Typographer, graphic designer and businessman Erik Spiekermann has created timeless, influential and, yes, Meta-physical work over the past three decades.

Next to founding MetaDesign and FontShop, the latter being the first ever digital distributor of fonts, and designing more instant classic typefaces than any other, he has been recognized as an outstanding expert internationally as a lecturer and professor.

Listen to the design genius talk about new visual languages, design processes, the analogies of music and typography, and why we need better client culture in our latest Gestalten.tv video and you will easily realize why. Before heading to new visionary pastures, the bike enthusiast will make a short stop to receive the German Design Lifetime Achievement Award 2011 in February.

Watch our complete line up of video interviews on gestalten.tv

 

Intro is a multi-disciplinary creative agency formed in 1988 and based in Smithfield. It has built a reputation for award-winning creativity within music, retail, fashion, arts, broadcast, corporates, government bodies and sport.

As part of Glug October, a panel of Intro‘s Creative Partners talked about the history of the company, how design, moving image & the digital domain has transformed over the past quarter century, how Intro have tackled some of their most notable campaigns and what they believe the future holds for brands and creatives.

Partners/Speakers: Julian House, Adrian Talbot & Julian Gibbs

Together with Rick Poynor, founder of Eye Magazine, Underware, Peter Bil’ak, Norm and Europa, Erik Spiekermann illuminated the field of conceptual type at the one-day conference in Copehagen on November 19.

For Erik Spiekermann, type is visual language: “Everything a company, a brand says about itself needs type. Shouldn’t that typographic voice be specific to the brand rather than bland and interchangeable?” Spiekermann displayed work for brands like Nokia, Bosch and Deutsche Bahn to show how exclusive typefaces work, how and why they’re made.

The conference “Conceptual Type: Type lead by ideas” is sponsored by the Danish Centre for Design Research and arranged in collaboration with The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of architecture and the type society Danish Faces.

Build is a small, yet perfectly formed, boutique design conference where interesting, talented web practitioners from all over the world come to share ideas, techniques and inspiration. Some are on stage; some are in the audience – buildconference.com

At long last, designers can use real fonts on the web. But what now? Where do we go from here? Tim Brown has been studying type on the web for seven years, and has lots of ideas to share. In this talk, Tim will guide you through using typographic tools and perspectives that will change the way you design websites. Typography is an ancient art and craft; we are merely its latest practitioners. By looking to our tradition for guidance, we might once more attain our finest typographic achievements in this new medium.

Tim Brown is Type Manager for Typekit. He studies, promotes, and advances the craft of web typography on a daily basis, and shares what he knows at Nice Web Type. Tim has written for A List Apart, and he helps web designers with tools like Web Font Specimen.