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Saturday, March 19th, 2011 at 15:14

Introducing Amman The FFilm's four guitarreros!

Remember those four remarkable guitar players in my Amman FFilm? After I decided to use their footage for the film, I never had the chance again to ask for their names or even permission, hence credited them as "the four unknown guitarreros". But I was confident that one day I'd be able to follow up. After Amman's official Facebook channel picked up on the film a few days ago, Basel Al Hanini saw himself performing in it without even knowning, probably bursting with laughter. It's a small world, and I'm thankful for it. Ladies and gentleman, please give a big hand to Basel Al Hanini, Zaher Tayseer, Fares Nashashebi and Ahmed Zayed, who are now correctly credited in the newly uploaded film. Basel tells me that he now has an acoustic music band in Amman, the first of its kind in the Middle East: Guitarion.

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Wednesday, October 20th, 2010 at 14:12

Amman The FFilm released

Yesterday FontShop and I jointly released the 21 minute documentary film I shot this summer in Amman about the making of the Amman typeface. They as FontCast #17, I on the film's official website amman-the-ffilm.com. In the meantime it has popped up also in two other places on the web that are important to me: The Khatt Foundation for Arabic Typography and the blog of SYNTAX's Ahmad Humeid.
On the film's site you will also find the complete and very interesting 12 minute interview with Ahmad, a second part to the film and a trailer.
Furthermore the two blogs of FontShop FontFeed (English) and FontBlog (German) each have published an extensive and well researched article about the typeface that was published in the FontFont library this past summer. Thank you everybody.

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Sunday, September 19th, 2010 at 11:06

Last post in next 355 miles

I'm in The Hague now, the city with more type designers per square kilometer than anywhere else in the world. More particularly I have started to study in the Type & Media department in the Royal Academy of Arts to learn more about type design from the masters. So don't expect much to happen around this site for the coming nine months. (Except maybe for the release of the Amman FFilm sometime in october). See you.

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Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 20:14

Lecture about FF Amman in Amman

It's confirmed: I'll give a lecture about the making of the Amman typeface in the beautiful Al-Balad Theater in downtown Amman on tuesday 27th at 7pm. Here's a Facebook page for the event. Tell your friends.

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Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 14:54

Amman in Amman

What a delight to wander through the city and see my type face up on well designed huuuge billboards.
The visit I'm paying to the city now feels more natural than ever, and still like a dream. Amman being the car city that it is I received my rental car at the airport yesterday upon arrival, which is a big deal. I already know my way around. All big construction sites haven't developed a bit since my last visit almost a year ago. Or so it seems.
In the meantime the type face is being globally promoted by the FontShops. A coincidence, but puts me in a state of flow. I might even hold a talk about the type face somewhere here during my stay. This is all so exciting.

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Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 at 11:11

FF Amman is out!

I'm most happy to announce that my graduation typeface Amman has now been released by the FontShops. This marks the end of endless months of work by myself and the remarkable technical team at FontShop International in Berlin. Being relatively new to arabic type, especially with a family of 22 fonts, both I and FSI had quite a hard time to put the final product together.
What an incredible time this has been for me since my original work on the typeface one and a half years ago in Amman. Tomorrow I'll be off to Amman again to try to shoot more promotional video footage. Hopefully some of the blogs will review the typeface. I'll keep you updated. I'm super eager to hear responses especially from arabic designers about the concept of the family, particularly the new concept of integrating a real italic.
Available now at your local FontShop.

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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 13:03

Yanone Kaffeesatz now in Google Font Directory

My free typeface Kaffeesatz is now available for web embedding by Google’s font directory. Now how did that come about? I have been approached by Google a while ago whether I wanted to have my free typeface Kaffeesatz included in an upcoming product of theirs. Oh no, I thought. Sell my soul. To Google, the notorious data kraken (the product then went live a couple of days ago just as Google got denounced, and rightly so, for illegally wiretapping people’s private wireless traffic with their Street View cars). The catch: I was asked to relicense the typeface under a free license like the Apache 2 or the Open Font License. But it was free before, you might say. Yes, but usage was permitted under a Creative Commons license that would require attribution of the author: A link to my website or my name in the imprint. This has earned me a lot of recognition and hundreds of thousands of downloads since my early steps in type design, but it prevents usage in software bundles or services like Google’s new font directory. This has legal reasons. When the fonts are available at one simple click the user’s compliance with the license’s requirements cannot be assured. I have been asked before by OpenOffice to make Kaffeesatz available under Apache 2. But other than OpenOffice Google achieved to convince me.
There’s was another upshot for me. Since FF Kava’s release I contemplated to finally discontinue Kaffeesatz because I thought it was too old and now replaced by a professional font family of much better design and quality. With these revised Kaffeesatz fonts that I delivered to Google I finally filled the missing characters for the ISO Latin 1 and Mac Roman character sets (still nothing compared to FF Kava’s language support, small capitals, extensive figure sets etc.). And I finally created screen-optimized TrueType fonts. All in all the current version of Kaffeesatz that is now available for download in TrueType and PostScript-flavoured OpenType is of a quality that I can continue to offer with a clear conscience. And I will now be able to finally close the chapter of the typeface that I owe everything to. And I will never touch it again. But it will remain available for download and now also for use in your web sites served by Google’s remarkable font directory.
If you ever have the feeling that Kaffeesatz still doesn’t meet your needs as a typeface, then please have a look at Kava. It is in my eyes the best Kaffesatz ever available. And it will finally become a truly professional family when the Italics are going to become available with FontFont’s upcoming release. Kaffeesatz will never get Italics.

