June 2011
1 post
A face in my face →
Lasko Dzurovski from Macedonia just sent me this portrait of myself, all done in characters from FF Meta.
I don’t know how Lasko finds the time to do this, but it is pretty amazing. The original…
May 2011
1 post
Dialogue
Lucas: oi
Caluã: Tudo bem?
Ana: Não quis interferir.
August 2009
1 post
Numerous numbers →
Good to see that I am not the only one who has to photograph numbers wherever I see them. Wardour Street in Soho ist still home to many colour labs, film-, sound- and design-studios. Someone…
July 2009
7 posts
A head full of letters →
Apparently there is a trend to make portraits from letters only. I was very surprised to find my head in a list on typography portraits, right above that of Obama. The designer, Thierry Eamon,…
Form & Function →
Metal shutters in front of shop windows are hardly ever pretty. Especially not when the shop seems to be closed forever. I have no idea whether these three letters have any meaning, but they were…
Cheap Type →
Before we had cheap digital printers and everybody started setting their little shop notices in Arial, there were dedicated systems for displaying messages in shops, bars and cafés. One of these…
Hotel art →
Hotel hallways are long by necessity and not meant to be places to spend time in. Looking out from the lift door all you normally see are the signs with the room numbers on them. Often barely…
Photo without -graphy →
The iPhone is not a camera, it just has a cheap plastic lens, a chip and some memory dedicated to capturing and storing image data. There are no adjustments possible, all you do is raise the phone…
Publish or Perish →
Spontaneous slogans here in London have been the subject of my deliberations before. A building site in Clerkenwell yielded this one today, done by an expert, typographically correct:
Nice face, shame about the ad →
Even with an ugly ad like this, the Nokia typeface carries the brand. I designed this 8 years ago (Monotype turned my sketches into real fonts) and it’s held up pretty well.
June 2009
8 posts
Typomania reloaded →
Under download above you can still see the bad copy of the Typomania video that I did for the BBC almost 25 years ago. Two fellow typomaniacs have taken the sound track from that video and…
Rename Capitaism! →
Students at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the Media and Film department have a project going called “Naming Capitaism”. The whole thing is quite cryptic: the location and…
Airtype →
A Zeppelin NT has been seen above San Francisco Bay, showing tourists the sights from above. The airship is 75m (246ft) long and 17m (64ft) high. The logo Airship Venture is set in ITC Officina…
Why The Economist is thriving →
Magazines and newspapers are suffering, everywhere. Everywhere? Apparently, one of them is doing extremely well: The Economist. Michael Hirschorn argues in this article in The Atlantic that is has…
Webtrend diagram →
The latest diagram showing what Information Architects think are the 333 most influential websites is now available.
I just wish they wouldn’t call it a map, because it isn’t. It is a…
Useless and totally cool →
You can download the Now widget at sprint>
Found, not lost →
This was the first enamel sign for what was to become quite a collection of them. In 1967 we – my then.wife, Joan and myself – saw it somewhere in the South of France, next to the door of…
Four-letter words →
My contribution to the world of spreadsheets is called Axel. It has been writen about quite a bit already, like here, but the naming still seems to need explaining. As the illustration shows,…
May 2009
17 posts
Did you know? →
Lots of answers in this video:
On the cover of the FAZ →
The FAZ, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is Germany’s most prestigious newspaper. Conservative in its politics, progressive (or enlightened?) in its coverage of The Arts. For the Federal Republic’s…
DIN everywhere →
The original DIN-Schrift and, above all, its cool sister, FF Din by Albert-Din Pool, is everywhere these days, not just in Germany, where it is still the official alphabet for roads and…
Berlin, 20 years after →
Christopher Niemann, illustrator who moved from New York City to Berlin a year ago, writes about the Wall, twenty years after it fell, with great illustrations: Abstract City
We’ve always known it: →
German Design →
A programme on Deutsche Welle TV came to film us for an episode about Communication Design. Watch the movie (with English voice-overs) here: dw-world-streamfarm
Not an ampersand →
Ampersands (and-per-se-and) can look like a 3 turned sideways with a t attached: latin et. Univers looks like that, Garamond Italic looks like a real e-t ligature. Some ampersands look more like the…
Alternate a, again →
A German daily paper sets its headlines in FF Unit and uses the alternate cut for another level of hierarchy. It makes for a subtle distinction, and that’s obviously what they wanted.
Typographic half-knowledge →
On the one hand I’m always flattered when I see a big German newspaper (Süddeutsche Zeitung in this case) use one of my typefaces. Especially so, when it happens to bring out one of its good…
That little difference →
Paul Renner’s Futura was sold in France as Europe. The Bauer Foundry cast special sorts for this market: just the lower case a in a shape that evokes Carolingian minuscles.
It is amazing…
Painted type →
This painting shows a part of the Eastside Gallery in Berlin, a stretch of Berlin Wall along the river Spree. The only substantial part of the wall that’s been left standing because it is covered in…
Porcelain on paper →
We made this movie about Hering Berlin’s new brochure and 700-page catalogue:
Porcelain on Paper from erik spiekermann on Vimeo.
Why America is f*cked →
Check this out from Aaron Draplin, if you like type and aren’t afraid of Futura Bold Oblique:
America Is F*cked…….(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.
Spiekerview →
If you can read German, you may enjoy this interview in our local business magazine, Berlin-Maximal :
Stand by me →
One of the greatest songs ever written (by Ben E. King, Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller in 1961), performed by artists around the world:
“Stand by Me” performed by musicians…
New website for Edenspiekermann →
At 18:00 today (that is 6pm for some people), our new website edenspiekermann went live. We expect a few days of fixing bugs like typos, wrong or missing links, etc. before we start…
How we work →
The new website for Edenspiekermann is up. A lot of the projects are fairly mainstream and a lot of the copy sounds rather “corporate” to me. That is the result of having to agree on every sentence…
March 2009
1 post
Proofing press upstairs →
My new Korrex proofing press weighs 460 kilos (approx 600 lbs). Getting it from the street to the workshop on the third floor was an adventure which, unfortunately, remains undocumented. Once…
February 2009
1 post
Word cloud →
Create your own word cloud on www.wordle.net
December 2008
5 posts
Achtung Spiekermann! →
Achtung! is the title of my monthly column in Blueprint magazine that I have been writing since October 2008. That headline has to to with the Brits’ continuing stereotyping of us Germans as…
Mr. Univers →
On May 24th Adrian Frutiger celebrated his 80th birthday. To mark the occasion I wrote a short piece for the Swiss magazine Hochparterre. At the time, this blog was not very active and I…
Colour of the Year →
I have never used many colours, apart from the basic typographic black and red. Twenty years ago, however, Alex Branczyk and myself designed the logo etc for FontShop. We thought light and dark…
WordPress →
As even the occasional visitor to these pages will notice, I have switched to WordPress. We use that programme at SpiekermannPartners, so I could enlist the help of Marcus Scheller who imported most…
Dieter Rams →
The exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London is titled Cold War Modern, the »first exhibition that examines the international development in modern art, design, architecture and film in…
August 2008
7 posts
Athos Bulcão (acabou de morrer...) →
bem legal, com conselhos práticos para designers →
July 2008
72 posts
