In Use: FF Liant for Weleda

A storefront in Stockholm sports a logotype set in FF Liant.

In 1976, Ingrid Liche began designing what would be FF Liant Medium for the packaging of the natural cosmetic company Weleda AG in Germany. The face defined the corporate identity of Weleda worldwide, and because of the company’s prestige, the look of the entire natural cosmetic industry.

Liche re-digitized the font in 1995, adding several ligatures and expanding the face to a three-weight family. FF Liant’s lively forms are taken from nature, so it works beautifully on packaging for organic cremes and the like.
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FontHunt2005 NY Winners

New York City in July — with TypeCon2005 in town and mayor Michael Bloomberg’s official “Type Week” proclamation, typography was hot in the city. In celebration of the events, FontShop held our first FontHunt competition.

In a sort of typographic scavenger hunt, residents and visitors of the Big Apple were invited to grab a sheet of FontHunt goals and scour the city for interesting type and lettering. And scour they did. We were delighted to receive hundreds of photos from FontHunters — from obscure street signage, to giant glyphs atop buildings, to letters baked into pie.
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I AMsterdam in Avenir

Photo by Mieke Tacken. See more photos of I amsterdam on Flickr.

As much as I’d like to claim we’re the only group to think of it, there is more than one “I Am” campaign. Adidas and Reebok have both used the phrase in recent marketing. (That’s everyone’s favorite blackletter, Fette Fraktur, in the Reebok ads.)

But my favorite “I am” (other than our own of course) is the city of Amsterdam’s decidedly typographic public art installation, “I amsterdam”, set in 10 pt.ft. Avenir. The piece coincides with a new motto and website for the Netherlands capital’s tourism campaign and it works beautifully. The only quibble might be that a country with such a rich type culture ought to use a Dutch face rather than something born in Switzerland. Yet Frutiger’s sans works so well it’s hard to complain.

PingMag Interviews Erik Spiekermann

Our founder is lecturing in Japan right now. Tokyo-based PingMag talked with Erik last week and the very detailed interview is up at their site with gobs of illustrations.
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