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.