Text by Liz Far­relly
Visit Berlin, and it won’t belong before you encounter Erik Spiek­er­mann. His graphic fin­ger­prints are every­where – in the type­faces for the Ger­man Rail­ways, the Berlin Under­ground, and the myr­iad organ­i­sa­tions that make use of com­mu­ni­ca­tions designed by his prac­tices over the years.

But there’s a web of con­nec­tions that reaches far beyond Berlin, where it can seem that every other designer has a link to the ‘Metaman’ – whether they’ve been hired, fired, taught, crit­i­cized or cham­pi­oned by him. Many more are linked by human (‘Six degrees of sep­a­ra­tion’) net­works. Spiek­er­mann reigned at the helm of MetaDesign’s inter­na­tional net­work of stu­dios and affil­i­ates for two decades, and has taught and lec­tured through­out the world. Wher­ever you go you can see the fruits of Spiekermann’s ongo­ing work for inter­na­tional brands that adorn the hoods of auto­mo­biles, the fas­cias of domes­tic elec­tron­ics, cul­tural insti­tu­tions and books.

Yet his role as a high-ranking mover and shaker, an éminence grise within cor­po­rate design cul­ture, is only one string to his bow. No analy­sis of his work would be com­plete with­out not­ing his role in the evo­lu­tion of type design. Not only as a designer, but also as an entre­pre­neur, who estab­lished a new model for doing busi­ness, which he grew into a sep­a­rate world­wide net­work in the shape of FontShopIn­ter­na­tional. In that role, he is a prodi­gious talent-spotter, who has helped to nur­ture two gen­er­a­tions of new type­design­ers by pro­vid­ing cre­ative and com­mer­cial oppor­tu­ni­ties for an ever-widening dias­pora of collaborators.

Inside this gate­fold, our time­line plots a net­work of design­ers, type­faces, pub­li­ca­tions and events linked to Spiek­er­mann (ES) over the past three decades. It is far from com­plete – we didn’t begin to list the ex-MetaDesign pro­fes­sors, nor the mul­ti­ple awards – but that’s in the nature of net­works. We’ll watch with fas­ci­na­tion as his con­nec­tions con­tinue to expand by degrees.

You can down­load the time­line here.
The arti­cle is online at eye­magazine.

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.

I’ve been involved with TCHO, choco­late mak­ers in San Fran­cisco, as a designer and an investor, for a few years now. Susanna Dulkinys, my wife and busi­ness part­ner, has won sev­eral prizes for her work on the TCHO brand and pack­ag­ing. We have been inter­viewed about the design aspects, shown the project at con­fer­ences and talked to other clients about it. The story of how this amaz­ing choco­late is actu­ally made and why it’s dif­fer­ent from other choco­lates is told in a fea­ture in WIRED magazine’s UK edi­tion. As it hap­pens, Louis Ros­setto, CEO of TCHO, was co-founder of WIRED way back in the early 90s.
For bet­ter read­ing enjoy­ment, here is a pdf of the arti­cle to down­load:
Wired_022010_Tcho

Next week I have to fly to China, and I’m already dread­ing the 12 hours or more on the plane. I can only hope that this man won’t sit next to me. He was pho­tographed by a Stew­ardess aboard a flight in the US. These days, we’re charged for every kilo­gram (or pounds or ounce) of extra lug­gage. Some­times I long for the days at the begin­ning of air-travel when every pas­sen­ger – includ­ing women – would be weighed. The pilot had to know the exact weight of the plane in order to guar­an­tee lift-off. Even with my post-christmassy 164 pounds I would qual­ify for a bonus com­pared to some folks…

As this meme has come up a lot recently in con­nec­tion with the hadopi story about a French gov­ern­memt agency using a stolen font for its logo and with Microsoft’s admis­sion of a major secu­rity issue, it might be use­ful to explain where it came from. This video does so.

Taken from the book — Stu­dio Cul­ture: the Secret Life of the Graphic Design Stu­dio. This is a short­ened ver­sion of an inter­view with Erik Spiek­er­mann. Dur­ing the 1970s Spiek­er­mann worked as a free­lance designer in Lon­don before return­ing to Berlin in 1979 where, with two part­ners, he founded MetaDe­sign. In 2001 he left MetaDe­sign and started UDN (United Design­ers Net­work), with offices in Berlin, Lon­don and San Fran­cisco. Since Jan­u­ary 2009 he has been a direc­tor of Eden­spiek­er­mann, which employs over 100 peo­ple and has offices in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Unusu­ally among con­tem­po­rary design­ers, Spiek­er­mann has a sophis­ti­cated set of the­o­ries relat­ing to the lay­out, struc­ture and man­age­ment of design stu­dios. His the­o­ries have been exten­sively road-tested in the var­i­ous cre­ative enter­prises he has founded and run dur­ing a long career.

The inter­view was con­ducted in the offices of AIG, London.

Adrian Shaugh­nessy: You have a vision of your per­fect stu­dio. You’ve even got a name for it — The ‘Rund­buero’ Stu­dio (see dia­gram). Can you describe it?
Erik Spiek­er­mann: Ide­ally it’s a round space. It’s made up of three or four con­cen­tric cir­cles. At the cen­tre is a recep­tion area. This is where every­body enters. It is linked to the rest of the stu­dio by a cor­ri­dor. In the cen­tral recep­tion area are the peo­ple who answer the tele­phones, do the emails and make the pho­to­copies. It’s where all the machin­ery is — the print­ers, the espresso machine. Every­body has to go in here sev­eral times a day to pick up print­outs, pick up mail, get cof­fee and so on. Now, the fur­ther you go from the cen­tre the qui­eter it gets. Peo­ple in the outer rings have win­dows, oth­ers don’t. The walls are maybe only shoul­der height. If a sec­re­tary wants to see if I’m in the outer ring, she can get up and look across and see if I’m actu­ally there.
Read the rest of this entry »

The pre­vi­ous post showed that blog­ging from a phone still leaves a lot to be desired. But I still want to make the point that tech­nol­ogy shapes design. In this case it cre­ated a Claren­don (ca. 15mm tall) that doesn’t exist any­where else. Sim­i­lar effects can be seen with type that was pro­duced for other meth­ods of repro­duc­tion, from trans­fer type à la Letraset to wood type made for small presses that printed labels and signs for shops.

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.

I’ve had a new platen press (the pre­vi­ous one burnt down in 1977) and a Kor­rex proof­ing press for a while now (see Proof­ing press upstairs). There is also quite a bit of type and every­thing else I need to start work; but I still haven’t printed any­thing. Mean­while, as reminder and inspi­ra­tion, here is a lovely video from the US show­ing busi­ness cards being printed on a platen press.

Kee­gan Mee­gan Press & Bindery from :::: MAGNETIC ARCHIVES :::: kiva on Vimeo.