http://yanone.de Blobs and blurbs from Yanone. en-gb Copyright 2008, Yanone 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. Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:14:14 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_50 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_50 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. Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:54:27 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_49 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_49 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. Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:11:17 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_48 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_48 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. Wed, 26 May 2010 11:03:17 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_47 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_47 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. Mon, 17 May 2010 12:24:33 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_46 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_46 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! Tue, 11 May 2010 20:33:53 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_44 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_44 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. Sun, 02 May 2010 20:16:57 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_41 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_41 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. Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:50:03 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_37 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_37 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. Sun, 14 Feb 2010 13:36:28 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_36 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_36 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. Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:41:39 GMT http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_35 http://yanone.de#blogentry_no_35