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Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 14:24

»Arabisch für Anfänger« im CoOrpheum

Ich werde am morgigen Dienstag, den 18. Mai um 21 Uhr in Dresdens neuem Co-Working-Space im Orpheum in der Kamenzer Straße 19 meinen neuen Vortrag »Arabisch für Anfänger« halten. Eintritt (für's CoOrpheum) 2 Euro. Bier und Sekt an der Bar. Wir sehen uns morgen.

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Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 22:33

FF Amman out soon

Appears like it's actually going to happen. Word is coming from the foundry that the extended type system that was my graduation is going to be released next month. The folks over at FontShop Int'l are also preparing a super nice promo poster to hand out at the TYPO Berlin next week.
Speaking of which: I'm busy preparing my presentation for the TYPO. It'll be a revised version of my original graduation presentation. Boy am I excited!

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Sunday, May 2nd, 2010 at 22:16

Yanone in Israeli border security concern target group

Two days ago I wanted to commence a trip to the Middle East from Berlin Schönefeld Airport, via Tel Aviv to see a friend and then take the bus to Amman via the northern border station to shoot promo video footage for my typeface. What I wasn't aware of is that you literally enter Israel upon passing the sliding doors of Terminal D of Schönefeld Airport that the Israelis have almost to their own. Only the loaded machine guns are held by blonde female German Bundespolizei officers. The hall was pretty empty, all in all just 35 people on this flight to Tel Aviv after its departure time has been changed just the day before after the chaos of the ash cloud flight blockade. Hence the Israeli border security officers had loads of time to question me about the purpose of my stay in Israel, to an extent that I actually had to fire up my computer to show them my web site to prove my story of the graphic and type designer travelling to Israel and Jordan. I soon realized that they had extended plans with me, as now the two-hour security check of me and my luggage commenced. First on was the news that I wasn't allowed to take my computer into the cabin. Which I never do for lots of luggage gets lost or damaged when dispatched in the airport. There was no point argueing, though, so I agreed. Next up was the news that I was going to miss my flight because of the extended check. Wow. I was starting to question their practice and feeling increasingly uncomfortable in the tiny and extremely untidy cabin. In the end it was my newly bought external hard disk that wasn't going to fly along.
Why? Because we can't open it. Of course you can't open it, it's a hard disk. Yes. But the hard disk it technically identical to the one in the computer itself, right? Err... But the computer is allowed to come along. Yes, just not in the cabin. And you didn't just open up my computer to look at the hard disk, or did you?!? No. See?
At this point, annoyed, exhausted and humiliated I gave up the trip before it even started. At least I was somewhat mentally prepared for it. This was already the second incident of its kind. Last time I departed from Ben Gurion Airport back to Germany they screened me for a whole one and half hours, leaving me literally in shock needing a whole 24 hours to recover.
Being professional by now I don't travel to the Middle East to shoot digital video footage with the possibility to return without data back up. One word: Unacceptable.
This whole incident is even more ridiculous since last time I departed to Tel Aviv with Air Berlin from Berlin Tegel without any additional security checks to the usual (I presume) high standard check. Hence this advice: Simply never book an Israeli airline.
I have one more, though: I exploded for the last time yesterday upon realizing that my wallet complete with ID, credit card, drivers license etc. was missing from my luggage after returning home to Dresden. They didn't give it back to me after literally taking apart all tiny bits of my luggage to X-Ray it and Ion-scan it (I'm not implying they kept it purpose, but the fact remains. That was, mind you, after one of the officers walked away with my role of black Gaffa tape thinking it belonged to them. Did I already mention that the cabin was a shit hole?). The wallet was of course not handed to the lost+found, where I called first. It took me an hour calling across the country and mentioning the possibility of an impending press release of the story in Israeli press through a friend to finally receive the phone number of the German Bundespolizei in the airport. There I had a super friendly officer on the phone who offered to personally walk over to the Israelis to seach for the wallet, which he found. After he was told that they tried to call me yesterday but I didn't answer. Which of course hasn't happened, which I know thanks to modern cell phone call history lists. Thank you, unidentified Bundespolizei officer.
Dear Israel, you are a beautiful country with beautiful culture and even more beautiful women, but you have just lost (another) friend. I don't think I want to see you again the next twenty to thirty years, until I'm old enough to withstand the hassle (or not getting it then anymore) or cool enough to travel without back-up hard disk.

