Early FontFonts

Early type designs from the FontFont foundry that helped launch the FontShop business and spawned entire genres.

Jürgen Siebert

Last edited August 15, 2019

The most sustainable FontShop project was the founding of the FontFont Library by Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody in 1990. The FontFont collection soon proved to be a driving force in the typographic world. Early FontFont designs defined new criteria for type design. From fun fonts like FF Beowolf, over the dirty typewriter design of FF Trixie, up to Neville Brody’s FF Blur … the number of FontFonts that have triggered new trends in the type culture is staggering.

The high quality of the FontFonts has been ensured by the Typeboard, which met quarterly in the early years, later half-yearly. Joan and Erik Spiekermann as well as the FontFont managing director Petra Weitz occupied the committee with changing international authorities, among them Jonathan Barnbrook, Erik van Blokland, Neville Brody, Stephen Coles, David Crow and Malcolm Garrett ... Erik Spiekermann, Andreas Frohloff, Ivo Gabrowitsch, Jürgen Siebert and Alex Roth took part on the FontShops side over many years.

As desktop publishing flourished in the early 1990s, the humanistic FF Meta family quickly entered widespread use due to its clean, cheery, and distinctive aesthetic, and its ability to serve well in multiple design capacities including signage and correspondence. Even today, FF Meta is still regarded as a prototype of the Humanistic Sans type design genre.

The family that became FF Meta was first called PT55, an economical typeface made for easy reading at small sizes created for the West... Read More

An irreverent brute made by slicing parts of two of perhaps the most commonly-used typefaces in the world: Bodoni and Futura. They were put together in a nightmarish configuration that could only have been conceived by Max Kisman.

Although it is basically a geometric typeface, FF Typestar is typographically sophisticated. It consists of two families. The first is a typical font quartet – Regular, Italic, Black, Black Italic – and feels just as at home in the office as it does in graphic design or corporate branding. The second part of the family consists of a single font, the non-proportional FF Typestar OCR.

FF Typestar, from Steffen Sauerteig, part of the eBoy design collective, is one of the most sophisticated typewriter-inspired fonts in... Read More

One of Berlin’s must-visit cultural stops is the Prater, a beer garden in Prenzlauer Berg, a district in the eastern part of Berlin. The Prater easily has one of the most unique graphic identities in the city, completely handmade by artist-illustrator Henning Wagenbreth. The alphabets created by Wagenbreth became the starting point for a refreshing type family, FF Prater. To convincingly... Read More

Just as popular as the digital typewriter face FF Trixie are those in the FF Instant Types series: FF Confidential, FF Dynamoe, FF Flightcase, FF Karton, and FF Stamp Gothic. Named after the places each comes from, these fonts feature familiar character sets from everyday letters and figures all around us: packaging, flight cases, children’s stamp boxes, Dymo tape labelers. We see them every... Read More

FF Blur was designed by British design star Neville Brody. Though deceptively simple, his process was imitated widely afterward, with mediocre results. In 2011, the MoMA in New York added FF Blur to its permanent collection of ground-breaking digital typefaces.

FF Blur is from FontFont’s earliest period, made in 1991 by British designer Neville Brody. The typeface was developed by blurring a... Read More

No cross railing lest suddenness happens

FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand, both marketed as the FF Hands package, are two of the first examples of loose, natural handwriting made to work as type. The software used to produce the designs was just being developed. In 2010, both fonts were reissued in OpenType and with Hi-res curves, plus hundreds of additional ligatures and glyphs.

FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand are two of the first examples of loose, natural handwriting made to work as type. The software used... Read More

FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand are two of the first examples of loose, natural handwriting made to work as type. The software used to produce the designs was just being developed. It certainly didn’t hurt that Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum actually know “how to write.” That’s not to imply that van Blokland and van Rossum were merely literate, but rather that had been taught... Read More

FF Dax is without doubt Hans Reichel’s magnum opus. The design is a contemporary streamlined sans in three widths: normal, wide, and condensed. Suprisingly, FF Dax Condensed was the first to be released, in 1995. The concept behind the typeface was to combine the clarity of a condensed Futura with a more humanist touch. The result is a space saving and legible typeface of timeless quality. The... Read More