










FontFont 12 Release Notes, November 1994


FontFont 12: 
FF Alessio
FF Autotrace
FF Bodoni Classic 2
FF Craft
FF Dirty Faces 2
FF Dot Matrix
FF Fontesque
FF Instanter
FF Irregular
FF Klunder Script
FF Quill
FF Tag Team 1


FF 8497 FF Alessio by Alessio Leonardi
(FF Mulinex, FF Cavolfiore, FF Coltello, FF Forchetta, FF Coltello Figures, FF Forchetta Figures)

Given: I am an Italian and to some extent a designer. The black sheep of the family. Actually, I should have become a lawyer like my uncle Mario. And if that wasnt bad enough, I came to Germany  an emigrant. Understandably therefore, my family doesnt want anything more to do with me. So, luckily I was given work, first at MetaDesign and then at xplicit in Frankfurt. I earn enough during the day to live on and at night design new typefaces for FontShop International.

The typefaces in the package FF Alessio are the fruit of rich dreams, born from a life lacking sleep and food. Perhaps I should say nightmares when I look at the results. The names of the faces remind you of kitchen utensils and electric household appliances that dont work, knives that are blunt and overcooked cauliflower needing salt. You can imagine that I would have rather drawn Helvetica or become a pizza baker Too late. FF Alessio follows one year after FF Priska, Priska, my love, whose life I have made difficult  now shame and scandal should be my fate



















FF 8498 FF Autotrace by Neville Brody
(One, Five, Nine, Double, Outline)

Is there anything left to say about Neville Brody which you havent heard before? Of course! His second book The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 2 has appeared. As the title suggests, this is a continuation of the first work. Brody demonstrates in words and images how his second phase of productivity, which is heavily influenced by the use of the computer, so markedly differs from his first, classic phase. In an interview for this second books release with the Hamburg design magazine PAGE, he revealed the fact that he sees the typographical experimentation for FontShop Internationals interactive magazine FUSE as his most important phase of productivity to date.

FF Autotrace, appearing after FF Blur, is the second Brody typyeface to be named after a digital alienation effect. The term autotrace is a program function which automatically traces the bitmaps of a scanned image to produce contours. Through this process irregularities in the contours become over exaggerated as the resolution of the bitmaps are increased. This disturbed effect is the aesthetic basis for FF Autotrace. Just as with his best seller FF Blur, Brody here gives the generic computer term to the face to show that he understands this face to be the first, the only and the last of its kind, ie. the definitive face to represent this digital effect.















FF 8499 FF Bodoni Classic 2 by Gert Wiescher
(Chancery, Shadow Initials, Flora Initials, English Initials, Bambus Initials)

As any graphic designer, I was at some point confronted with the question: Should I specialise or not? I couldnt imagine only ever designing soup cans; therefore, I went for diversity. Today I design everything, including typefaces  surprisingly, more and more faces. Does that mean that in the end I have specialised?

The idea to design a Bodoni Classic came from a publication from the French publisher Jacques Damase. The French write Jean Baptiste Bodoni, while the Italians speak of Giambattista Bodoni. Therefore, in the title of his book Jacques Damase had to change the G to a J, and it is at this very point that he made his mistake. He placed a new, angular J next to Bodonis original letters which are characterised by their rounded serifs. 

As I notice this flaw, I decided to immediately begin work to help Bodonis details regain recognition. The idea of a Bodoni Classic with rounded serifs instead of the angular, more fashionable ones was born. This discovery took place one Autumn afternoon in 1990 in Paris, in the bookshop of the Pompidou Centre. Since then my five man office in Munich has worked almost without interruption on more and more weights from the old master. It appears to be an endless task since Giambattista was an unbelievably productive man. In FF Bodoni Classic 2 you will find his most beautiful ornamental typefaces and initials collected; these of course fit best to the core group of typefaces found in FF Bodoni Classic 1.

We do, however, design a few other things in Munich besides fonts, for example: yogurt and CD packaging, magazines and pork belly advertisements. I am also writing a new book on design and drafting a crazy cookbook. Oh yeah, Ive also begun work on FF Bodoni Classic 3.
















