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It is a network of designers in several places, but it
is also a company in Berlin with 7 partners and 20 designers. This office
is the core of a bigger network that we are planning. Can you introduce your work for the Deutsche Bundesbahn?
What makes a good typeface? 1. What makes a good typeface is decided by the users, not the designer. 2. Most good typefaces have been designed for one purpose,
they do not come
3. there are certain laws of perception as well as cultural
traditions which 4. it has to look almost like all the others, but 5. just be a little different You have designed a lot of typefaces. What is your favourite?
On your blog, you publish a compilation of old type specimen? Do you sometimes regret the good old time of paper? What have we lost in the digital world? The touch, smell and feel. Too much precision can be cold. You say that design is not an art because a designer works for a customer, an artist for himself. Have you ever tried to design a typeface for your own pleasure, artistic research or whatever you want ? No. Except perhaps my early faces, Berliner Grotesk and LoType, which i made because the old metal faces were not available as photosetting fonts in the 70s. There was no marketing rational behind this, just my love of these faces that i used to have as metal letters in my print shop. Don’t you think that something conceived with a utilitarian view in mind can be considered only for itself ? Exemple: let’s take a poster of Cassandre (there has been an exhibition in the French National Library). It is designed to fulfil a customer needs (let’s say to encourage people to take the boat to go to New York). But I can now put this poster on a wall of my room just… because I really like the object… I agree. We have the responsibility to add something
aesthetic and beautiful once we have solved the immediate problem. And
then, when the problem is forgotten, the beauty remains That you are designing not the black marks on the page, but the space in between.
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What
is “
We
designed a literature system two years ago, based on the corporate design
they had then. We had to use Helvetica and cleaned up everything
they have in print. We produced very detailed guidelines and templates,
and within a few weeks, everything they print looked at least clean
and coordinated, if not exactly very exciting.
ITC
Officina still looks great. While FF Meta was very unusual
at the time (1985) and has a lot of imitators by now, Officina
is my true classic. It was based on the idea that a typeface for correspondence
should retain some of the quality of a typewriter face without the disadvantages
of monospaced fonts. Basically, Officina is my redesign of Letter
Gothic.
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