Good information design

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.

100 best typefaces, final result.

Jürgen Siebert of FontShop Germany has just announced the result of the search for the 100 best typefaces. The website, 100besteschriften, will be online very soon. The brochure in pdf form is already available for download at 100besteschriften. So far, there is only a German version, but with plenty of pictures.

I can proudly announce that three of my faces made it: ITC Officina at number 8, FF Meta at 18 and FF Info at 53. This occasion seemed appropriate to republish a few remarks about the history behind Officina Display.

ITC Officina Display

ITC Officina Display und ihre Herkunft.
When we (Ben Acornley and myself at MetaLondon) redesigned The Economist magazine in London in 2000/2001 (the new magazine was launched in May 2001,) we picked ITC Officina Sans as the “information” face. All text is set in the Economist’s own typeface, which Ole Schäfer and myself redesigned for the relaunch. But all the graphs, tables, sidebars and captions are set in ITC Officina Sans for contrast and clarity. When it came to using that face on the cover in fairly large sizes, the client deemed it a little too “goofy”. Officina’s blunt edges, its explicit pseudo-serifs and oblique terminals were indeed very noticeable in the Bold and Black weights they were using for the cover.

The display version I sketched out had sharp corners, the terminals are not as oblique, and the swings at the top left of the characters have all but gone. This allows the face to be set much more tightly and doesn’t draw too much attention to individual letters. Ole Schäfer had already expanded the original family of Book and Bold while at college and presented me his designs for comments and corrections. Out of or collaboration came the extended family with Medium, ExtraBold and Black weights, plus Small Caps and Italics, Old Style figures – the works.
Ole also did the initial digital work on the new Officina Display for The Economist. After two years’ exclusive use by that magazine, I decided to update the display family to include a Light version. The digital work was carried out by Christian Schwartz who used an extrapolated version that FontBureau had previously done for a client. Christian then improved the overall appearance of the Regular, Bold and Black weights and added a new Dingbat font. Officina Display now has the same x-height across all 4 weights. Ascenders, descenders and cap height have also been harmonized. In text faces, that would constitute a cardinal sin, as bolder weights tend to look smaller because of their reduced counter spaces. In display use, however, it is important to be able to compose word-sets and headlines with mixed weights. Nothing would be sillier than having to fix individual sizes in order to achieve maximum impact.

New logos for Web 2.0

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.

Check websites remotely

Egor sent me a very useful address: netrenderer, that lets me check what my site looks like under IE or any other browser. They go to the site, take a screenshot and send that back to you. Pretty cool!

Internet Explorer is not so broken anymore

It certainly seems that way if you look at this site using IE 7 or even IE 6 (!), as a some people still may be doing. I use a Mac, of course, wirh Safari and Firefox, and in both browsers I see things exactly the way my very limited HTML and CSS knowledge allow me to build them. Under IE, however, images either disappear or turn up in the wrong position.
Joely and I have been working on improving this. I have removed a lot of old tags from the import of my previous blog and a few days ago, the site validated under the w3 validator. As, however, I do not have IE installed and have no access to a Windows machine, I still cannot see what it really looks like for the rest of you.
Now that the comment function has been turned on in my blog, I’ve already got quite a few useful hints. You can also email me directly, see contact.

Real Meta Numbers

Yesterday I saw the first housenumbers in Real Life, on Jane and Louis’ office in Berkeley. The numbers are generously spaced to allow for conditions here in the USA, where people tend to sit in cars, looking for numbers quite far away. The number combination here presents a worst case scenario: two Ones which don’t need a lot of space and have a strong horizontal bar at the bottom, next to a 6 and a 9 that have to overshoot at top and bottom in order to look right.
Louis didn’t have a hammer drill, which made it very difficult to drill into a hard brick wall. That is why not all the holes are as precisely positioned as the templates would have allowed for. The 9 hangs too low. On paper, one would have to individually adjust the space between 1, 6, 1, 9. That, however, would be asking too much of your regular DIY homemaker, so I was not allowed to include kerning tables in the packages. Louis, on the other hand, is a journalist with more design savvy than a lot of designers I know, and he would have managed.

Normally, electric drills are not tools that type designers consider when planning for application of type on media.

These are the Contemporary numbers, made from grey anodised aluminium, based on FF Meta Bold.

New York News

If you live in New York City, you need to read NEW YORK. That weekly magazine knows and shows everything that goes on in the city.
Inside the section THE WEEK there is a different illustration every week under the heading HIGH PRIORITY, and designers are invited to design it. Friday you get the manuscript and you deliver data by monday. As that takes no extra time these days, wherever you are, there have been plenty of designers involved who do not work in New York.
The website shows all the work published so far.
These illustrations show three of them as they appear in alphabetical order,
from Pierre Bernard, Paris,
Michael Bierut, New York
and Neville Brody, London.

The brief is very simple and extremely well presented. You can tell that competent colleagues work there:

How to go about such an honorable task? Go for something really novel and creative? Many contributors went that way, with varying degress of success, as you can see. Solve the problem and simply show the readers what the priorities are for the week? That would most easily be solved by setting a table in the style of the magazine. Or do what the client expects? Why would John Sheppard, the senior designer, and Chris Dixon, the design director, have chosen me for the list of contributors? Probably because they expected from me what I am known for: straight-forward, teutonic information design, in white, grey and red. This may be a boring prejudice toward my work and not represent what I really do these days, but better than not being known at all. And it’s quickly done. Minutes later I had the first version ready to be sent to John in New York. Three different colour versions, with quite a bit of greek copy still. As was to be expected, they picked the red one for final production. There was, however, copy missing, so the first deadline went by without me being able to make final artwork. On monday they sent several copy changes, but still no movie title. It took a few more days of email correspondence until we had all the copy. I had been on the road and kept checking emails on the way to keep up with John’s search for final and approved copy. In the end, it got to NY just in time for printing.