FF 8500 FF Craft by Peter Bilak
(Regular, Reversed, Black, Black Reversed)

This is my story: My name is Peter Bilak, I am 21 years old and live in Kosice, Slovakia. FF Craft is my first digitised type family. The first version of Craft originated in the summer 1992. It is inspired by medieval woodcuts; however, the final version is supposed to have a fresh, modern look. I provide the user with ten different word spaces as a part of my typeface to create the natural rhythm inherit in woodcuts. (Note: Users with a European keyboard will find these word spaces under the combinations: Option <, Opt >, Opt m, Opt d, Opt w, Opt P, Opt p, Opt b, Opt space bar and space bar. With an American keyboard it is exactly the same except instead of Opt < and Opt >, Opt , and Opt . should be used). How was FF Craft created? I drew and then cut all of the 185 characters, scanned them and then digitised them using Fontographer.















FF 8502 FF Dot Matrix by Cornel Windlin and Stephan Mller
(FF Automation Grid, FF Dot Matrix One Regular, FF Dot Matrix Two Regular, FF Dot Matrix Two Narrow, FF Dot Matrix Two Extended)

After five years of living in London, working with Neville Brody and The Face magazine, among others, Cornel Windlin set up his own studio in Zurich in 1993. He produces work for anybody having the right attitude and willing to pay the proper fees  mostly selling art and culture to the masses. He is currently working on a remix of his first FUSE font F Moonbase Alpha (FUSE N 3) which has become a typographical anthem of Techno culture. He also recently started his own club, Reefer Madness, in a desperate bid to boost Zurichs nightlife.

Stephan Mller, Swiss just like Cornel, worked in Germany and Switzerland before completing his studies at the Schule fr Gestaltung in Luzern. He is presently working on an actively randomizing PostScript font which will  fingers crossed  effectively imitate handwriting.

Cornel Windlin and Stephan Mller have decided to join forces under the name of lineto, a loose collective with the purpose of future collaborations on a number of typefaces designs. Expect more exquisite techno trash from the toner junkies!

FF Dot Matrix:
While some are busy with the quest for the perfect typeface, we are quite happy to wallow in the nether lands of typographical perversity. FF Dot Matrix, originally designed in 1991, is a direct result of this fascination with the shortcomings of technologys promise of purity and perfection and their impact on typography and type design. Welcome to the age of junk! FF Dot Matrix takes you on a journey through the everyday banality of the techno dream world: state of the art typography, available at your TESCO check-out till, ready made by your bus ticket vending machine, flashed at you in a seedy travel agents office, screaming at you by an out-of-date needle printer.  Point of sale, last few days, waste no time  everything must go!  Blinded by science, gagged by the media  now strike back at the empire!















FF 8503 FF Fontesque by Nick Shinn
(Roman, Italic, Bold, Ornaments, Ornaments Black, Ornaments Fine)

Educated in Fine Arts, Nick Shinn (b. 1952) entered the advertising business in 1976 as an assembly artist, subsequently becoming an art director and creative director. Following  the advent of desktop publishing, he established a design studio in 1989, pursuing a hands-on approach to design, illustration and typography in a mix of software. A generalist, the direction of his work stems from the typographic tradition.

A good casual setting of type has a distinctive quality all its own, quite unlike handlettering. But its a lot of work. Letter by letter one has to improvise with baseline shift, size, rotation and kerning. Fontesque solves the problem. It sets casual right off the keyboard, yet with proper typographic color, even at text sizes. FF Fontesque is found in the styles regular and bold roman, along with a true italic in the regular weight. Also a full set of ornaments (comprised mostly of unevenly stroked, smoothly curved asymmetric shapes) in three weights, making it possible to apply a consistent look to most graphic aspects of a design.

















FF 8504 FF Instanter by Frank Heine
(Light, Bold)

FF Instanter has been developed by the young designer from Stuttgart, Frank Heine (b. 1964). This is the second typeface to appear under the FontFont label, the first being FF Chelsea. Heine studied at the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart, where in June 1994 he founded his own design studio (U. O. R. G.). He has designed 13 typeface families (28 weights) in the last two years, a few of which are being distributed internationally. FF Stourley, planned for release in the Spring of 1995, will be the next of Heines faces to be added to the FontFont collection.

FF Instanters form was inspired by the grotesque faces of the 1920s, most directly by Erbar from Jakob Erbar. These origins are most apparent in the capital letters (A, C, N). Heines goal was to develop a dynamic grotesque face. And although there is a touch of functionalism, the face he created has nonetheless a very definite and lively character of its own which is brought out by strokes that are very similar to handwriting (m, n, r) and are arranged asymmetrically (v, w, y).

