FSI FontShop International
| FSI FontShop International | |
|---|---|
| legal form | GmbH |
| founding | 1990 |
| Seat | Berlin , Germany |
| Branch | Font production ( foundry ), picture agency |
| Website | FontFont |
FSI FontShop International (FSI) is an international manufacturer of digital fonts based in Berlin . Many fonts are published as FontFonts within the library of the same name. The library includes designs by 160 type designers. They include 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 production of FontFonts aims to produce fonts by designers especially for designers. In addition to foundries such as Linotype , Monotype and ITC, FSI FontShop International is one of the most important manufacturers of digital fonts today.
history
After the German font trading company FontShop was founded in 1989 , Joan Spiekermann , Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody started an independent foundry the following year . They commissioned some young, unknown type designers to publish the first FontFonts. The first published font was FF Beowolf by the two Dutchmen Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum in 1990. It was called a "living" font because it used a random function of the PostScript page description language to arbitrarily change the letterforms of a font with each print. The library grew through numerous new publications (so far 56 so-called releases, as of July 2011) to one of the largest collections of original contemporary font designs.
Between 1990 and 2000 FSI published 18 issues of the experimental typography magazine FUSE together with Neville Brody and initiated conferences of the same name. The annual European design conference TYPO Berlin developed from these .
In 2001 the company also entered the stock photography industry with the establishment of the photo agency ƒStop .
In February 2010, FSI was the first font manufacturer to publish web fonts in the new WOFF format , which, in combination with the EOT Lite format supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer, supports the majority of current browsers and restricts web designers to the system fonts that are installed by all website visitors , cancels. These web fonts are linked to the elements of a website in such a way that HTML texts have the same, individual typography for all visitors.
Corporate structure
FSI is the licensor for a total of four FontShops in Benelux , Germany , Austria and the USA . Only the US distributor based in San Francisco operating under this name is a wholly owned subsidiary of the company. The FontShops act legally and financially independently with different business focuses. While FSI itself produces fonts as a manufacturer, the FontShops act as mail-order companies for these, but also for fonts from other manufacturers (111 in August 2011).
FSI FontShop International has the corporate form of a GmbH .
FontFont
The company's main focus is on expanding and maintaining the FontFont font library. Fonts published in it are identified by the prefix FF . In addition to text and headline fonts such as FF Dax , FF DIN , FF Meta , FF Quadraat and FF Scala, there are unusual designs. For example, the “dirty” typewriter font FF Trixie , the “living” font FF Beowolf and the first digital script fonts FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand ( FF Hands ) have become known. The library includes more than 600 different font families.
Font designers can submit their own designs for inclusion in the library. A committee composed of international experts ( TypeBoard ) advises every six months according to aesthetic, technical and marketing criteria about the acceptance of the fonts. The originality of the submitted designs is a basic requirement.
FontBook
FSI is also the publisher of the FontBook . The FontBook is a hardcover , manufacturer-independent compendium of digital fonts. The first edition was published in 1991 and - in order to do justice to the growing number of new fonts - was revised three times and reissued each time. The fourth edition from September 2006 comprises 1,760 pages of over 32,000 fonts from 90 international libraries and manufacturers, making it the most comprehensive printed overview of the fonts. In addition to font examples, the reference work also contains information on the respective designers, the year of publication, the style category and language versions as well as cross-references Alternative fonts.
In July 2011, FSI published the first digital version of the FontBook. The iPad app contains 620,000 font samples from 110 international font libraries.
ƒStop
The company also produces the ƒStop image archive. The offer currently includes 22,000 license-free images from 150 photo designers (as of December 2008). The images are offered both in-house and through external distributors, including some of the FontShops and Getty Images . Analogous to the motto of the font library, ƒStop aims to offer images by designers specifically for designers.
literature
- Roxane Jubert: Typography and Graphic Design. From Antiquity to the Present. Flammarion, Paris 2006, ISBN 2-08-030523-9 .
- Jan Middendorp, Erik Spiekermann (eds.): Made with FontFont. Book Industry Services (BIS), Amsterdam 2006, ISBN 90-6369-129-7 .
- Günter Schuler : Typo Marks, Mark Typo - The Origin of Fonts in Libraries. In: Publishing Practice. 14, 1/2, 2008, ISSN 0948-1931 .
- Mai-Linh Thi Truong, Jürgen Siebert, Erik Spiekermann: FontBook. Digital Typeface Compendium. FSI FontShop International, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-930023-04-0 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from July 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Designer list on the library website
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Interview Joan Spiekermann 20 years of Fontshop, as of April 2015
- ↑ https://www.fontfont.com/fonts/beowolf Information about the font on the library website
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 30, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Information about the latest publication on the library website
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento from May 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Press release on the publication of the "Web FontFonts"
- ↑ http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/foundry/ Overview of the manufacturers available at FontShop
- ↑ Celebrating 20 Years of FontShop With Erik Spiekermann ( Memento from August 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Interview with Erik Spiekermann on the history of FSI and the TypeBoard
- ↑ http://fontbook.com/ FontBook
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from July 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Information about the FontBook app on FSI's FontFont website