This is the version as it appeared in the magazine (colours do suffer from conversion between TIFFs, JPEGs or GIFs; the real one was simple red, i.e. 100Magenta, 100Yellow):

The 100 best typefaces

Jürgen Siebert’s Fontblog shows the countdown for the 100 best typefaces of all time. The criteria are discussed there – if you read German, that is. I can proudly announce that my ITC Officina came in at number 8, ahead of Gill and Univers, no less. There’s a new announcement every day, so in a week’s time we’ll know all the winners. The picture shows me in 1989, holding the first print of what was still called ITC Correspondence.

New numbers please!

Here in the USA streets can be quite long, and housenumbers often run into five digits. The choice of numbers for this purpose, however, is pretty limited. What you see attached to most walls would not pass for professionally designed figures. This is how Rob Forbes, the founder of Design within Reach, also saw it. So he asked me whether I could do anything about that and design numbers that would work in three dimensions. An interview between Rob and myself is at The Type that wouldn’t steal Sheep

DWR have been listing the first four different housenumbers in their catalogue since the end of 2006 now. They are named for popular appeal, not necessarily after proper historical or typographical conventions.
Classic is my own adaption of Bodoni; for Contemporary I somewhat rearranged Meta Bold, Industrial is a generic industrial typeface as negative stencils, and Tech is my attempt at designing numbers without any diagonal strokes. The materials are laser-cut, enamelled steel, extruded and anodized aluminium, laser-cut, painted steel and water-cut, polished stainless steel.

The Tech numbers have no diagonal shapes. This could eventually turn into a complete typeface.


Even an accomplished face like Meta needs to be adapted to the production process. The routing tool for the aluminium extrusion can never achieve a finely pointed inner corner. Rather than leave the shape of these details to mechanical coincidence, I drew radii that would not present any problems in the tooling process. They do look somewhat exaggerated in the drawings, but work well in metal. The slighly bolder housenumbers are shown on top, with figures from FF Meta Bold below.

You need no typographic training to fix these housenumbers to the wall. The drilling templates are printed in yellow on clear acetate in order to be visible against any background, and they also provide proper spacing for the numbers.

iErik

In November last year, the ISTD – International Society of Typographic Designers – organized a lecture tour through five cities in the UK and Northern Ireland. I have to be careful with the proper place names here. We tend to simply refer to Great Britain or – even worse – England. That would have been totally wrong, as the journey took us from Belfast via Glasgow and Manchester to Bristol and London. All that in five days, with two lectures each. I was privileged to have two colleagues in each city appear with me. The tour was called “Kern up the Volume”, and I had my own tour manager, chaperon, master of ceremonies and minder in Jonathan Doney, who was just as knackered as I was at the end of it. This was a kind of farewell tour as president of the ISTD. I am no longer PISTD, but PPISTD: Past President.

In Belfast Liam McComish, Course Director at the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster, recorded a little movie during question time and called it iErik. It is short and not destined for Hollywood, but the idea is great, so I put it under download.

007 digital

Everybody has probably noticed by now: this yeas is not abbreviated with two figures (like ’06), but with three: ’007. So much for branding’s influence on our language.
Of all the number associations in the mail this year, I liked this one best. It came from Szönyei György in Hungary, the designer of FF Archian. I have no idea why his alarm clock has cyrillic letters on it, but I’m glad he pressed the button on his camera at the right moment. This will work until 2059, and then again from 2100. If you have no better idea, you could simply sit down with a camera in front of one of the many digital timers in your home and wait for the right moment. Unless your VCR looks like mine: it has been blinking 12:00 ever since I bought it. And now it has become an antique.

San Francisco

This may sound unfair when seen from Europe, but winter here in SF can be quite pleasant. The occasional rain makes sure there’ll be enough water next summer, but most of the time the sky is as blue as the picture shows.

SpiekerBlog 2.0

At long last: only a few days into ’007, and my new blog goes online. The itinerary is up-to-date and now has its own page. The contact page is also new, and for good reason: my design studio moved to a new address last year. As of this week, it has also changed its name. UDN | United Designers Network is now SpiekermannPartners. The button on the top of this page goes right to the new homepage. Which, however, will not be online for a few days yet. You know how that goes: deadlines in the online world are as flexible as CSS stylesheets.
The new name is our answer to a recurring problem. After more than five years, clients and colleagues alike still think that I am with MetaDesign, the company I founded back in 1979. The studio appearing under my own name should send a clear message to everybody that I am out of Meta.
The new blog runs under Movable Type. We haven’t found any software that runs two versions parallel with just the text part being different. Seems there aren’t many blogs in two languages, if any. So we have to run two entire blogs on the server and I have to edit everything twice. Spiekermann.com/mt is German, spiekermann.com/mten sends you straight to the English language site. Joely Hegarty, friend and colleague in London, built the templates, learning blogging as he went along. Piece of cake for a proper coder like him. Thanks anyway.

Not the complete story of my life.

These are not extensive listings of all my achievements and failings, nor the complete story of my life (who would want to know?). Just the sort of cv people need to publish for events and publications.
There are two versions;
a very short one (erik_bio_en+de.pdf)
with 600 characters and a slightly longer one with 1700 (spiekerbio_de+en_0107.pdf).
Both in German and English and available from the download page.