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Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 12:50

Amman Typeface in NOVUM

Watch out for the upcoming 5/10 issue of the german bilingual design mag novum. They featured my Amman Typeface on one page in their super interesting Middle East special. Thank you novum.

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Sunday, February 14th, 2010 at 14:36

Dresden nazifrei

Many thanks to the alliance Dresden nazifrei who spearheaded and organized the protests against yesterday's Nazi demonstation on occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Allied's bombing of Dresden. About 12,000 (numbers vary) citizens peacefully blocked various streets and bridges around Dresden Neustadt station, effectively locking the 5,000 brown scum up at the station upon arrival and for the whole seven hours of their allowed demo. The police didn't let them march for "security concerns", thus playing hand in hand with the protesters, and at 5 p.m. pushed them back into the waiting trains.
Yesterday we showed the world and the Nazis where this ideology leads: exactly nowhere :)
This is not to be confused with the human chain of quiet remembrance of the victims of the bombing organized by Dresden's mayor Orosz with another 10,000 participants on the other bank of the river. Such a passive protest is nice and also very important, but ridiculously ineffective in face of Europe's biggest Nazi march since the end of the war. Hadn't the police locked the bridges, another couples of thousands of citizens would have joined the blockade on our side after the solely symbolic event of the human chain was over. I hope that the effectiveness of this year's active blockade will lead to a change of thinking of our local politicians, to maybe join forces with protesters in the future, instead of criminalising Dresden nazifrei prior to the event.
Thanks again to every participant and also to the police, who could have easily torpedoed the efforts but chose to remain quiet.
Here's a link (in german) that pretty much sums it all up, with more links in the article.

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Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 15:41

Yanone on Typo Berlin 2010 »Passion«

Confirmed: Typo Berlin invited me to speak about the Amman Type Project on this year's issue of Europe's largest design conference. Thank you, Typo.
Get tickets here while they're cheap.

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Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 10:12

Amman Typeface in PAGE

German design mag PAGE issue 03.2010 is out today. It sports a four page article about the making of the Amman Typeface.

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Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 20:38

iloveyanone on Twitter

Follow me now on Twitter. @iloveyanone

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Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 12:43

Interview on FontShop's start in 1989

The FontFeed published a really interesting interview with FontShop co-founder Joan Spiekermann about their early days of distributing floppy disks of digital typefaces in 1989. The article also sports a photo of our former guest prof Alexander Branczyk, who already wore his Lederhosen permanently at the time.

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Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 10:58

Und sonst so: Creative comments from Dresden

I'll hold a short presentation along with a hopefully rather extensive discussion about my Amman project on a talk event called Und sonst so. Aim of the organizers is to point out the creative potential gathered in our beloved provincial little Elb-Florence.
November 5th at 7pm, Louisenstraße 64 in Dresden-Neustadt

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Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 15:56

Metrikmodus: Workshop about type design and FontLab Studio

I'll be holding a workshop about type design and the technical part of font production using FontLab Studio for students of the Bauhaus-University this semester. The workshop is independant from uni curriculum; student will not officially get credited for it. More here.

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Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 08:48

Good bye Amman

My short stay of well over a week in Amman has come to an end. I'm really sad to leave this time, as I have actually gotten to love this city over the past times. I met old and new friends and took photos of my graduation typeface in the cityscape.
The Centennial Parade yesterday was super nice, and much better (and better organized) than expected. It was a parade showcasing the history of Amman in many steps, played by nicely dressed actors. It also included a number of groups key to Amman's experience: The street cleaners, vegetable and hommos vendors, road workers, police men, and even the gas vendors. They are known to every citizen by the annoying melody of the loudspeaker attached to their cars for notification. They have remixed that melody into an urban beat and put it on a sound system on the parade's car. Nice.
I'll take the northern border crossing by Irbid today. Just out of curiosity. It appears to be of a much less painful crossing, since only a couple of foreigners cross there. Its the crossing between Jordan and Israel, not Palestine like at the King Hussein/Allenby Bridge. So there's no need to harass any Palestinians. It's definitely a huge detour, but might be faster than the Dead Sea crossing with its endless hours of waiting. Plus the northern crossing is open until 8pm, which is nice. I'll have three more days in Tel Aviv then before flying back to Old Europe.

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Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 10:30

Zoo Beats on the Block!

Following up on 2008's Amman party success "Doo the Zoo": German discjockey superstar Yanone alias The Tiger teams up with local legend The Z'Ibra to celebrate 100 years of urban diversity in Amman, on the night of the Centennial Parade in Downtown Amman.
Old Irish Pub, below the Dove Hotel, Jabbal Amman. Friday, 9th of October. Don't miss!

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FontShop International
partner program:

Click here to purchase my FontFonts FF Kava or FF Amman Sans and FF Amman Serif directly from the producer FontShop International.

If you buy my and all other of the popular high quality fonts on the FontFont Online Shop using this link, you support me with a small percentage of the (otherwise unchanged) retail price.

Thank you.

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