While sorting through old stuff (I’m looking for the first sketches for Officina) I came across the first cheque ITC wrote me in the summer of 1991. ITC Officina had officially been introduced in November 1990 after we had delivered data as early as 1989. In preparation for a TypeBoard Review Meeting on January 21st I had introduced my concept:

„My favourite idea = a correspondence face, on the same lines of thinking as Stone Informal; a face for business correspondence that reads better while taking up less space than Courier or Pica, but still doesn’t look too much like a proper “designed” typeface – because once you’re using a real typeface, the whole page wants to be laid-out, to be designed. A business letter, an estimate, an invoice should be more neutral, not making a comment about its content. So we need something between Courier and American Typewriter, again perhaps both with and without serifs. Also the present versions of Courier and Letter Gothic available for LaserWriters by Adobe and Bitstream are too light to withstand more than one copy stage (ITC Officina).


Obviously, the name was in the air already. After that meeting, I made a proper proposal which I cannot find in my files right now. I am sure we’ll find that document soon so I can publish it in the course of this research into typographic history.

The first cheque came to the unbelievable sum of One Dollar and Nine Cents. The fees for cashing it would have been much higher, so I kept it as an original document. ITC Officina is still a bestseller in that library. And although the license fees are a little higher these days, I certainly couldn’t live from that money.

Good information design is very rare. Often, a printed instructional piece may work but look really boring and will usually be set in one of those institutional typefaces. More often than not, however, forms and instructions tend not only to be ugly, but also useless.
This mailing from the Royal Mail in the UK is different. The marketing people actually came up with a simple concept. There are only three classes of mail: Letters, Large Letters and Packets.. While measurements and weights are simply listed, a clever device makes all the difference: the size of the pieces is demonstrated by printing their same-size outlines onto the form, as well as a white slot representing the maximum thickness. A photo next to that illustration shows how one can simply hold a letter up to the illustration and check whether it would fit.




This is all designed clearly and modestly, without a designer trying to show what tricks she has learned in Photoshop. And it is set in a wonderful typeface: Chevin, by Nick Cook. FontFont users may have heard of Nick, as he designed FF Penguin, years ago. Today he runs the G-Type foundry.
Chevin is not the Royal Mail’s official corporate font and certainly wouldn’t be suitable for long, serious financial reports. It is charming without being cute, and very legible even in small sizes because of its restrained shapes and simple construction. I am pretty certain that this form has proven to be useful in many households and will not be chucked out, unlike most mailings that find their way into our letterboxes.

Some practical joker found the time to redesign well-known logos according to Web 2.0 fashion: gradations, reflections below, bright colours. Seen on flickr, where else. The very compressed jpeg below doesn’t show the effect properly.