I’ve been involved with TCHO, chocolate makers in San Francisco, as a designer and an investor, for a few years now. Susanna Dulkinys, my wife and business partner, has won several prizes for her work on the TCHO brand and packaging. We have been interviewed about the design aspects, shown the project at conferences and talked to other clients about it. The story of how this amazing chocolate is actually made and why it’s different from other chocolates is told in a feature in WIRED magazine’s UK edition. As it happens, Louis Rossetto, CEO of TCHO, was co-founder of WIRED way back in the early 90s.
For better reading enjoyment, here is a pdf of the article to download:
 Wired_022010_Tcho

Next week I have to fly to China, and I’m already dreading the 12 hours or more on the plane. I can only hope that this man won’t sit next to me. He was photographed by a Stewardess aboard a flight in the US. These days, we’re charged for every kilogram (or pounds or ounce) of extra luggage. Sometimes I long for the days at the beginning of air-travel when every passenger – including women – would be weighed. The pilot had to know the exact weight of the plane in order to guarantee lift-off. Even with my post-christmassy 164 pounds I would qualify for a bonus compared to some folks...

As this meme has come up a lot recently in connection with the hadopi story about a French governmemt agency using a stolen font for its logo and with Microsoft’s admission of a major security issue, it might be useful to explain where it came from. This video does so.

Priori Acute is the latest addition to the Priori family. It is the result of a series of experiments into three-dimensional letter form design inspired by 19th Century display and artistic printing types.

A recent surprise on my screen. With Mac Os 10.6.2. Nice colors but really no way to use it.

Taken from the book - Studio Culture: the Secret Life of the Graphic Design Studio. This is a shortened version of an interview with Erik Spiekermann. During the 1970s Spiekermann worked as a freelance designer in London before returning to Berlin in 1979 where, with two partners, he founded MetaDesign. In 2001 he left MetaDesign and started UDN (United Designers Network), with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco. Since January 2009 he has been a director of Edenspiekermann, which employs over 100 people and has offices in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Unusually among contemporary designers, Spiekermann has a sophisticated set of theories relating to the layout, structure and management of design studios. His theories have been extensively road-tested in the various creative enterprises he has founded and run during a long career.

The interview was conducted in the offices of AIG, London.

Adrian Shaughnessy: You have a vision of your perfect studio. You've even got a name for it - The ‘Rundbuero' Studio (see diagram). Can you describe it?
Erik Spiekermann: Ideally it's a round space. It's made up of three or four concentric circles. At the centre is a reception area. This is where everybody enters. It is linked to the rest of the studio by a corridor. In the central reception area are the people who answer the telephones, do the emails and make the photocopies. It's where all the machinery is - the printers, the espresso machine. Everybody has to go in here several times a day to pick up printouts, pick up mail, get coffee and so on. Now, the further you go from the centre the quieter it gets. People in the outer rings have windows, others don't. The walls are maybe only shoulder height. If a secretary wants to see if I'm in the outer ring, she can get up and look across and see if I'm actually there.

So the walls don't go all the way up to the ceiling?
Not at all. You can shout across the studio. The people in the third or outer ring are the ones who need privacy. These guys spend time on the phones, and do conceptual work. People like me, in fact. All we have is a desk and a laptop - this is laptop country. In the second ring, there are proper computers with monitors. This is where the designers are; they actually spend all day working on screens. These people do physical work. There might be another ring, where people have cutting tables and boards. These are people who have to make shit.

OK, so looking at your diagram, I see four rings joined by a corridor.
Yes, in order to get anywhere you have to cross through the various rings. Every time you do anything, you have to meet other people. So, unless you never go for a pee or a coffee, you have to meet other people at least twice a day.

Clearly you think this traffic and human interchange is important to the life of a studio?
Yes. Something happened to me once that taught me an important lesson. I was with one of my ex-partners at Meta. We had an in-house restaurant run by a proper chef. There were 120 of us, but we could only make about 50 lunches, no more. Some of our people would choose not to eat there, but our clients would come every lunchtime. I was freelancing at the time and I often dropped by at 12.30pm for lunch. I was standing with five or six people and I said hello to one of them. My former partner was there and actually asked me to introduce this person to him. I said this is so and so from Siemens. But there was another person there and he held out his hand and said ‘I'm Michael, I've been working here for two years.' My partner didn't know him. With 120 people, that's a bit embarrassing.