Advantages of FF Instanter: it is extremely legible even in very small point sizes. It offers an alternative to other well known (but often over used) grotesque faces, for headlines as well as text. Furthermore, the face is appropriate for use in corporate identity materials (letter head for example) since its poignant character can easily be illuminated in a small amount of text. It is unique in that it has medieval as well as lining figures.








FF 8505 FF Irregular by Markus Hanzer
(Light, Italic, Bold, Black, Caps, Inline)

I studied at the College of Applied Arts in Vienna, graduating in 1979 with a teaching certificate in Art. Since then I have worked as a freelance designer, photographer and illustrator. In 1980 I began to produce computer graphics at Austrian Public Television. In the years following I supplied special effects and computer graphics to video companies for advertising spots, music videos and even scientific documentations. From 1987 to 1991, as art director for SAT.1 (television station), I have re-vamped the entire corporate design and completed the video graphics for all the various programs. Since December 1991 I have been the creative and administrative director of ORF-Grafik (radio broadcasting station). Over the past three years together with Neville Brody we have devoloped a completely new corporate identity for ORF.

With a passionate interest in all forms of communication design (from printed matter, books to interactive, multi-media projects) I have always been involved in type. This involvement has intensified and in the last two years I have designed 16 typefaces. 

The traditional problem of computer graphics has been its sterility. The aim has been to re-create the dirtiness, coincidentalness, naturalness and complexity of the handcrafted. Increasingly apparent is the fact that computers are not only orientented for creating perfect order, but also for a sort of disorder that fits to certain chaotic environments. 

FF Irregular is the attempt to allow a face to be created by accident. It comes about from a series of attempts to electronically change and re-work drawings. When the degree of alienation is at its most extreme, that is actually the point of departure. The computer program Hand was used to simulate the similarity to handwriting, yet what results is its own unmistakable form. It is not the look of a feather, brush or woodcut, rather a completely new, computer oriented appearance. While I was designing this face I didnt have a clear image of what it would be used for. I was simply driven by my instinct to play and explore.


















FF 8506 FF Klunder Script by Barbara Klunder
(Roman, Bold, Kreatures)

Barbara Klunder (Queen of the Dingbats) is an award-winning, internationally known Canadian illustrator and graphic designer. She has also, in her 25 year career of theatre, rock and roll and good-cause posters, designed and made rugs, jewelry and sweaters. PageActive is a creative integrator in Toronto. We thought Barbaras style was one that everyone should be able to use and enjoy. So, we approached Barbara to digitize and create an electronic font of her unique script and illustration style. To quote Barbara on the typeface: I think the best use of this font is as body copy  it turns a sentence into a dance.












FF 8507 FF Quill by Manfred Klein
(Light, Demi Bold, Extra)

Manfred Klein lives in Frankfurt and for decades was a type setter and worked in advertising before he became involved in creating typefaces. Today he makes faces that are very much his own, with little influence from other peoples designs. These he does with all sorts of digital equipment: scanners, pressure sensitive graphic trays as well as misconfiguration filters in programs such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. On the side he also writes about type design in a variety of publications.

In music there are several different directions in style  from classic to punk  for a wide array of listening groups. Manfred Klein believes that in typography this is also true. With his new script FF Quill you could make the comparison to the musical equivalent of free jazz. He improvised the use of a graphic tray, working and re-working freely constructed elements of letters.












FF 8508 FF Tag Team 1 by Thomas Marecki
(FF Marker Skinny, FF Marker Fat, FF Marker Icons)

Thomas Marecki was born in Berlin in 1972. After his schooling he completed a graphic design program in 1994 at the well known Lette Verein in Berlin. Since 1988 he has been interested in the culture of comics, specifically the last couple of years in graffiti. He has worked as a freelance graphic designer for a variety of clients (pharmaceutical concerns, banks, dance clubs). Presently he is enjoying a stay in the USA, combining business with fun.

Thomas about FF Tag Team and graffiti art: The illegal typography on fassades in big cities today is rarely given recognition, although it offers a lot of creativity and playfulness with forms. The delinquency and petty damage associated with this form of expression gets in the way of appreciating its real value. 

I hope that FF Tag Team will do something to change that  that the typefaces of the streets will find an acceptance in typography and will be more accessible; although, I only represent here a small portion of the wider spectrum. FF Tag Team 1 is made with a Tagger (a brand name for magic marker). While doing the digitizing I was careful not to lose the style and dynamics of the original (speed and perfection play an important role in typographic street fights). Watch out beginners: Orthographic rules are not enforced when using Tagger, capital and lower case letters can be mixed. Have fun with FF Tag Team 1!












