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The stuff always had a more humane quality than a lot of other furniture-especially German-engineered furniture. It doesn’t look like it comes from a factory. And I’ve always liked Herman Miller furniture. “Meta was made by hand and has that human touch. We met at the newly opened Design Museum, where I asked him if he considered the marriage between FF Meta and Herman Miller to be a successful union: “I think it’s very appropriate,” he said.
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I caught up with him on one of his visits to London-you can add “peripatetic” to the many adjectives that apply to him he flits between homes in Berlin, San Francisco, and London. He is witty, argumentative, and bursting with opinions on most subjects. Now in his seventies, he exudes the physical energy and intellectual vim of someone half his age. A big chunky book on Spiekermann’s life and work, Hello, I am Erik, was published in 2014. His writings (and tweets) on design and typography and his numerous show-stopping design conference appearances have made him known to nearly everyone working in design. He is one of a handful of designers widely known to both the design and business communities, and his impressive list of clients includes Berlin Transit, Düsseldorf Airport, Bosch, Volkswagen, The Economist, and Nokia. The open apertures of FF Meta’s letterforms, one of the font’s defining qualities, makes it suitable for both print and electronic applications.īut can we discern something about Herman Miller’s molecular structure in FF Meta? Who better to ask than Spiekermann himself?Ī luminous presence in the world of graphic design and typography, Spiekermann combines a love for traditional printing techniques (he runs a hand press in Berlin), with a deep understanding of digital design technology (until recently he was chairman of digital agency EdenSpiekermann). In the 1990s, electronic communication fast became as important as printed communications, and a new typographic syntax that worked on screens as well as the printed page was required. In fact, Spiekermann is on record as describing it as the "complete antithesis of Helvetica." Yet just as Helvetica defined its era (roughly speaking, the late 1950s to mid-60s), FF Meta also defined its own. There’s an irony here: Frykholm dumped Helvetica for a typeface that came to be known in typographic circles-thanks to its intense popularity at the beginning of the digital era-as the “Helvetica of the 90s.” Now, FF Meta looks nothing like Helvetica. I’ll admit it was a rather subjective choice.” It was computer-friendly, and I also liked Erik. Prior to FF Meta’s adoption, Helvetica had been the firm’s principal font, but after three decades of the Swiss typeface, Frykholm proposed a change: “We explored serif, sans serif, and script fonts,” he says, “but in the end we settled on Erik’s Meta. It was designed in the previous decade by Erik Spiekermann, and introduced by Herman Miller’s then-Vice President of Creative Design, Steve Frykholm.
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You’re reading it right now, come to think of it. Does it exhibit the Herman Miller persona? The company has used the typeface as its corporate font since the late 1990s. Handwriting – among other techniques – cannot.Companies use typefaces to embody their personalities-or as marketing departments are wont to say, their “brand values.” It is often noted that pet owners come to resemble their pets, but can it ever be claimed that a typeface resembles an organisation? Surely it’s asking too much of 26 letterforms and a few punctuation marks to embody a corporate entity? Glyphs: The symbols in a typeface that represent characters like A, ! or 5.Type: Printed or digitally reproduced glyphs.Typesetting: The act of arranging physical or digital type.Typography: The art and technique of arranging physical or digital type.Rule of thumb: If your submission is about Comic Sans MS misuse, bad keming or a funny typo, it’s likely better not to post it.ĭo not use URL shorteners. Only exception: It’s educational and non-obvious. No memes, image macros and similar submissions.No lettering, calligraphy, handwriting, graffiti, illustrations.