My year in type—2009
Now that 2010 has begun, I can’t help but reminisce about the past 12 months. 2009 was good, personally and professionally; can I measure its this? Was 2009 awesome, or am I just trying to convince myself of something? How does it all stack up to 2008?
#1: Bedrooms and traveling
- 2008: Nine months in Reading, then three months working at Linotype in Bad Homburg. During these three months, I began commuting between Offenbach (near Bad Homburg) and Berlin.
- 2009: 12 Months of working at Linotype, including 10 months commuting between Offenbach and Berlin, with stops in Darmstadt, too—where I taught from March–July and October–December. Since November, living full-time in Berlin, with one trip per week to Bad Homburg and Darmstadt.
- Winner: 2009. The MATD program kicked ass, but living in Berlin trumps living in Reading. Although, I spent more total hours in Reading during 2008 than I spent in Berlin during 2009.
#2: Letter drawing
- 2008: About eight months of full-time typeface design (including ca. seven months of this at Reading).
- 2009: Just three months of close-to-full-time typeface design, scattered on various projects throughout the year.
- Winner: Well, it should be 2008. But 2009’s projects were interesting…
Malabar claims German Design Prize Gold
This year’s German Design Prize jury has selected my Malabar typeface as one of ten works from across the nation to received the coveted design prize of the Federal Republic of Germany in gold.
In June, the German Federal Ministry of Economic and Technology nominated my Malabar typeface for the 2010 German Design Prize. The design prize of the Federal Republic of Germany is the country’s highest distinction in the field of design. No other design award sets such strict criteria on entries. A company can only enter the competition of its product has already been recognized in another national or international competition. Over 1,200 items were nominated for the 2010 judging.
Earlier today, the German Design Council published the 45 winners for 2010 at designpreis.de. I am very pleased to announce that Malabar is one of ten works awarded with a gold prize.
How are the competitions results? In the product design category, five works received gold, and 18 others silver. In the communication design category, five more works received gold, with 17 silver awards. Although other typefaces were nominated, Malabar is the only typeface design among this year’s winners. Congratulations to this year’s other prize recipients, as well as all of the 1,200+ design pieces that were nominated!
Side Notes
Over at Thomas Kunz’s blog, ABCdarium, is an interview with Gerard Unger. Thomas regularly interviews typeface designers for his site, and the post are always interesting. He even interviewed me several months ago. But to date, I think that the interview with Gerard is probably the shortest of all Thomas’s interviews. In fact, it may be the shortest Gerard Unger interview yet published. Still, it is worth a read! The text is in German.
Over at the ShoType English-language blog is an article about an MATD alumna’s visit to Japan. Nice little summary of non-Latin typeface design at Reading, from an outsider’s point of view.
Ivo Gabrowitsch and Christoph Koeberlin, both of FSI FontShop International in Berlin, simultaneously published “best fonts of 2009″ lists on their respective blogs this morning. The text on both sites is in German, but type samples are for everyone! Each list is fabulous in its own right, but since I read Ivo’s list first, he gets the primary link. A great summary, Ivo gives a sort of “Top 10,” or at least I like to think about it that way, since it would mean that fellow MATD-alum Michael Hochleitner’s Ingeborg is the best font of the year! Christoph’s list, however, really is most excellent. And that isn’t because it has 12 items instead of 10, or because my Malabar is on it. Simply put, Christoph’s list is just so much closer to my own typographic taste! It’s got Libelle, and Gerrit Noordzij’s Burgundica, which is simply the most divine among the many new blackletters. Nara—from Typotheque—is there, too. Finally, the way that Christoph shows off the type in the graphics on his site is really good. I mean, it is a kind of my-awful-looking-website-is-crying-with-bitter-envy good. Great job, Christoph! And Ivo, too.
A year ago, on October 17, 2009, I posted my personal recipe for happiness. On Saturday, I am finally moving to Berlin. So how is my post-MATD Reading master plan coming along?
