FSI FontShop International
Encyclopedia
FSI FontShop International (FSI) is an international manufacturer of digital typeface
s (font
s), based in Berlin
and one of the large type foundries
that exist today.
All the typefaces are published as part of the FontFont library. The library contains type designs by 160 type designers, among them renowned designers such as Peter Biľak
, Evert Bloemsma
, Erik van Blokland, Neville Brody
, Martin Majoor
, Albert-Jan Pool
, Hans Reichel
, Just van Rossum
, Fred Smeijers
, and Erik Spiekermann
. The aim of FontFont is to offer typefaces by designers for designers
. Besides type foundries such as Linotype, Monotype, and ITC
, FSI FontShop International is one of the most important publishers of digital typefaces.
in 1989, Joan Spiekermann, Erik Spiekermann
, and Neville Brody
started an independent type foundry just one year later. They commissioned a few young type designers to make the first few FontFonts. The first font ever was FF Beowolf by the Dutch Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum in 1990. It was called a “living” font because it used a random feature of the PostScript
language to generate randomly different letter forms each time when printed. The library has grown over the years by numerous FF releases (being 56 until July 2011), and is now one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary type designs.
Between 1990 and 2000 FSI published together with Neville Brody 18 issues of the experimental typographical
magazine FUSE and organised several FUSE conferences, the forerunners of the annual European design conference TYPO Berlin.
In 2001, FSI founded their own stock photo agency called ƒStop and introduced it to the stock photography
market.
s in Austria
, Benelux
, Germany
, and the USA. FontShop USA, based in San Francisco, is owned by FSI; all the other FontShops are separate, independent companies concentrating on their own markets. While FSI publishes typefaces as a foundry, the FontShops work as reseller
s of FSI’s FontFonts but also of fonts from other foundries.
FSI FontShop International’s legal form is GmbH.
s published as FontFonts are always named using the prefix FF. Besides text and headline fonts such as FF Dax, FF DIN
, FF Meta
, FF Quadraat, and FF Scala
there are also special designs like the “dirty” typewriter font FF Trixie, the “living” font FF Beowolf and the world’s first digital handwriting fonts FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand (FF Hands package). The library now consists of over different 600 font families.
Type designers may submit their own type designs for publication in the FontFont library. A committee of internal experts (TypeBoard) reviews submissions for aesthetical, technical, and marketing aspects and decides about publication in the library. A basic prerequisite is that the type designs are original.
. The FontBook is an independent compendium of digital typefaces. The first edition was published in 1991 and revised and extended three times to show as many new and updated typefaces as possible. The latest fourth edition from September 2006 contains 1,760 pages with showings of 32,000 typefaces by 90 international foundries, being the largest printed type reference book of the world. In addition to the type specimens, users can find information about the type designer, year of publication, style category, language versions and see-also references to similar alternate typefaces.
In 2011, FSI published the first digital version of the FontBook. The iPad app contains 620,000 typeface specimens by 110 international type foundries.
. The aim is – like for the typefaces – images by designers for designers.
Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
s (font
Font
In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
s), based in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
and one of the large type foundries
Type foundry
A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Originally, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Monotype machines designed to be printed on letterpress printers...
that exist today.
All the typefaces are published as part of the FontFont library. The library contains type designs by 160 type designers, among them renowned designers such as Peter Biľak
Peter Bilak
Peter Biľak Slovakian graphic and typeface designer, based in The Hague , The Netherlands. He is the head of the type foundry Typotheque. In 2003, he designed a series of the standard post stamps for the Dutch Royal mail...
, Evert Bloemsma
Evert Bloemsma
Evert Bloemsma was a Dutch type designer and graphic designer. In 1981 he graduated from the Hoogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem. He taught typography at the Breda academy AKV St...
, Erik van Blokland, Neville Brody
Neville Brody
Neville Brody is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director.Neville Brody is an alumnus of the London College of Printing and Hornsey College of Art, and is known for his work on The Face magazine and Arena magazine , as well as for designing record covers for artists such as...
, Martin Majoor
Martin Majoor
Martin Majoor is a Dutch typedesigner and graphic designer.-Biography:Martin Majoor has been designing type since the mid-1980s. During his study at the School of Fine Art in Arnhem , he shortly worked in a student placement at URW in Hamburg. It was there that he was able to work with the first...
, Albert-Jan Pool
Albert-Jan Pool
Albert-Jan Pool is a Dutch professional type designer. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague....
, Hans Reichel
Hans Reichel
Hans Reichel was a German improvisational guitarist, experimental luthier, inventor, and type designer.-Career:...
, Just van Rossum
Just van Rossum
Just van Rossum is a Dutch typeface designer and computer programmer.-Typeface design:Just van Rossum’s typefaces combination of programming and letterform design has resulted in several developments in typeface design. His typeface FF Beowolf used a random feature of the PostScript language to...
, Fred Smeijers
Fred Smeijers
Fred Smeijers is a Dutch graphic, type designer and writer. He studied at the ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem in the early 1980s.- Work :...
, and Erik Spiekermann
Erik Spiekermann
Erik Spiekermann is a German typographer and designer. He is a professor at the University of the Arts Bremen....
. The aim of FontFont is to offer typefaces by designers for designers
Graphic designer
A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures and...
. Besides type foundries such as Linotype, Monotype, and ITC
International Typeface Corporation
The International Typeface Corporation was a type manufacturer founded in New York in 1970 by Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin, and Edward Rondthaler. The company was one of the world's first type foundries to have no history in the production of metal type...
, FSI FontShop International is one of the most important publishers of digital typefaces.
