The World Cup may be over, but I still get comments about the design disaster caused by the logo and the rest of the corporate design for that event. Check Deutsche Welle www.dw-world.de.
My interview was not my only comment about this design disaster, but the only one in English. Saves me translating all my other comments.
Just found this article from Baseline 7, 1986. It describes the making of PT 55, the typeface which later became FF Meta.
baseline0785_meta3
FF Meta’s lively shapes make it look good in small sizes and certainly give it character. Often too much so for headlines. Enter MetaHeadline: three widths with four weights each. For extra tight setting, some characters have alternative shapes.
It’s flattering to know that some of my typefaces have influenced other designers. Except…
More from my column in form, the German design magazine.
Pitched out
A pitch is the presentation of design ideas to a client by competing agencies or studios.
Continue reading
More from my monthly column in form, the German design magazine.
Logos to go.
Who needs graphic designers when you can just get logos online for a few dollars?
From my monthly column in form. The German design magazine.
Of Chief Pencil Sharpeners and Senior Meeting Conveners.
About meaningless titles and unnecessary hierarchies
Over the last decade more and more Non-Western versions of FF Meta have been designed. If you need to set Baltic languages, Romanian, Turkish, Central European languages, Greek or Cyrillic, you can now get all of these in a package (with their Western cousins) in two basic weights, Book and Bold with their Italics. Go to Read More and see the PDF.
I have often found that supposedly perfect typefaces turn out to be less so on close inspection. Consider these examples for Futura: the version from Adobe (top in both examples) is clearly badly digitized. Early days, they were still learning — it’s not about blaming anybody, but about getting our client — Volkswagen — a decent typeface. If Futura’s O is supposed to look like a perfect circle, why does it look like an egg? And look at the counters in a, g, and e! Those are also supposed to be circular, not egg-shaped. So we took the typeface apart and reassembled it. If your VW had egg-shaped wheels, wouldn’t you complain? Or excuse it as an expression of the designer’s creativity?