FF 8501 FF Dirty Faces 2 by Fabian Rottke, Neville Brody, James Closs and Fabrizio Schiavi
(FF Assuri, FF Dirty Three, FF Dirty Six, FF Dirty Seven, FF Innercity Brixton, FF Innercity Camberwell, FF Trade 01)

Too radical for the FontFont library, too harmless for FUSE: those are the limits for the new FontFont series FF Dirty Faces. Under this term FontShop International (FSI) releases every three months the most unusual contributions to this current trend of digitally filtered alphabets  electronically processed faces, typographical tramps which dont give a damn about legibility. They are the children of MTV and Super Mario, they feel most at home in the aesthetic circle of ugliness. Especially young adults, who hardly find time to read, must be addressed with new tricks relating to the written word. This is a job for FF Dirty Faces! The new FontFont series offers every designer an immediate grasp on a palette of demented characters; letters which were chosen under the guardianship of one of the most radical type users and producers of the FSI Type Board: Neville Brody. His involvement guarantees the quality  and the potential customer of such dirty faces shouldnt forget: even the destruction of traditional forms and the construction of new codes is something that must be learnt.

























FF Dirty Faces 2 contains:

FF Assuri by Fabian Rottke
Fabian Rottke has studied communication design at the University of Essen since 1988, majoring in typography. Although he hasnt always been understood by his critics (That looks more like a group of Akkadian symbols than a font), that hasnt deterred him from finishing several of his own typefaces.

FF Assuri came about as an attempt to destroy existing fonts and is actually a software accident. Which face was actually sacrificed for FF Assuri remains a secret. 

FF Dirty Three, FF Dirty Six and FF Dirty Seven by Neville Brody
Here is the second dirty faces trio from Neville Brody. Brody had sown the seeds for damaged faces even before the introduction of the computer. He worked with exacto-knives, photo copiers and color proof machines, or he crumpled lines of rub-off letters and laid them under a repro-camera. The three faces that are now being published are actually from a series of seven that Brody completed a year ago. They are all to be seen in his new book The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 2 (page 46). More will follow

FF Innercity by James Closs
James Closs is a freelance graphic artist living and working in London. Graduating from Central St. Martins School of Art in 1992 with a degree in graphic design, he continued on there to complete a postgraduate diploma in 1994. Though a self confessed Macaholic, he is enthralled with the human element in the design and drawing process. Inspiration comes largely from comic books, graffiti and the music of Captain Beefheart. James is currently struggling to make a living by bringing his idiosyncratic design vision to a wider audience. He also lectures in typography and design computing at Goldsmiths, University of London and plays bass guitar with the deranged country band Gewgaw Mule.

James about his font: Innercity originally started life as a headline font for a magazine of the same name. The magazine was to be a forum for new writers and its editorial policy one of freedom of speech. I chose to use letterforms taken from the streets of London, feeling that the walls of a city are probably the only truly uncensored platform for new writers one is likely to find. The lack of continuity in the font also harks back to punk graphics and the blackmail style lettering of Jamie Reid. The names of the two printer fonts, Brixton and Camberwell come from the area of South London in which I was living at the time. Most of the letterforms in the font come from these areas, though some are gathered from as far afield as New York.

Users should note that each letter in each font is available in four variations. They are placed on the computer at four different keyboard levels. Mac users will find them the easiest (if you are using a European keyboard it is easiest if you simply switch it to reflect an American one). There you will find the four variants, for example for the letter A under: A, Shift A, Option A and Option Shift A. The same holds true for the rest of the letters. Windows users will also not have any problem with the first two levels (see example above: A, Shift A); however, in the third and fourth levels a keyboard utility driver must be used.

FF Trade 01 by Fabrizio Schiavi

The twenty-three year old Italian Fabrizio Schiavi studied at the Istituto darte P. Toschi in Parma. A year ago he decided to devote himself entirely to designing typefaces. Since then he has published six designs, whereby most have been the result of experimentation. His newest face FF Trade 01 was born for and out of the communication chaos of a metropolis. For this Schiavi destroyed a face similar to the OCR A, for him the most metropolitan face in the history of typography.

								Berlin, November 1994
