Personal Collection

On the way back to the airport from the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, Albert-Jan Pool and Erik Spiekermann discussed Pool’s prospects, Spiekermann knowing that his friend’s employer had just gone out of business. He suggested that if Pool wanted to make some money in type design, that he take a closer... Read More

The Akko™ typeface family is the first new design from Akira Kobayashi in a very long time - and it is well worth the wait. Early in his career, Kobayashi drew original typefaces for the likes of Adobe, ITC, FontFont, Linotype and TypeBox. In the spring of 2001 he joined Linotype as type director and for the next several years collaborated with Adrian Frutiger and Hermann Zapf in the... Read More

The Akko™ typeface family is the first new design from Akira Kobayashi in a very long time - and it is well worth the wait. Early in his career, Kobayashi drew original typefaces for the likes of Adobe, ITC, FontFont, Linotype and TypeBox. In the spring of 2001 he joined Linotype as type director and for the next several years collaborated with Adrian Frutiger and Hermann Zapf in the... Read More

Eurostile Next is Linotype's redrawn and expanded version of Aldo Novarese's 1962 design. This new version refers back to the original metal types and to its mid-century modern aesthetic of squarish characters and subtle curves. Eurostile Next brings back the gentle curves, which were lost in other digital versions, therefore regaining the spirit of the original design and its somewhat softer... Read More

The typeface FF Transit is a highly legible design that works well for readers who need quick orientation while en route. Made to blend aesthetic quality with legibility, it was originally developed by MetaDesign in Berlin for official use by the Berlin Public Transportation Services (BVG) and Düsseldorf Airport. Based on the proportions of Frutiger (licensed from Linotype), it was freshly... Read More

Under the guidance of Albert-Jan Pool and Professor André Heers, Jakob Runge started designing the typeface that would ultimately become FF Franziska as part of his studies at Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel. The robust text face performs well in body text, while its more extreme weights do the work of setting headlines. Details such as its short descenders accommodate tighter... Read More

Dieter Hofrichter’s blunted, spurless Carnas typeface maximizes its counter-forms by pushing its strokes outward, each character forming a straight-sided or superelliptical structure. The face treats the passing eye to a subtle diagonal jostling as tensioned upper-right and lower-left curves create radial symmetry.

Vialog is a large and versatile sans serif family consisting of four weights of roman with corresponding italics, each with small caps and Old style Figures, released by Linotype in 2002. Designers Werner Schneider and Helmut Ness based the concept for Vialog on the forms in "Euro Type," an unpublished type designed by Schneider in 1988 for the German Federal Transportation Ministry. For... Read More

FF ThreeSix is a vast optical type system consisting of six variants across eight weights, including four additional monospaced weights. It is the result of London-based Paul McNeil’s and Hamish Muir’s experiments in working within the restrictive rules of geometry to generate simple typographic forms. A wide range of almost imperceptible optical corrections are used to create the illusion of... Read More

When ITC Officina was first released in 1990, as a paired family of serif and sans serif faces in two weights with italics, it was intended as a workhorse typeface for business correspondence. But the typeface proved popular in many more areas than correspondence. Erik Spiekermann, ITC Officina's designer: "Once ITC Officina got picked up by the trendsetters to denote 'coolness,' it had lost... Read More

The family that became FF Meta was first called PT55, an economical typeface made for easy reading at small sizes created for the West German Post Office in 1985. Erik Spiekermann later improved and expanded his design to include more weights and styles, and prepared its release as FF Meta, one of the first and truly foundational members of the early FontFont library. As desktop publishing... Read More

When Christian Schwartz and Erik Spiekermann were working on FF Meta Serif, they had plans to also expand the FF Unit family (a closely related design) to include FF Unit Slab. They figured that it would be nice to create a serif and slab that could be used together, as well as with their own sans counterparts. While FF Meta Serif featured a more classical structure, FF Unit Slab was shaping up... Read More

Rounded typefaces go in and out of style. They are often used for user interfaces, or for back-lit signage. Sharp type often looks blunt in these situations, and the amount of bluntness is unpredictable. The solution: start by rounding the corners. FF Unit Rounded began as an exclusive customization of FF Unit. Something friendly and precise to be read on screen, on signs, in print, and a broad... Read More