FF Info Text supports up to 82 different languages such as Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, French, Turkish, Italian, Polish, Kurdish (Latin), Azerbaijani (Latin), Romanian, Dutch, Hungarian, Serbian (Latin), Kazakh (Latin), Czech, Swedish, Belarusian (Latin), Croatian, Finnish, Slovak, Danish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slovenian, Irish, Estonian, Basque, Icelandic, and Luxembourgian in Latin and other scripts.
Please note that not all languages are available for all formats.
FF Info is named after its purpose: the transfer of information. Its clean lines make no fashion statements, nor do they attempt any technical wizardry. The typeface was initially intended for use on traffic signage,and other wayfinding systems in stations, on buildings, etc. Because space comes at a premium in such situations, FF Info Display is drawn narrow; It requires 15% less space than most of the signage typefaces currently in use. To compensate for the tight fit, its spacing is been slightly increased. The process of reading signs is quite different from reading long text. Rather than combining groups of word images to form a sentence, we scan letter by letter to produce a brief and sometimes surprising result. For this reason, it’s important that characters be individually differentiated. This is especially so for figures, since many numbers are easily confused due to their similarity. The same is true of lowercase i and l, or uppercase I and the number 1, when seen from a distance, or given little context by which to differentiate them, the process of reading is error prone. FF Info Display solves this problem with a serif at the top of the small i, a tail at the bottom of the small l, and serifs at the top and bottom of the uppercase I. These distinctions are derived from typewriter typefaces, where the dominant serifs on the i, l, I and 1 were used to fill out the otherwise narrow letter forms, and prevent “holes” from forming in the monospaced text. The designer, Erik Spiekermann, gave the same letters a similar treatment in his earlier typeface, ITC Officina. Signs are generally read in motion, and often at odd angles. Under such circumstances, letterforms can become blurred and indistinct. Backlit signs have the effect of rounding otherwise sharp corners, further complicating the process of distinguishing between individual letters. FF Info Display was designed with the demands of backlighted signage in mind: the already rounded ends of the letters are less given to these distortions and the letters remain true to form. White type on a dark background appears heavier in weight than equivalently sized dark type on a light background, and the effect is further exaggerated when the light type is backlit. The typeface FF Info Display compensates for the difference between the various weights, and introduces a system for weight matching. For example, white text set in its Book weight on a black background is optically the same as black text set in Medium on a white field. With backlit signs, dark text appears thinner, in which case the Semi Bold weight would be an appropriate match to the above examples. FF Info also includes numerous arrows in a range of line widths and directions, handy for sign making. Critique Magazine gave specific recognition to the FF Info family in 1998. That year, it made the cut that included just 1% of all considered designs to receive an award in their “Big Crit” contest. FF Info was later adapted to print, and correpondence versions. “When we looked at prints of FF Info Display used in small point sizes, we found that the typeface also worked well as a text face,” said Erik Spiekermann about the second phase of his FF Info type family. “I’ve always maintained that technical specifications, which help determine the appearance of a typeface, also make it work well in other difficult circumstances.”
