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Edited anddesigned by Micaela Brody

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Table of Contents

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Interview with Erik SpeakermannDebbie Hemley

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To Live In A CityMicaela Brody

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Mr. Vignelli’s MapMichael Beirut

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8

An Interviewwith Erik Spiekermann

Debbie Hemley

Throughout his illustrious career as a designer and typographer, Erik Spiekermann has created dozens of commercial typefaces (FF Meta, FF MetaSerif, ITC Officina, FF Govan, FF Info, FF Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk) and many custom typefaces for world-renowned corporations. Erik and his wife Joan, revolutionized the world of digital fonts twenty-two years ago when they started FontShop—the first mail-order distributor for digital fonts. This year, he was awarded the Federal Republic of Germany’s 2011 Design Prize for Lifetime Achievements— a most noble accomplishment. The exhibition, Erik Spiekermann, The Face of Type recently took place at the Bauhaus-Archive Museum of Design in Berlin. Spiekermann is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts in Bremen, the author of the Adobe Press title, Stop Stealing Sheep, and the originator of the colorful map for the Berlin metro system.

He recently took time out of his busy schedule to speak to Web-designer Depot about typeface design and what he sees next in his future. We thank Mr. Spiekermann for speaking with us and invite WDD readers to comment on how his contributions to typeface design have helped shape your work.

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What was the first typeface you fell in love with?

Reklameschrift Block. It was what my neighbour gave me with my first little printing machine when I was 12.

Which of your fonts do you feel should be more popular and why?

FF Info Office because it works well on screen and is really cool but nobody has found it behind the larger FF Info Text and Display families.

Being one of the lead font designers in the world, who or what do you learn from in order to keep pushing yourself?

The world out there: technical developments, trends, other de-signers, other cultures. In other words: by observing what goes on in the visual world.

What are some of your proudest projects ever?

Making the buses and trams in Berlin bright yellow instead of the boring beige they were before. Making it both easy and pleasant to find your way around the Berlin Transit system. And giving Deutsche Bahn (German Railways) their face by designing their corporate design, including all the typefaces which work from the smallest timetable to the largest poster.

What do you think of Apple and their approach to design in general? How does their industrial and web design compare to typeface design?

I bought my first Mac in 1985 and have probably bought every single computer they ever made at one time. I also have a large collection of equipment by BRAUN, most of it designed by Dieter Rams. If you look at the stuff from the 60s now, you see where Apple (i.e. Jon Ives) get their direction. They have learnt to bring objects down to the essentials without making them look boring and purely functional. They know that aesthetics play a 

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big role in function because we do not like to use anything that is ugly. Function also follows form. Perhaps that is the common denominator for my typefaces: I have always designed my faces for a specific purpose, but they always have to look pleasing, whatever purpose they serve.

Can you briefly describe what the current process is like for you to create a new typeface and where do you get your inspiration from?

The question about inspiration is tedious because I work like everybody else. Everything can be inspirational, there is no method or proper process. Like any design process, I look at the brief, take it apart, look at comparable briefs, make analog sketches, discuss with colleagues and the client and then carry on condensing the sketches, at some point digitally.

Please finish this sentence: “In an ideal world, fonts…”

Would be paid for.

What was one of the most challenging typog-raphy problems you have ever had to solve?

It is always the same: to find a visual voice for all the communica-tion of a large corporation. It is supposed to express their iden-tity (whatever that may mean), be legible, pleasant to look at, 

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work technically across platforms, and be applicable across the world. I’ve done that for Nokia, Cisco, Bosch, German Railways, Heidelberg Printing and many smaller brands.

What is the plan for rolling out more web fonts on FontShop?

Rolling out more web fonts.

Where are some of the areas where typography is improving and where do we need to see more growth?

Technology is improving for displaying type properly across media.

What are the challenges today for someone getting started in typeface design versus when you first started in the 1970s?

There is more competition out there. While theree are fantastic tools available that I would have killed for, it has also become very difficult to master all of them. We are therefore on the way back to share work between people. Some of us are good 

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at sketching, some at programming, some at using production tools. Not one person can do all of it equally well. That is how type used to be made before desktop computers and that is how type is made again today.