To me, the only way to run a studio is to have perfect knowledge about the people and the work. The idea that you can ignore areas and not get involved is unthinkable. Do you agree?
I would come in at 8.30am and spend the first three hours just walking around the place, and once a day I talked to everybody. Sometimes only just to say hello. I usually knew their names or their sisters or dogs and various members of their family. But in the end, this old-fashioned ‘managing-by-walkabout' wasn't popular with my partners. It led to questions such as ‘why isn't he at his desk?'

Today, I've got 30+ people in Berlin, but even when I had 100+ I could present any project within half an hour's notice. I knew enough about it. I was involved in the brief. I was at the meetings. People would come to me with questions, often with just a choice of type or whatever, but I always knew enough to do all the presentations. I find that incredibly important, otherwise you're a manager and not a designer. I'm not a very good designer or manager, I'm ‘medium' at both. But I'm a good motivator. Designers want to talk shop; they want to talk about design, even to an old git like me. My philosophy is that I want the physical space to inhale the traffic. I don't want anyone slipping out unnoticed.

I want people to know that if they are slackers, or go to the toilet too many times, or take 50 smoking breaks, there is some social control. That's not fascism, that's simply... good management. Whenever I design a space these days, it's the traffic that's important. Circulation for any architect is a big issue. The blood supply has to go in and out. It's very simple but I know so many studios that have no interaction at all.

I was always told that Germany didn't have design studios in the British or American sense, and that most of the commercial work was done by advertising agencies. Is there such a thing as a model for the German design studio?
I hate to say this, but I think I invented it. I started in 1979 while I was working at Wolff Olins in London. We had a few German clients, and I went back and forth to look after them. One day they gave me a project because they just couldn't handle it. Production at British companies was weak, compared to what was the standard in Germany at the time. Michael [Wolff] knew this, and Wally [Olins] knew this, and so they handed me this project and this is how I started MetaDesign, while commuting between London and Berlin every two weeks. This was 1979, early 1980s even, when the largest German design studio was about six or seven people. It was usually a boss - a famous guy - with a couple of assistants, usually fresh out of school. And more often than not, German designers were also teachers, so they had a regular income to fund their studio. The rest of the people in the studio would be students, usually unpaid.

Was this the model for Otl Aicher's famous studio?
His studio became famous for the Olympics in 1972, but the work started in 1969. All the people he employed were from this school in Ulm. Literally, his entire class. I'm not saying they didn't get paid, but it was a group of kids in their early 20s. For a long time, this was the German model - one guy with a few assistants. The studio layout would echo that. The main guy would be in a corner of his own office, and then there would be the studio floor, but never more than six people. In 1983 or 84 I had eight people, including interns and we were the biggest studio in the country - outside of packaging and advertising. So corporate design was done by advertising agencies and packaging designers. They were the ones who always put the stripes on the packaging, you have this brand and then you make it like this [makes diagonal motion with hands], with lots of stripes for the ‘light' version. Then you have the specialized people and they tend to be in Hamburg for some reason. All the newspaper and magazine work, until today, was pretty much done in-house.

So you moved back to Berlin with the aim of starting your own studio?
At the time - the late 1970s - Wolff Olins was 75 people. I thought if they can do it in Britain, surely we could do it in Germany? 
So I came back to Berlin with the intention to build a large studio. It went up to about 16 or 18 people in the middle of the 1980s, which was quite large, and we started getting the projects that we should have been getting before. We got some large signage projects and some large corporate design projects. But the whole market in Germany was one generation behind Britain, which was one generation behind the States. And then in 1989 I realized this was getting too big for myself or too small for the big markets, so I realized I had to do something else because I'm not a businessman. I decided to bring in a businessperson.

Is there a magic number for studio size?
You can have 125 people, but the work never gets done by more then five people. The teams are never bigger than that. It's all about group dynamics. More then seven people and you don't increase efficiency or effectiveness, you just have more meetings. If you have 12 people, you don't work twice as much as six people, you work 50% more, so in other words you lose money. Seven people round the table, six people plus a project manager, maybe seven plus an intern. We know this from perceptive psychology - the magic number seven - and there's a good reason for that.

