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.

My old Riven­dell road bike was stolen in June. I’d had it for a long time and los­ing it did hurt. I think steal­ing a bicy­cle like that is more than just a lit­tle mis­de­meanour; it is a wicked crime and shows really bad character.

The only way I could get over the loss was by going to see Bradley Woehl at the Amer­i­can Cyclery in San Fran­cisco and have him build me a new bicy­cle. The frame is made by Water­ford in Wis­con­sin, the paint job is pretty much the same as my Riven­dell and the parts are mostly Cam­pag­nola. We put 28 tyres on it, which looks less ele­gant than 23, but if you have seen the roads here in San Fran­cisco, you know that even that is too thin.

I’m pub­lish­ing a few pic­tures here as a pub­lic record. If any­body dares steal this bike, there’ll be lots of peo­ple look­ing out for it.

John sends occa­sional mes­sages to a list of friends. This par­tic­u­lar one arrived on Sun­day, Sep­tem­ber 11, 2011. All the sun­day papers were full of state­ments, pre­dic­tions, analy­sis and opin­ions about what hap­pened and what it meant. But noth­ing I read was as con­cise and com­pre­hen­si­ble as what JPB wrote – yes­ter­day and ten years ago.
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Nor­mally, I don’t believe in horo­scopes, Tarot cards, clouds in my cof­fee or read­ing the lines in my hand. Except when it suits me.

When Jesi Khadivi from Soma Mag­a­zine asked me to send him a scan of my right hand for some art project or other, I did so. Couldn’t do much harm and I tend to sup­port most crazy arty ideas that peo­ple write to me about.

Lit­tle did I know that this was part of a major project that has Lena, a “pro­fes­sional” palm reader ana­lyze peo­ples’ palms with­out know­ing who they are. With uncan­nily accu­rate results, at least in my case which is the only one I can judge.

So here is my palm, between Moby and Tifanny Shlain’s – not such a bad neighbourhood.

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Here’s a video show­ing how it works. You can get the app from iTunes.

There are lots of videos about me or by me or by us out there, and not all of them are easy to find. Vimeo now offers this great script that just puts these small pre­views together, so I thought I make a start with the first four videos that I found and uploaded myself. I’ll try and find more of them. I can, of course, only upload those videos that I have legal access to. The TV sta­tions usu­ally won’t allow that.

Stephen Coles inter­viewed me about the his­tory of FontShop.

Chris­tiane Scheibe Pluriver­sum made this video fea­tur­ing the type­faces and icons we designed for the relaunch of ZDF’s heute news pro­gramme in 2009. The motion graph­ics werde done by Vel­vet in Munich.

This is a piece I orig­i­nally wrote for my Achtung col­umn in Blue­print mag­a­zine. When John Board­ley asked me to con­tribute to his forth­com­ing mag­a­zine Codex, I was too busy to write any­thing from scratch. As, how­ever, I con­sid­ered the over­lap between Blueprint’s and Codex’s read­er­ship to be neg­li­gi­ble, I offered this arti­cle. John sug­gested send­ing him a pho­tog­ra­phy of my infa­mous book­shelf that runs over two floors in our house in Berlin, where the top shelves can only be reached by strap­ping one­self into a climber’s har­ness which is moved up and down by an elec­tri­cally oper­ated winch.

I don’t think John edited my piece very much, but I did notice that he changed my British alu­minium to the US alu­minum. As you can see below, I would have insisted on my orig­i­nal spelling. No idea why one would ever change that word in the first place – in Ger­man word we also write (and say) Alu­minium. John did me a favour though: he found the source for the Ovink quote below. Thank you, John, for that and for Codex.
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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.