How do you view the state of typefaces in the mobile world?

In flux.

Taking into account small sizes, aliasing and browser font rendering engines, which fonts do you think should be used for body text on the web?

The ones that look good.

What’s the most overrated font in the world?

Arial. It totally sucks but has become the standard for many us-ers and even institutions.

Let’s talk a little about the creative process and how you work. Can you describe your ideal work environment?

This is a silly question because I have no fixed formula. Every project is different and the work environment is always differ-ent as well. I do not work on my own, ever. (See question “Can you briefly describe what the current process…”)

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“Work less for clients and more for myself.

Which typefaces’ styles do you think will be the most popular in the near future and why?

The ones that express the Zeitgeist, In other words: all the styles that are appropriate, fashionable, legible and cool, how ever that may be defined at the time. We do not have one style or fashion (not even within one culture, let alone globally) anymore but many currents at the same time. Type design has always been eclectic. Type has always mirrored what went on in the visual world. These days it does so as quickly as music does and even more quickly than literature and film because you can design and produce a single typeface in a few days, all on your own. It is only the larger, more professional typographic systems that need weeks and months to complete, but even that is less than what it takes to make a movie.

What’s next for Erik Spiekermann?

Share my time between San Francisco, Berlin and London (to a lesser extent), work less for clients and more for myself. Use digital technology to make analog things.

Use digital technology to make analog things.”

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“Work less for clients and more for myself.

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Use digital technology to make analog things.”

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Mr. Vignelli’s MapMichael Beirut

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This week marks the 100th anniversary of the New York subway system, and what better time to recognize the beautiful achieve-ment represented by Massimo Vignelli’s subway map of 1972.   I still remember the first time I heard the rationale for this  extraordinary graphic solution. Up on the sidewalks, New York was a confusing bedlam of sights and sounds. Below ground, however, it was an organized system. Each line had certain stops. Each stop had certain connections. Getting from here to 

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Up on the sidewalks,

New York was a confus-

ing bedlam of sights

and

sounds.

there wasn’t the result of a meandering sojourn, but a series of logical steps, one following on the next like a syllogism. What was happening on the streets was meaningless. What happened below ground — that sequence of stops and connections — was supreme. It was as logically self-contained as Marxism. And, like Marxism, it soon ran afoul on the craggy ground of practical reality.  Like many complex urban transportation systems, the New York subways were aggregated over many years, as a variety of competing businesses (the Interborough Rapid Transit, the Independent Subway System, the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit) were consolidated into a single integrated network. The result was a tangled spaghetti of train lines, a mess of a “system” that was almost comical in its complexity.   In 1968, Unimark International was commissioned to design a sign system for the subways, and out of this chaos came order. Two Unimark designers, Bob Noorda andMassimo Vignelli, developed a signage plan based on a simple principle: deliver the necessary information at the point of decision, never before, never after. The typeface they recommended, the then-exotic, imported-from-Switzerland Helvetica Medium, was unavailable; they settled for something at hand in the New York City Met-ropolitan Transit Authority train shop called Standard Medium. The designs they proposed assumed that each sign would be held in place at the top with a black horizontal bracket; the sign shop misinterpreted the drawings and simply painted a black horizon-tal line at the top of each sign. And so the New York City subway 

