He’s not very keen on the new posters either, preferring the images he gave them of landscapes. ‘They said, “What does landscape have to do with music?” Like type, landscape and music are all about emotion. But that’s the one thing about this job – I love to be a graphic designer, but could we get rid of clients somehow please?’
Spiekermann, who is in his early sixties, has also used type to define corporate identities for Audi, Sky TV, Bosch and Nokia. He hopes that his types will trigger associations with a product even before the company’s name or logo is revealed, although he hopes that his involvement with a redesign of The Economist will have the opposite effect, keen to design type that is in effect invisible. ‘I never want anyone to pick it up and say, “What a cool typeface.” I want them to say, “What a cool article.” I don’t design the notes – that’s what writers do; I do the sound. And the sound has to be legible.’ For the German railways, Spiekermann and his team had to make a family of typefaces to accommodate both fat headline type for advertising, and the much smaller text on the menus in the dining car. And even then there were variations. ‘Wine menus look different from snack menus,’ he says, ‘because wine is more valuable – so that’s serif. The snack menus are in sans serif.’
Self-confessed typomaniac Erik Spiekermann – from the Helvetica movie
Spiekermann is one of those people for whom not being able to identify a g would be grounds for serious self-reappraisal. ‘But I’m not quite as nerdish as I was. Perhaps it’s age. In my generation I was the nerdiest of the nerds. But now with young kids – there are so many more nerds.’ He says he became ‘infected’ himself at the age of six. He was living very close to a printshop in Lower Saxony and ‘I saw all that messy metal type, and all that oily dirty ink, and then someone placed a pristine piece of paper on top of it and it produced this clean and clear text that you could read – it was magical, and I was hooked.’ He was given the guillotined paper strips, which he used to draw trains and the narrow lorries his father drove for the British forces. Then in his teenage years, ‘I had a crush on a girl, and I would write her letters and print her address on the envelopes. Other kids play with Lego, but I had some Futura and some Gill.’
His professional career began when he turned seventeen and moved to Berlin to avoid the draft. He began work as a printer, setting type by hand. He drew his first typefaces when he worked as a typographer in London in the late 1970s, based on famous fonts he used to collect in wood and metal. He wrote to his heroes for advice, including Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger and Günter Gerhard Lange. ‘With Matthew and Adrian it was almost like the freemasons – it was them and a dozen others, and they were glad there were whippersnappers like me about because most people weren’t interested. These days it’s almost the other way round. Everybody wants to design a bloody typeface.’
Spiekermann teaches a course at the University in Berlin and says that he tells his students, above all other things, that digital type can be too harsh. ‘When letters were cut from metal and wood there was a warmth, some fuzziness, that came about when it was printed. Now we have to add warmth to our letters, but we can’t do it through the printing. So I add it by not making my type too perfect – I leave stuff alone, I won’t make it mathematically, so it can look unfinished and handmade. Nylon can be perfect, but I’d rather wear wool, because it feels different on the skin on different parts of the body.’
Spiekermann’s Meta font
He refers to his Meta font as an example. ‘If you look at the data, it’s a mess. The thickness is all over the place, nothing is identical. But I’ve resisted any attempt to clean it up, because then it wouldn’t be Meta any more, it would be a mechanical clone. And that’s the challenge for all of us – to create warmth in a digital world. Not many people can do it. You see a lot of stuff that looks great but simply doesn’t turn you on. It’s like making a song on a synthesizer. To make a drum machine sound good is really difficult – you might as well play real drums. We’re still analogue beings. Our brains and eyes are analogue.’
Spiekermann’s blog, which is called Spiekerblog, contains acerbic comments on type he sees on his travels. As well as Berlin, Spiekermann has offices in London and San Francisco, and as he flies around he observes how type defines not only a city, but the characteristics of a nation. He sees parallels with architecture – Bauhaus influencing the geometric Futura – the classic German sans serif font while tall British Victorian terraces reflect the serif tradition. And there are parallels in commerce. ‘What does England make these days?’ he asks. ‘Jam, marmalade, cider, little pressies, gift stuff. English serifs have defined the packaging of tea. The French have defined perfume, the Italians have defined fashion, and we Germans have defined cars. Also everything in France is auto-shaped. Their typefaces look like a Citroën 2CV.’
In Germany, Erik Spiekermann, like all of his generation, was brought up reading and writing two scripts: the as well as regular roman type, and the duality defined the darkly confused relationship his country has had with type since type began.
The blackletter type first used by Gutenberg took on several forms with slight variations – or , , , and – though most of them died out as a popular form of text when the roman letter gradually assumed prominence throughout the sixteenth century. The heaviest, blackest blackletter type held fast to the work of courtly scribes: the elaborate swirling capital waves of ink with their internal crossbars, better suited to iron gates than paper, and the unforgiving jagged lower-case, devoid both of curves and signs of humanity, the reading of which is akin to sticking needles in one’s eyes.
