San Francisco walks, 7.

Today is the last day here in San Francisco for a few months. Just enough time left to go down to my favourite newspaper shop and get tuesday’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The coffee house opposite offers free internet, monday through friday. As I went in to get a coffee, I counted 12 people in there, each one in front of a computer. I couldn’t really take a proper photo without it being embarrassing for myself or the guests, so I just shot one from the hip without looking at the camera or the subjects. It shows five people and five computers on one side of the room.

Starbucks across the street also has online access, but only if you have a T-online account. The city of San Francisco plans to have free online access across the city very soon, so people can once again pick a café for the quality of the food and drink offered.

San Francisco walks, 5.

Today was a pink day.

San Francisco walks, 4.

One thing that never fails to amaze me on the streets in California are the classic European cars that are around – not in showrooms, but driving around or parked on the streets. Like this ca. 1969 Mercedes 280SE with a 4.5 l engine. Those cars were hardly ever sold in Europe, because we have always paid more for petrol than here in the US. You can buy one of these classic cars for less than $5000 here, because with gas at $4 in San Francisco, some of the original owners are beginning to feel the disadvantage of these fantastic, powerful, indestructible, thirsty engines.

San Francisco walks, 3.

Amongst the things threatened with extinction for a long time has been the apostrophe. Not a big loss for mankind probably, but too bad for the typographically educated amongst us. The apostrophe is neither a foot mark nor a sharp (as in acute) accent. It is shaped like a comma, but raised to the top of the cap height. Very simple.
I’m happy to report that my favourite ice cream shop in San Francisco also has good typographic taste. The fact that the apostrophe in Swensen’s is not only typographically correct and good-looking is, unfortunately, due to the fact that it was put up there by a signwriter a long time ago, when craftsmen still had to learn a trade in order to practise it.

San Francisco walks, 2.

I always carry a camera, but the extremely sunny weather (and the sun is brighter here than anywhere in Northern Europe) makes it difficult to get some motives. It is, for example, almost impossible to photograph shop windows because there is so much reflection in the glass.

I was initially only interested in the typography in this window. It may be a little over-designed in its nostalgic style, but it is a 100% fit for the subject matter and the clientele in this neighbourhood. That also clearly shown by the type of dog displayed in the window next to it, which I had not seen at first. Poodles are almost cartoons of dogs in the first place, but three of them in lightblue, pink and white certainly make a statement.

San Francisco walks, 1.

In San Francisco I walk a lot. Some of the hills are too challenging for my simple road bike, taking the car out just to get to the newspaper shop is stupid, and I have never worked out how the bus system works here.

I do, however, see people – usually older women with shopping bags – hanging around near street corners a lot. While enjoying my Swensen’s ice cream the other day, I saw them again: more and more women gathered by a shop on a corner. Then, suddenly, they were gone.

I waited a few more minutes, eating my ice cream, and more people appeared. Then I saw what brought them to that corner: it was actually a bus stop. As I walked over, I noticed that there was a yellow band painted onto a lamp post. It actually had two numbers stencilled onto it, obviously the numbers of the busses that stop there.

With this attitude towards passenger information I am not surprised that people in the US stick to their cars as much as they do.
The stop on the other side of the street at least had the words BUS STOP painted on the lamp post, but nothing else. No timetables, destinations, routes, fares. A closely guarded secret for the natives. Nobody seems to want more passengers.

San Francisco

Not every city has a landmark, but San Francisco has more than its fair share of them. And I can see one of them from our window – if only the very tip of it.
Last night on my way to the mailbox (April 15!) I took some photographs of the Transamerica building. For snapshots of that size in good weather the iPhone turns out to be perfectly adequate.

Less is more

This is my first post on my MacBook Air. The photo of the new computer on the kitchen table was shot with an iPhone. Not the best quality thinkable, but adequate for this type of message. I’m waiting for blogging software for the iPhone. The update to 2.0 in June should bring some cool stuff.

Red is the Helvetica of colours

Saw this in London recently. Not the best spelling, but a valid observation nonetheless. The construction fence it was sprayed on was painted solid red – more than anyone would need for warning purposes.

