Erik Spiekermann knows more than a thing or two about typography. As an internationally leading type designer, typographer, and author, his list of career accomplishments and experiences might even rival the length of a grocery list for a family of twenty.
In his decades-long career working with the art and craft of typography, Spiekermann — whose unmistakable voice narrates our new animated short, “On Type” — has created countless fonts that are now considered classics, including FF Meta Serif, FF Info, Nokia Sans, and ITC Officina. If you’ve ever hopped aboard or caught sight of the Deutsche Bahn, you’ve also witnessed Spiekermann’s prevalent type and wayfinding work in the real world. He’s also developed custom typefaces for brands like The Economist, Audi and Mozilla, on top of running the experimental letterpress workshop and gallery p98a in Berlin. The founder of several companies over the years, Spiekermann is also a supervising board member of the global design consultancy Edenspiekermann, and the author of several books on type, including Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works (Adobe Press, 2013).
Like all of us, Spiekermann was once a novice himself, which is why he remains invested in engaging with the next generation of creatives. Here, we speak with the design luminary about the ins and outs of typography.
Why is typography important?
Type is very much in our minds and in our brains. We've been trained by the time we can read. Whether or not you’re a designer, we all have a lot of knowledge about type that we don't know about. In other words, we have prejudice. And as a designer, one of the things you have to do is overcome the prejudice to make a surprise. Sometimes doing the opposite of what's expected will be a very noticeable message; or sometimes it can be a new face and not work. That's where we, as designers, come in with our training and our feelings, knowing what works and sometimes not using it, and going a little sideways, or maybe going very sideways to surprise people. But that is a craft you have to pick up and learn.
The number of typeface choices can be overwhelming. Is there such a thing as a “bad” typeface?
There are very, very few bad typefaces. Anybody who makes fonts professionally is of a high technical standard — the letters fit together, they work together. They are kerned as well as the designer wanted them. And they certainly work technically.
A seasoned type designer and typographer, Spiekermann works with both digital and metal type, and often begins his work by drawing on paper.
Typography and graphic design are so tied to technology and culture. How has our understanding and use of type has changed over time?
If you go back to the beginning, as it were — to the days of people writing by hand with a quill, or some sort of instrument that has an edge to it, even a pencil or fountain pen — you realize that what we do read, more than the actual shape, is the rhythm and the contrast. And that is the sort of contrast that we still read. If you look at a classical typeface, say Bodoni, the downstrokes are thicker than the cross strokes or the upstrokes. The problem now is, of course, that we're not writing by hand anymore. As it were, keyboards and typing fonts are now designed to look more mechanical. Maybe in a generation or so, we will have lost that implicit knowledge of what writing looks like.
The designs of the Deutsche Bahn identity (left) and The Economist (right) are just two examples of Spiekermann's many typographic works.
How do you determine what type to use for a given project?
More often than not, we either know the exact audience or we want to know the exact audience. Breakfast cereal has a different audience from machine grease, and the machine grease people will have different sensitivities. So if you know your audience, you already know that you have to manipulate the prejudice.Certain things have to be mechanical and precise.
Certain things have to be pretty. As designers, we know if we do know our audience then it's good, because then we can use some of the language we expect that they know and maybe push it a little bit, so it's a little bit unusual. You want to be different from the previous messages, but it's always that balance — if you overpush it, people will ignore it. It'll be alien. They won't like it.
“Sometimes having too much knowledge is really painful. It gets in the way of being spontaneous.”
Are there any hard and fast rules to working with type?
Sometimes having too much knowledge is really painful. It gets in the way of being spontaneous. You think, “Oh, I shouldn't be doing this because I know it's not really done.” It's the rules that we might talk about later. So it's good to know stuff because then you can forget it. If you don't know anything, you don't know what you're forgetting. Most of us have been trained without knowing it, just by reading all our lives. I mean, we learn to read when we're what, five or six? We're surrounded by messages, and whether they be on screen or paper, it's irrelevant. We see words all the time.
As someone who does both, how would you describe the difference between using typefaces and designing them?
Designing type is obviously a little more complicated than using it. It's like driving a car and building one. You can get your driver's license pretty quickly because it's pretty straightforward, and these days it's pretty much automatic for you. If you look at a word or a typeface and you know nothing about it, it's probably the best thing because you have an emotional reaction.
A peek inside p98a, Spiekermann’s experimental letterpress workshop and gallery in Berlin.
Any advice for folks who are just getting started with typography?
Look at some stuff, wherever it is, and make yourself a mood board of designs that you've always liked and then look at it and think, “I like this because it's black. I like this because it's comfortable. I like this because it's technical.” That's your little world, and it would probably not be more than a dozen or so different typefaces — and that's a great start because quite frankly, on any job, you never need more than one or two.
Go and pick a few typefaces you're comfortable with and that you like. Then learn about them. You’ll realize that this particular one has 12 weights. Well, what about using the very thin one and using the very thick one with it, to get some contrast? That already tells a story. Start small, and expand over time.
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