Their use today is largely confined to the confirmation of noble tradition, not least on Pilsner beers (Mexican beers as much as German faithfuls) and newspaper mastheads (The New York Times, Telegraph and Mail groups – and hundreds more throughout Europe and the US), or as a measure of pastiche denoting pomposity, grandeur and the presence of tourists ( sign, anything in ). The third use is a world unto itself: heavy metal (try writing or in jaunty Lucida Bright and see how many T-shirts you sell). And then there are tattoos: nothing says quite like a word written in Old English.
Blackletter news from around the world
Make mine a pint of blackletter – this Stiegl one is a modern revival
Blackletter metal: motorhead
But the German experience is different, and highly political. The use of (a slightly less flamboyant gothic lettering than ) continued in Germany well into the twentieth century, and in 1928 more than half of all books were still printed in blackletter. Its use had been advocated most vehemently at times of economic uncertainty, or when Germany struggled to define itself on the international stage. Deutsche Schrift, which had its strongest cultural roots in Martin Luther’s Bible of 1523, became a talisman as strong as any flag or figurehead. Dissenting voices were largely drowned out, including the Brothers Grimm, who fearing for their literary reputation called Fraktur ‘barbaric’.
But at the beginning of the twentieth century the move against gothic type gathered momentum, spurred on both by the demands of international trade and by the creative and political concerns of artists who had been influenced by Johnston and Gill in England and the broader sweep of the Italian Futurists and Bolsheviks. The type designer Paul Renner, whose dynamic sans serif Futura of 1927 defined the modernist movement, was at the centre of it. He renounced gothic text most vocally when the Nazi party embraced it (the Nazis judged roman text degenerate, believing only traditional gothic text could fully express the purity of the nation; a view not shared by the Italian fascists). Renner was arrested in 1933, having protested against the imprisonment of his teaching colleague Jan Tschichold, and directly after a lecture Renner gave about the history of letterforms, which the Nazis judged too sympathetic towards roman types. His arrest could hardly have been a surprise: when a magazine asked for his thoughts on graphic design, he observed that ‘Political idiocy, growing more violent and malicious every day, may eventually sw
eep the whole of western culture to the ground with its muddy sleeve.’
Third Reich propaganda not only employed gothic lettering for its message, but made it the message itself: one slogan read ‘Feel German, think German, speak German, be German, even in your script.’ Perhaps overwhelmed by this onslaught, Renner made several attempts to combine gothic and roman type, while the Nazis evolved their own more brutish, angular and heroic Fraktur before the war; nicknamed ‘the jackboot gothic’, it was something that went typographically well with the swastika.
But in January 1941, everything suddenly changed. Gothic script was outlawed by decree, newly labelled ‘Schwabacher-Jewish’. Centuries of tradition were cast aside overnight, the type being newly associated with the documents of Jewish bankers and the Jewish owners of printing presses.
Third Reich slogan. It reads: ‘German Script. It is an indispensable protective weapon for Germans abroad against menacing de-Germanization.’
But the true reason was pragmatism. ‘In the occupied territories you just couldn’t read it,’ says Erik Spiekermann. ‘If you were French and saw a sign saying in Gothic, it could be very confusing. But the main reason was that the Germans just couldn’t make enough of the stuff – there was a shortage of type.’ When it came to printing outside Germany, the Nazis found few gothic fonts in French or Dutch foundries. And there was a further advantage: the roman-heroic architecture of Albert Speer could now employ Trajan-style inscriptions above their columns.
The switch to roman type outlived the ideology. After the war, Paul Renner declared that ‘the motives that led to this step may have been loathsome, but this decree itself was an undeserved gift from the heavens, of the kind which occasionally deliver goodness from those whose intentions are bad.’
His own early type designs would become increasingly influential, although what he described as his ‘inner emigration’ in Germany after the war resulted in little new work. Interestingly, it was from Switzerland that the new international typefaces – Helvetica and Univers – emerged in the 1950s. The concentration of power had shifted: the present belonged to clean lines devoid of political or historical connotations, to an alphabet that looked the same throughout the new Europe, to a simple g that would be instantly recognizable without recourse to a typeface encyclopaedia.
This loss of a national type identity is obviously to be welcomed, in so far as it relates to the Third Reich. But the homogenization is regretted by many designers. As Matthew Carter recalled: ‘Once I could be parachuted blindfold anywhere in the world, take the blindfold off and look around, and I could see the shop facias and newspapers, and I would know where I was just from the typeface. I’d see the type of Roger Excoffon [creator of Banco, Mistral and Antique Olive] and know that I had landed in France. But now a typeface is released in Tokyo or Berlin or London and it’s gone around the world overnight, and it has completely lost its sense of origin.’
Futura – Paul Renner’s most enduring work – is the best known of all German fonts. Commissioned in 1924, it belongs to an era before the Nazis, and still looks modern, more than eighty years on. It is a font that type fans feel passionate about: witness the controversy when IKEA dumped it in favour of Verdana.
Renner, a painter as well as a typographer and lecturer, developed Futura initially for a publisher, Jakob Hegner, who told him that he wanted something artistically liberating. The day after his visit, Renner began his first drafts, and the words with which he chose to experiment with his new type did not arrive by chance: , he wrote – the typeface of our time. He could just as easily have written .