Can you talk about recruitment - how do you go about hiring people?
Until the mid-1990s there were no employed designers in German design. The advertising people employed designers but the designers in the design studios were all freelancers. People wouldn't want to be employed. I had a really hard time finding people. The German scene was very much what the Americans call a ‘Mom and Pop shop' - Pop did the work, Mom did invoices. This has perpetuated the idea of a strong studio being one fellow and a couple of assistants until well into the mid-1990s. And if you talk to German designers - designers in their 30s, 40s or 50s - I'm afraid many of them worked with me at one time or another. Every year we do a sort of MetaDesign anniversary, a picnic in the park, and we had up to 300 people. I trained about 600 people in the years I was there. We looked at the personnel files once, and there were always two or three interns, so that would be 20 interns a year over five years. That's already 100 people; over ten years that's 200 people. And if you count those, and if you count all the employees, that's well over 600 people who I've personally employed at one time.

A second part of this interview will be released in this section next Wednesday 13th of January.

The full version of this interview can be found in the book Studio Culture: the Secret Life of the Graphic Design Studio, edited by Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy, published by Unit Editions. The book is available to AGDA members at www.uniteditions.com

Cela faisait longtemps que nous attendions cela, c’est chose faite: Xavier Dupré a lançé son site web en ce début d’année 2010. Sachant que depuis longtemps, ce créateur de caractères typographiques français proposait régulièrement des créations d’excellente qualité, comme cette famille récente publié chez FontFont en automne 2009, le FF Masala et FF Masala Script.

Cela faisait longtemps que nous attendions cela, c’est chose faite: Xavier Dupré a lançé son site web en ce début d’année 2010. Sachant que depuis longtemps, ce créateur de caractères typographiques français proposait régulièrement des créations d’excellente qualité, comme cette famille récente publié chez FontFont en automne 2009, le FF Masala et FF Masala Script.

We've blogged about Project Never before, but we're pleased to announce that (in addition to loving the project) Veer is now an official sponsor. Project Never is a free awards competition for graphic designers that honors the most creative design concept that never reached production. If you pitched a brilliant but poorly received concept between January 1, 2009 and February 19, 2010, you're eligible to enter. The winner will receive almost $2,000 in prizes and subscriptions, including 1,500 Veer Marketplace credits, plus a little slice of creative redemption.

Les visiteurs seront amenés à s’interroger sur la frontière entre la lettre en tant qu’outil de lecture et la lettre en tant que dessin, forme purement esthétique.

Venez découvrir le résultat des recherches typographiques et le travail de graphistes, créateurs et artistes contemporains au

Vernissage le mardi 12 janvier de 18 h à 20 h, au CENTQUATRE, 5 rue Crucial, 75019 Paris

Al Gore requests numeral change.

Tag team tames pixels.

Friends and fans of the Jim Rimmer, who passed away last week, share their stories.

Jim Rimmer – a multi-talented type designer, graphic artist, bookbinder, printer, letterer, technician, and a most generous teacher – passed away early January 8, 2010.

The previous post showed that blogging from a phone still leaves a lot to be desired. But I still want to make the point that technology shapes design. In this case it created a Clarendon (ca. 15mm tall) that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Similar effects can be seen with type that was produced for other methods of reproduction, from transfer type à la Letraset to wood type made for small presses that printed labels and signs for shops.

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.

This naïve rendering of Clarendon is a good example for how the material makes the shapes.
Also an example for blogging from the iPhone, including what little photo editing there is.

I’ve had a new platen press (the previous one burnt down in 1977) and a Korrex proofing press for a while now (see Proofing press upstairs). There is also quite a bit of type and everything else I need to start work; but I still haven’t printed anything. Meanwhile, as reminder and inspiration, here is a lovely video from the US showing business cards being printed on a platen press.

Keegan Meegan Press & Bindery from :::: MAGNETIC ARCHIVES :::: kiva on Vimeo.

L’agence anglaise okdeluxe à l’origine du logo de la conférence Copenhagen 2009 expérimente typographiquement sur l’iphone avec la fonction d’accéléromètre intégré. L’utilisation potentielle est assez limitée mais le propos est intéressant.

ORTHO-TYPE on iPhone