Friekermann

I see many versions of the spelling of my name, which in German is quite ordinary. A phonetic equivalent like Speakerman is the most frequent one. Last week in Boston, however, the lady at reception may have wanted to make a statement. Or she simply couldn’t read the type in my passport.

New Year’s Cleaning Up.

While cleaning up my hard drive I found several videos that may not be totally up-to-date, but could be fairly amusing. As long as I haven’t figured out how to insert the html code for streaming full-size movies, I’ll just post small versions here. If anybody is really interested, I can always provide downloads for bigger files.

That reminds me of why I started the SpiekerBlog in the first place: I still get requests from student almost every day. They have to write an essay or a term paper or even a thesis. Sometimes the subject is me, sometimes one of my typefaces and sometimes a bigger typographic subject. This is why I have archived several interviews and other writings. The questions are never identical, but they certainly cover the same ground, more often than not. The published answers thus save time, both for me and the students.

The first little video was my apology to a conference in Athens last year. I had just been elected into the European Hall of Fame for Communication Design by the readers of several European magazines, but had to cancel going to receive the prize at the last minute. This video was recorded via iChat on my Powerbook. That’s why voice and images are not in sync. I also didn’t have any time to practise, as witnessed by the fact that the signs I hold into the camera are never in the center and hardly in focus.

erik_greek.mov

Spanish impressions

As the warning above says, I shall now and again publish whatever I feel like. Just found these images from my last trip to Zaragoza and Barcelona a few months ago. A 120-gig hard drive offers a lot of surprises...

If you ever travelled through Spain, you would have noticed these gigantic metal silhouettes on the mountain tops. Originally these images of bulls had the explanation next to them: they were larger-than-life advertisements for Osborne brandy.

After many years, the added brand name had become as superfluous as putting Mercedes Benz under the star. Now, however, these giant sculptures are being taken down, at least in Catalunia. Apparently they are still considered a symbol of Franco’s Spain – from a time when this region was not allowed its language, nor its other cultural expressions.

I cannot help the impression that it might also have played a role here that it is definitely a male animal. In these politically correct times, that seems unacceptable. Too bad.

The authorities are much less concerned with typographical correctness. Officially, Spain uses the US alphabet on its freeways, in spite of that one being badly legible and totally out of date. But it stems from a time when every import from the States was considered superior and beyond criticism.

It is quite apparent that the authorities have no idea about typography – just like everywhere else. Every other sign in the region uses good old Helvetica, which is just as unsuited for this purpose, but so easily available and thus ubiquituous.
I have been demanding a Minstry for Typographic Affairs for decades. In vain, obviously.

Braun Apple

Braun collectors like myself have known for a long time where some of the ideas came from that led to the perforated-aluminium-look of some Apple computers. I took a few photographs of my world receiver T1000 from 1962 (!). Radii and perforations look almost identical to the ones on a MacBook Pro or a MacPro, 45 years later.

Colleagues in Japan and after them in the USA have now discovered that the iPhone also has a precedent in Braun’s past. The electronic calculator ET33 from 1977 has pretty much the same form factor as the revolutionary iPhone. The ET33 and its successors up to ET88 featured those cool semi-spherical buttons. And they had figures set in Akzidenz Grotesk, way cooler than the boring Helvetica numbers that Apple chose.

Read more on air-port.com.

Science papers on the fly

A commentator who calls himself Schorch sent me this link: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/.
It is a dummy text generator. This one, however, generates content, not just nonsensical strings of words. You enter author names, press the button, and – Bingo!– you have a science paper. I entered Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Karl May (a 19th century German author of adventure fiction) and Adolf Schicklgruber. Schicklgruber was Hitler’s mother’s maiden name. Apparently, a paper generated with this method was accepted to a conference. I have attached the pdf I made from the paper. Makes convincing reading and looks the part.

Dummy generators

I see many layouts with boring and stupid dummy text of the kind Indesign generates automatically. I happen to dislike pseudo-latin copy – it is misleading and useless.
There are alternatives.