Renner worked in a golden age of fonts and in Futura he created a timeless type, forever suspended between irrefutable traditions and a vision of things to come. After its launch, Renner kept working to perfect it for four more years. But its influence was immediate. Renner reported that as early as 1925, much of the civic appearance of Frankfurt am Main was already set in Futura by order of the city’s planning office. He also noted many similar typefaces appearing at that time, a fact he attributed to ‘unthinkingly’ showing his early work-in-progress to other designers in a slide show, telling ‘the whole world what had led me to this new type form’.
Advertising material for Futura, showing Paul Renner working on his design
The font has proved resilient. Volkswagen, with its socialist marketing ideals, still uses Futura in its advertising, to a point where it would be dangerous to switch it, like tampering with the brakes. But the most famous appearance of Renner’s visionary font, and his geometric interpretation of letters and numbers, is, suitably enough, in space. The Apollo 11 astronauts didn’t just gather rocks and stick in a flag, they also left behind a plaque inscribed in Futura capitals. Did the short-sleeved people in Houston make Futura their positive choice for typographic reasons, or because the name suited the mission? Who knows. Ultimately it just looked right.
The signatures may be hard for extraterrestrials to read but they’ll have no problem with the Futura
In some ways, the United States has never really thrown off the cloak of English type. The Declaration of Independence was printed in Caslon, and the New Yorker magazine still is. The New York Times still uses and and an Old English blackletter for its masthead. But the American type foundries of the nineteenth century gave things a very good shake.
The most influential of these established themselves in Philadelphia in the 1790s and denied all English associations. They were, after all, Scottish. Chief among them was the firm of Binny & Ronaldson, who started their business after acquiring the press that Benjamin Franklin had bought, twenty years earlier, for his grandson, from the French firm of Fournier. Archibald Binny had learned letter-cutting in Edinburgh but his partner James Ronaldson had been a biscuit baker – until he lost everything in a fire. Ronaldson handled the business end of their new operation, while Binny did more than any craftsman of his time to establish an early American identity in print. Not the least significant of their innovations was to produce a $ sign; previously, printers had used a long ‘S’.
Binny & Ronaldson’s best known font is Monticello, which they called Pica No 1. This was a modern hybrid of Baskerville and Caslon, a transitional face combining thin and thick strokes that proved instantly popular. It wasn’t radical, but it was celebrated as an American product, and received a significant accolade when in 1810 it was used in Isaiah Thomas’s The History of Printing in America.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Binny & Ronaldson became a cornerstone of the American Type Founders Company (ATF), an amalgam of twenty-three American type foundries. Their font re-emerged, too, and for a while seemed oddly English, being renamed Oxford. However, it was renamed Monticello, after Thomas Jefferson’s residence, in the 1940s, when it was used to print his papers, and has gained recent popularity after a digital revival by Matthew Carter. The original matrices are now in the Smithsonian.
Many American book publishers, including Scribner and later Simon & Schuster, favoured what was known as for their books, a slightly more modern transitional face showing heavy influences of Bodoni and Didot. When the de Vinne Press published a specimen book in 1907 they used Scotch Roman to explain why it was popular:
Thomas Jefferson’s letter to James Ronaldson, expressing admiration for his fonts – part of the ‘continued progress of science and the arts, and the consequent advancement of the happiness of man’.
‘Books are not made for show. Books are written to be read and read easily, without discomfort or annoyance. The conditions of printing that favour easy reading are plain types, clear print and freedom from surprises.’
At the start of the twentieth century another font did truly define a new American look, but with a distinctly English name: Cheltenham (known by most printers as Chelt). Designed in 1896 by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and Ingalls Kimball for a New York publisher, the Cheltenham Press, the typeface dominated American advertising and display for the next fifty years. A rugged and uncompromis
ingly heavy serif, it had relatively little stroke variation: its capital A with a misaligned apex, its G with an ungainly stub at its bottom right, its g notable for its broken lower bowl and its Q an unbroken one. It was promoted by both of the new mechanical casting processes Monotype and Linotype, which guaranteed widespread use, much as a tune will eventually appeal if played often enough. In 1906 it was sold to the printing trade as one might sell cigarettes or dubious linaments:
A happy face is a face that gives joy, and the Cheltenham – so apt, so – is this kind.
Cheltenham had been ‘the type sensation of the year’, the ATF advertisement claimed. ‘Until now it is hardly possible to pick up a publication of any merit without a showing of the complete series of both the Cheltenham Old Style and the Cheltenham Italic …’
Cheltenham – in a modern Linotype version. In 2003 Matthew Carter revived it for the New York Times
Like the catchy tune, its appeal waned. It was a fairly charmless face, reliable and pliable, but not beautiful, and the refined tastes of Madison Avenue in the 1950s probably got bored with it before the public did. However, in the 2003 redesign of the New York Times, it made its comeback, digitized by Matthew Carter, and employed in bold condensed forms for the paper’s headlines.
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