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Tag: adrian shaugnessy

Published January 19, 2017

So Meta

Adrian Shaughnessy talks to Erik Spiekermann about his typeface FF Meta, the corporate font of Herman Miller, for the company magazine WHY:

FF Meta was not designed with Herman Miller in mind, however. It was designed for the German Post Office (Deutsche Bundespost), which hired Spiekermann to rethink the entire graphic design system for the organization—everything from order forms to the once ubiquitous telephone directories. Deutsche Bundespost’s previous font? Like Herman Miller, it was Helvetica. With typical forthrightness, the then 38-year-old Spiekermann urged them to drop it, announcing that it was “unfit for purpose” and “overused.”

Spiekermann recognized that it was the Bundespost’s phone books that offered the greatest potential to benefit from a new typeface: “With just a change of typeface you could save a million trees and be a hero,” he recalls. And so he set about designing FF Meta (then called PT55), a process that involved meticulous research into the proportions of classic letterforms and analysis of developments in printing technology. “We have a great German word, ‘Kopfgeburt’—it means something that springs from your brain. The design of Meta wasn’t like that at all. The process was very theoretical. It wasn’t emotional. This was because at that time I had no experience and couldn’t rely on talent or practice. Everything had to be deducted.”

So thorough was Spiekermann’s process that he arranged to have his new letterforms tested for legibility by perception scientists at Braunschweig University of Technology. “There was a guy there who looked at it, and in his view, there was a little too much ‘noise,’ which you can see in my early drawings. So, I toned down the contrast. There were a couple of numerals that he said were a little too in love with themselves—mannered, in other words.”

 

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Published April 20, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Making Bird Noises — Dwight Garner profiles novelist John Le Carré, for the New York Times:

In his lesser books, le Carré’s prose can thin out perilously, but at his best, he’s among the finest writers alive. There’s a reason Philip Roth has called “A Perfect Spy,” le Carré’s 1986 autobiographical work of fiction, “the best English novel since the war.” The Times of London ranked him 22nd on a list of the 50 greatest writers since 1945. His books are less about espionage than they are about human frailty and desire; they’re about how we are, all of us, spies of a sort.

See also: Mark Lawson reviews Le Carré’s latest, A Delicate Truth, for The Guardian.

(Pictured above: the cover to the US edition, illustrated by Matt Taylor)

And while we’re at it… James Campbell reviews Kurt Vonnegut: Letters edited by Dan Wakefield, which has just been released in the UK:

[Anatole] Broyard was scarcely wrong to say that Vonnegut’s reputation suffered a blow with each new book; he is a classic example of a writer whose renown endures through the success of a single novel. Yet the tone was ever recognisable, and even lesser-known books – Slapstick, Deadeye Dick, Hocus Pocus – sold well. In response to a question from a reader in 1991 about the relationship of his style to “jazz and comedians”, he replied: “I don’t think about it much, but now that you’ve asked, it seems right to say that my writing is of a piece with nightclub exhibitionism … lower class, intuitive, moody, and anxious to hold the attention of a potentially hostile audience.”

New England — Alan Moore talks to Pádraig Ó Méalóid about League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Nemo: Heart of Ice, his unfinished novel Jerusalem, and his Lovecraftian work-in-progress Providence:

with Providence, what I am doing is, I’m looking as much at American society in 1919 as I am looking at Lovecraft, in terms of my research, and I am connecting up Lovecraft’s themes, and Lovecraft’s personality, to a certain degree, with the tensions that were then incredibly evident in American society… It’s starting from – if Lovecraft’s characters, if Lovecraft’s monsters, if Lovecraft’s locales actually existed in A Real World, then what would they really be like, and what would the world be like?

In part two of the interview, Moore discusses his recent film projects and other work.

Who? — Steven Heller talks to Unit Editions Adrian Shaugnessy about Jurriaan Schrofer (1926-90): Restless Typographer at Imprint. It’s a rather short interview, but there are some lovely illustrations!

Any finally…

Still my favourite thing on the internet this week:

Phillip Marsden’s one-page comic strip ‘Hipster Hairdo’ for Off Life #4 (PDF).

 

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