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.