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signage system was born.  Four years later, Vignelli introduced a new subway map. It was based on principles that would be familiar to anyone who appre-ciated the legendary London Underground mapdesigned in 1933 by Henry Beck. Out with the complicated tangle of geographi-cally accurate train routes. No more messy angles. Instead, train lines would run at 45 and 90 angles only. Each line was repre-sented by a color. Each stop represented by a dot. What could be simpler?  The result was a design solution of extraordinary beauty. Yet it quickly ran into problems. To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. What about, for instance, the fact that the Vignelli map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide? If you’re underground, of course, it doesn’t matter: there simply aren’t as many stops along Central Park as there are in midtown, so it requires less map space. But what if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get out at 59th Street and take a walk on a crisp fall evening? Imagine your surprise when you found yourself hiking for hours on a route that looked like it would take minutes on Vignelli’s map.  The problem, of course, was that Vignelli’s system logical system came into conflict with another, equally logical system: the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan. In London, Henry Beck’s rigorous map brought conceptual clarity to a senseless tangle of streets and neighborhoods that had no underlying order. In New York, however, the orthoginal grid introduced by the Commis-sioners’ Plan set out its own ordered system of streets and ave-nues that has become second nature to New Yorkers. Londoners may be vague about the physical relationship of the Kennington station to the Vauxhall station: on the London underground map, Vauxhall is positioned to the northwest of Kennington when it’s actually to the southwest, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. On the other hand, because of the simplicity of the Manhattan street grid, every New Yorker knows that the 28th Street num-ber 6 train stops exactly six blocks south and four blocks east of Penn Station. As a result, the geographical liberties that Vignelli took with the streets of New York were immediately noticable, and commuters without a taste for graphic poetry cried foul. 

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 And thus it was that by 1979, the Vignelli map was replaced by a conventional, less elegant, more geographically accurate map that persists in revised form to this day. I remember a presenta-tion at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum at which designer Wilburn Bonnell presented this revision as the graphic design equivalent of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing development: im-practical, elitist Modernism succumbing to the practical, flawed imperfections of everyday life. The Vignelli map is remembered today as “colorful and handsome” but also “incomprehensible,” a regrettable lapse from good sense, if not good taste.  But it wasn’t to me. My favorite souvenir from first trip to New York in 1976 was my very own copy of the Vignelli map, straight from the token booth at Times Square: gorgeous, iconic and cerebral, it represented a New York that didn’t care if it was understandable to a kid from Ohio. It hung on my wall, in all its mysterious unknowablility, for the next three years. That was the city I wanted to live in. It still is.

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To live in a city is to move in a city. In many places, this is done just with your feet – New York City wouldn’t be the same place without the masses of pedestrians constantly crowding through the sidewalks, clogging “pedestrian walkways” like a drain, or glaring angrily at tour-ists who stop and point with an “ooh” or “ahh” at a famous landmark. Walking, some might say, is the best way to get the flavor of a city – to truly feel its spice and particular rhythm some may say you need to have your own feet hitting the hard concrete of city sidewalks and your own shoulders brush against total strangers’ as you try to cross a street.

To live in a city is, however, to move in it. And while walking can be an experience, the practicalities of life mean that sometimes your destination is far away, or sometimes it is just inconvenient. What does that leave you with? Mass transportation. London’s skeleton is found in the tunnels underneath the city, subway trains rattling around like moving mar-row. Red double-decker buses are the blood vessels, taking people from place to place, careening around tight corners and impossibly sharp turns. Paris’ snaking art-nouveau arms above each Metro station are its jewelry and its embrace to citizens and tourists alike seeking only to move in the city. New York’s subway is no-nonsense, gashes in city streets where people descend into a complex web of trains no tourist could possibly understand.

In almost every city, its transportation is the personality of the place encapsulated in a bus or train or trolley. People interact with these systems, these anatomies almost, of a city, every day, through timetables, signs, maps, and more. What would a London Underground stop look like without the internationally recogniz-able roundel and the famous Johnston Sans logo? For that matter, a New York Subway stop without its esoteric collection of numbers and letters in colored circles? Or a Boston T stop without a solid colored bar and a large “HAR-VARD SQUARE?” Because transportation is inherently based in information, in times and 

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schedules and distance, anyone using transpor-tation must learn to read the unique language of the system.

It is a combination of the language of the country, of course, and lines and grids and timestamps displaying where the bus will come to pick you up and when, how far it will take you, and how much you must pay to board. It combines all the elements of the city – its geography, in the form of a map, its economy, in the form of tickets and prices, and its pace, in the timetable. These elements must be unified, or there would be informational chaos – and to travelers, chaos is a waste of time, and time is never more equivalent to money than it is in transportation.