Michaels Sousa’s http://adhesiontext
generates copy in several languages, while MacLorem doesn’t just generate dummy copy in different languages, but also lets you enter parameters like the length of paragraphs.

Justanotherfoundry

by Tim Ahrens adds options like multi, neutral und abstract. That leads to wonderful copy in phantasy languages. You can even list character and character-pair frequencies. Just two examples:

languages: neutral abstract; characters: all characters
Se vis si Pora tantia fro amig mans en exera Farin o mare an ante in stiga inia. Frargir gamt a steint ing. Finde dem re foren ca re enich Bast de, untyler na du ninerd en hina car tan men, vin regan Lonsi volusob, tremon Lostan smeng bareff heopte en durien palior un sar Best dirde hon Aman ka, ensell cures?' Tor marbe a mout fambur le to, Medempon postali pienmint song etion famama Listrumi, sonta, tuering tedener wilinpar crun Hacer hologni entecom, comaingre sit ban sembere Parwide entionte. Mal dimendu sovial ere.

languages: abstract de; characters: all characters
Syse dospal afince hasit jus eiß en soni fise, de nur Ent eina miturchke as Peraver, seing eine a Alle, sulle nik oditi to, aur der läres mer vatud Pativie Frandie unice cas spoppe ine in ralte, Auster ventge hand nu weich duroty fisere eit diessol demann Gra dad an Bahm, eingricht ses munsse, in dier are inceprin dirkeit, alein Histigen, prommile lo-Phanachke velltein tregind inete auseder semoch dechenge all do Lontand misso ensproglo sie sorner zu leinur, st errtalet übezies pa sie ihrer Kopot volie tentliche he 60. Eurch a nalisch eve men sen) somen des pradaß d. hab, miss.



Adhesiontext generates dummy text from the copy you enter into a window. This is particularly useful when you’re designing a new typeface and need to look at text before you have more than a handful of characters ready. I tried it with that old favourite Hamburgefonstiv, with German selected:

arteigener ein ist Hofs Hofes rissigeren rieb starb treibe tu aufsagen nisten am tutete bestrebst vorgeformten rauf aufgemuntert neu unbetont engen rare erbte bei tote taub trag inne erbietet surre is erfreut berufst umgeformtem Hebung so am ob saftiger vertratet nur tobe ins anfange er nur vereinige intensiveres Heu steifst in ein gab nettem es ansteige gegangenen baue sanft in nun gravierte getarnt unfein ungenanntestes oft teigigsten ureigenen ans neuer mies vereist Haft gestreiftes bei traff in traff bare sonore in steinernem rief Hauer rammst steuern mag trabe begingen soff immerfort arrogantestes angegriffener rufe taue tragbarerer emsige

... etcetera. The dictionaries for each of the languages make the words look very genuine that it generates from just so few characters. Add a comma or a full point and perhaps another capital letter or two and it looks as if you've already designed a whole typeface.

Friedrichstrasse 126

When SpiekermannPartners moved into a listed building in Berlin-Mitte last October, our landlords, Ullstein Publishers, let us use a photo of the building for the announcement. Monika Molin took our 256-colour motif to highlight the windows of the 3rd floor where our offices are.

Part of SpiekermannPartners’ new address card

Ullstein’s recently redesigned homepage shows the same picture, but this time as a navigational device to lead to their separate publishing labels that are, of course, not hidden behind our windows.
We had nothing to do with the redesign. The tree in front of the building is still there – it just got retouched out of the picture.


Homepage of Ullstein Buchverlage

Work more efficiently

Now and again, there’s something that solves a problem so effectively that we wonder how we ever managed to work without this solution. Gabriel Kornreich is a German-Argentinian designer in Barcelona. He designed Linea to make it easier to read your laptop screen, work better on the keyboard and ventilate it to prevent if from running too hot. All this with a simple piece of wire, bent into shape and sheathed in plastic at the angles.

Gabriel makes Linea at home in his kitchen and sells it via gabrielkornreich. It only costs 18 Euros plus postage.

As my colleagues Johannes, Matthias and Ali at Bremen University demonstrate, it even looks cool.

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.

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.

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.

Football

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.

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