History
After founding the first German reseller of typefaces FontShopFontShop
FontShop was founded in Berlin in 1989 by Erik Spiekermann and Joan Spiekermann, who were then husband and wife, and Neville Brody. FontShop was the first font reseller in digital type history. There are four independent FontShops in Austria, Benelux, Germany, and the USA.FSI FontShop International...
in 1989, Joan Spiekermann, Erik Spiekermann
Erik Spiekermann
Erik Spiekermann is a German typographer and designer. He is a professor at the University of the Arts Bremen....
, and Neville Brody
Neville Brody
Neville Brody is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director.Neville Brody is an alumnus of the London College of Printing and Hornsey College of Art, and is known for his work on The Face magazine and Arena magazine , as well as for designing record covers for artists such as...
started an independent type foundry just one year later. They commissioned a few young type designers to make the first few FontFonts. The first font ever was FF Beowolf by the Dutch Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum in 1990. It was called a “living” font because it used a random feature of the PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
language to generate randomly different letter forms each time when printed. The library has grown over the years by numerous FF releases (being 56 until July 2011), and is now one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary type designs.
Between 1990 and 2000 FSI published together with Neville Brody 18 issues of the experimental typographical
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
magazine FUSE and organised several FUSE conferences, the forerunners of the annual European design conference TYPO Berlin.
In 2001, FSI founded their own stock photo agency called ƒStop and introduced it to the stock photography
Stock photography
Stock photography is the supply of photographs licensed for specific uses. It is used to fulfill the needs of creative assignments instead of hiring a photographer. Today, stock images can be presented in searchable online databases. They can be purchased and delivered online...
market.
Company structure
FSI is licensor for four FontShopFontShop
FontShop was founded in Berlin in 1989 by Erik Spiekermann and Joan Spiekermann, who were then husband and wife, and Neville Brody. FontShop was the first font reseller in digital type history. There are four independent FontShops in Austria, Benelux, Germany, and the USA.FSI FontShop International...
s in Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
, Benelux
Benelux
The Benelux is an economic union in Western Europe comprising three neighbouring countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. These countries are located in northwestern Europe between France and Germany...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, and the USA. FontShop USA, based in San Francisco, is owned by FSI; all the other FontShops are separate, independent companies concentrating on their own markets. While FSI publishes typefaces as a foundry, the FontShops work as reseller
Reseller
A reseller is a company or individual that purchases goods or services with the intention of reselling them rather than consuming or using them. This is usually done for profit...
s of FSI’s FontFonts but also of fonts from other foundries.
FSI FontShop International’s legal form is GmbH.
FontFont
The main focus at FSI is the extension and maintenance of the FontFont typeface library. FontFont
In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
s published as FontFonts are always named using the prefix FF. Besides text and headline fonts such as FF Dax, FF DIN
FF DIN
FF DIN is a realist sans-serif typeface designed in 1995 by Albert-Jan Pool, based on DIN-Mittelschrift. DIN is an acronym for Deutsches Institut für Normung ....
, FF Meta
FF Meta
FF Meta is a humanist sans-serif typeface family designed by Erik Spiekermann originally as a commission for the Deutsche Bundespost , but later released by Spiekermann himself in 1991 through his FontFont library...
, FF Quadraat, and FF Scala
FF Scala
FF Scala is an old style, humanist, serif typeface designed by Dutch typeface designer Martin Majoor in 1990 for the Vredenburg Music Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The FF Scala font family was named for the Teatro alla Scala in Milan...
there are also special designs like the “dirty” typewriter font FF Trixie, the “living” font FF Beowolf and the world’s first digital handwriting fonts FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand (FF Hands package). The library now consists of over different 600 font families.
Type designers may submit their own type designs for publication in the FontFont library. A committee of internal experts (TypeBoard) reviews submissions for aesthetical, technical, and marketing aspects and decides about publication in the library. A basic prerequisite is that the type designs are original.
FontBook
FSI is also publisher of the FontBookFontBook
FontBook is a typeface compendium in hardback published by FSI FontShop International and edited by Erik Spiekermann, Jürgen Siebert, and Mai-Linh Thi Truong. Published in 1991, it has been revised four times, with the latest edition published in September 2006. This fourth edition contains 32,000...
. The FontBook is an independent compendium of digital typefaces. The first edition was published in 1991 and revised and extended three times to show as many new and updated typefaces as possible. The latest fourth edition from September 2006 contains 1,760 pages with showings of 32,000 typefaces by 90 international foundries, being the largest printed type reference book of the world. In addition to the type specimens, users can find information about the type designer, year of publication, style category, language versions and see-also references to similar alternate typefaces.
In 2011, FSI published the first digital version of the FontBook. The iPad app contains 620,000 typeface specimens by 110 international type foundries.
ƒStop
FSI also publishes the image library ƒStop. At present, 22,000 royalty-free photos by 150 photographers are offered (December 2008). The images are distributed directly as well as via some of the FontShops and Getty ImagesGetty Images
Getty Images, Inc. is a stock photo agency, based in Seattle, Washington, USA. It is a supplier of stock images for business and consumers with an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations and more than 50,000 hours of stock film footage...
. The aim is – like for the typefaces – images by designers for designers.
Literature
- Spiekermann, Erik; Middendorp, Jan: Made with FontFont, Book Industry Services (BIS): 2006, ISBN 978-9063691295
- Thi Truong, Mai-Linh; Siebert, Jürgen; Spiekermann, Erik: FontBook – Digital Typeface Compendium, FSI FontShop International: 2006, ISBN 978-3930023042
- Jubert, Roxane, Typography and Graphic Design, From Antiquity to the Present. Flammarion: 2006, ISBN 2-0803-0523-9
- Schuler, Günter: Typomarken, Markentypo – Die Herkunft der Schriften in Libraries, in Publishing Praxis: 1–2/2008. 14. Jahrgang, Deutscher Drucker Verlagsgesellschaft: 2008,