DB Mobility BahnCard 100iPhone 3G 8GBMove to Berlin- Get a dog
- Achieve personal bliss
What a difference a year makes! I’m already on my second DB Mobility BahnCard 100. As you can see, I have yet to achieve personal bliss. But I’m working on it. I’ve penciled in my potential dog-getting date for sometime in February or March 2010.
Back in 2001–2002, while I was finishing up my BFA at RISD, I spent a semester abroad at the Fachhochschule Wiesbaden, a large-ish University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, Germany. The German-language blog Design Tagebuch (design diary) reports that this university has gotten a new name: the institution is now going to be know as the Hochschule RheinMain. Total bullocks! While I think that the new school logo is an improvement (the old logo looked like the US state of Texas with a hat on it), I find the name “Hochschule RheinMain” rather pompous.
In Germany’s Rhein–Main region, there are already several Hochschulen (universities). If we limit the number to only include state-run schools, we will find two in Mainz and several in Frankfurt, as well as the state of Hessen’s official art academy in Offenbach. And three more to be found in Darmstadt! Many of these universities have larger student bodies than the old Fachhochschule Wiesbaden did. Plus, while Wiesbaden may be the official political capital of the state of Hessen, the center of the Rhein–Main region—as well as the cultural and financial hub of the area—is Frankfurt. So if any Hochschule in the Rhein–Main area should rename itself the “Hochschule RheinMain,” perhaps it should have been the FH Frankfurt, and not the FH Wiesbaden.
Back in 2004, the annual ATypI conference was hosted in Prague. The local Museum of Decorative Arts was hosting a show at the same time: E-A-T, a selection of contemporary Czech and Slovak type design. Several tremendous designs caught my eye, and I wrote up a review of the exhibition for Typotheque. I always remembered one specific design in the back of my mind, too…
Adriq, the first PostScript typeface produced in Czechoslovakia, was designed at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design by Andrej Krátky in 1988. Drawing severe, narrow calligraphic letterforms that all sport an almost wedge-shaped serif style, Krátky developed this dynamic, constructed type family. In addition to the Roman, Adriq has both a Kursive style (an upright italic), as well as an Italic.
Typotheque has just announced that Adriq has finally been completed and released under the name Nara. Nikola Djurek and Peter Bilak are credited on the site as having helped finish everything up. Fantastic work!
Dez Squeeze is a Heavyweight Display with knockout punch and Resonant Voice. Dezcom Typefaces is happy to announce the release of its first commercial typeface and plans several more releases in the near future. Dez Squeeze Fat is a full-figured display face. It is generous enough in weight and width to make you a knockout! Heads will turn from ho-hum to hard-hitting with this face. Don’t apologize for your size-the ample look will speak volumes to your audience. When you don’t want to speak softly, Squeeze can shout above the crowd. Say it loudly and proudly, this face does not have a weight problem. The Dez Squeeze Family was developed as a clean OpenType display face with a super-bold weight. Dez Squeeze has 483 glyphs with uppercase, lowercase, proportional lining figures, unicase, stylistic sets, alternates, ordinals, and case specific punctuation. It has a full range of diacritics and covers all European languages using the Latin script.
Over on Facebook, I just read about the co-release by Fountain and PSY/OPS of Catacumba. Aside from the typeface itself, which offeres really sweet variety, I particularly like the tagline at the bottom of the description text blurb in the Facebook posting, “designed by Rui Abreu and mastered by PSY/OPS.” I think that every foundry should start writing copy like that… especially foundries that wonder why designers think that there is no benefit from licensing their fonts to one of the couple of the big font houses.
So, how ’bout Gudrun Zapf von Hesse? She was one of the first female typeface designers, and I think that she is still up there among the best of any living practitioners. Her excellent mid-century Diotima just got an update. Check it out!
If you are looking for something to do for an hour and 37 minutes this weekend, check out a lecture that Process Type Foundry gave at the Walker Art Center this past week. Eric Olson and Nicole Dotin are clearly visible there, live and in color. Here’s the YouTube link. You can also find the talk in iTunes U.