In a literal language, the words are important. Boston uses the color of the path on the map to denote the name of the line. The “Green line” and “Red line” are an inherent part of the language to a Bostonian, as well as the inbound/outbound difference which requires, of course, a little knowledge of the geography of the city – Ashmont is different than Alewife, and the Green line taking you to Government Center won’t be helpful if you’re trying to get to Brookline. In London, however, lines are named for a famous stop, or a landmark they pass, or sometimes for the shape of the line itself – the Picadilly and Leicester Square sta-tions are named for important landmarks, the Victoria line for the stop which leads directly to Buckingham Palace, and the Circle line for the fact that, as it would sound, the line travels in a circle. Paris’ Metro lines are, like New York’s, given a number, and sometimes denoted with a big stop along the way. (Many people would argue that the less word-based the vocabulary is, the more confusing the system becomes. See Paris and New York for good examples.)

However, there is a graphic language which is even more important, arguably, to trans-portation. In both London and New York, the unification of the graphic system was done through choosing a font. In London, Johnston Sans became the font for the London Under-ground when Frank Pick, Commercial Manager of the Underground at the time, commissioned it in 1913. He was concerned for the corporate identity of the Underground, which was using a large variety of styles and typefaces. Pick wanted to make sure that the Underground, 

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which had been a feature of London since 1863, moved smoothly to the twentieth century with-out feeling at all behind the times. Johnston’s typeface was set in two weights (regular and heavy, the latter of which does not contain lowercase). It was at first only to be used on the Tube, but it eventually came into every area of the Transport for London framework and its redesign in 1979 enabled it to be a continuing presence, and now a defining feature of the TFL system.

New York’s subway system went through many typeface decisions, by contrast. It had many mosaic signs of the nineteenth century, handpainted signs of the 1930s, and other indicators, all contributing to a general chaos in design when there was a decision made to unify in the fifties. A typeface close to Helvetica was released in 1963 for Heathrow Airport, and this set off a trend of Swiss typefaces used in transportation design: Milan’s signage, for ex-

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To live in a city is tomove in it,is to breathe it,

and to speak it.

To move in a city is to sway with a city, to drink in a city,

to read a city.

ample was a combination of Akzidenz Grotesk and Milano. Bob Noorda, who was in charge of much of the signage, had significant issues with choosing Helvetica, and such drew his own ver-sion of the now-ubiquitous font. Eventually the team reevaluating the subway signage chose Standard Medium over Helvetica, in 1970, much to teammate Mossimo Vignelli’s chagrin. Vignelli was further usurped when a new map was commissioned only four years after his had been distributed. In 1989, the Graphics Manual of the recently-created Mass Transportation Authority made the switch officially to Hel-vetica, to reflect an institution-wide unification of typeface.

Both Johnston’s typeface and Helvetica are sans-serif and clean. Johnston Sans is a more humanist typeface, while Helvetica is a neo-grotesque, but the similarity reveals that typography on mass transportation is by and large focused on being clean, standardized and modern. In Boston’s T system, the font used is much like Helvetica or Standard, though it is not quite as standardized across the board (the Charlie Card and Charlie Ticket, for example, use a much lighter face than the solid letter-forms used on large signs indicating the stop). The focus on modernity, however, is clear – no “old-fashioned” serif faces are being used any-where on subway systems unless it is a deliber-ate recall to the past, as in the Paris Metro’s propensity for keeping art nouveau signs and typography as a callback to the heydey of the Paris Metro and a certain period in time. 

To live in a city is to move in it, is to breathe it, and to speak it. The language of a city is indis-putably connected to the language of motion within the city. How we read that language is in the typography, the skeleton of the system of the city. To move in a city is to sway with a city, to drink in a city, to read a city.

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To live in a city is tomove in it,is to breathe it,

and to speak it.

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An Interview with Erik Spiekermann, from http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/07/inter-view-with-designer-and-typographer-erik-spiekermann/

Mr. Vignelli’s Map, from http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/mr-vignellis-map/2647/All images property of Micaela Brody or Carol Shansky.

Front and back cover image: Metro sign in Paris.

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