble and bet­ter to under­stand in a hurry. The tab­u­lar fig­ures in FF Unit still have slight Old Style char­ac­ter­is­tics, and if that would appear too noisy for some appli­ca­tions, there are Lin­ing Fig­ures as well, also all of equal widths.

This paint­ing shows a part of the East­side Gallery in Berlin, a stretch of Berlin Wall along the river Spree. The only sub­stan­tial part of the wall that’s been left stand­ing because it is cov­ered in pic­tures. Those get repainted now and again, as the paint­ing by Edward B Gor­don shows. In spite of his English-sounding name he is a Ger­man painter liv­ing in Berlin and has been putting out a paint­ing a day for 900 days now.

There are two rea­sons why I am show­ing this here:
1. Gordon’s paint­ings show the Berlin I know; not always roman­tic, not always bright, not always flat­ter­ing, but always observed with affec­tion and painted quickly, before the moment goes away. Great stuff, all Oil on Board, 15x15cm (i.e. 6×6 inches).
2. Although there are only three and a half let­ters to be seen, it seems enough to iden­tify the type­face. Five steps away from the orig­i­nal – painted type on wall, paint­ing of that scene, repro­duc­tion in the news­pa­per, scan on my desk­top, repro­duced on your desk­top – I iden­ti­fied it as FF Type­s­tar.

Except for that r. And the i. Seems like who­ever painted these let­ters knew more about type than most graphic design­ers and cer­tainly used the free­dom of the brush to shorten that long hook on the r and the long top serif on the i. A clever solu­tion to avoid a gap that would draw too much atten­tion to this combination.