DBType wins German Design Prize.

The system of typefaces designed by myself and Christian Schwartz for Deutsche Bahn, the German state railways, just won the most prestigious design prize in the country.
You don’t submit to this competition, you get proposed by one of the official design institutions in Germany. The actual medals will be handed out by the Federal Secretary for the Economy on 9 February, and officially we don’t know that we may have won the top prize in the communication category. Only 25 prizes were awarded out of 950 submissions. This, apparently, is The Prize of Prizes. It is as much an award for the political achievement of persuading a large bureaucratic institution to even commission their own typefaces, as it is for the design work.

And here is some evidence of our work: an ad before and after, i.e. Helvetica on the left, DB Type Head on the right.

typomania

This video is from the mid-eighties. Jonathan Dorney sent me a copy of a copy a few years ago. The quality is atrocious, but the content still amusing. Some people think so, anyway, as they keep asking me for a better version. There isn’t one, but there are two bad ones here as downloads: one with 16mb, small screen, and one with 50mb, bigger screen, but just as bad as far as the image quality is concerned.
The files are on the download page: (typomania_video.mov) is the big one, and (typomania1.mov) not quite so. Both pretty lousy quality.