A beautiful PDF by FontFont, who got together several top designers and typographers to determine the greatest fonts ever. It’s in German, but you can still read the names of the typefaces and look at all the pretty pictures. I’ll save you the suspense: Helvetica is numero uno.
001 // Michael Poplawski // 10.16.2007 // 5:31 PM
I just returned from a half year in Germany and was very impressed by the typefaces used on, of all things, train station platforms, road signs and licence plates (licence plates, in particular, became a minor obsession for several reasons). For my obligatory PowerPoint show from my trip, I will be looking for freeware versions of the fonts used. I’ve found a version of EF Mittelschrift to use, am still looking for the DIN typeface used on road signs, and I still don’t know what the typeface used in train station is (commonly seen in white against a blue background).
While German licence plates are striking in their own way, my favourites were the Swiss plates, which featured both an emblem of Switzerland and of a canton, and black on white type (but the font is clearly not Helvetica).
I even bought a board game called Ausgerechnet Buxtehude (a game about German geography) which uses road sign graphics. Beautiful!
The PDF put out by FontShop is great, by the way. I will be showing it to at least one graphic designer I know, even though she doesn’t speak any German.