Erik Spiekermann
Who Is Erik Spiekermann?
Erik Spiekermann is a German typographer and graphic designer, whose work has really benefited the world of visual design over the last century. Erik started his career just working the wordpress in his own basement while going to school for graphic design before graduating and starting his first design company. Erik has started multiple companies across his career that all have contributed massively to the graphic design and print industry. Erik has also created dozens of fonts including the most famous one Meta, which is used by many today.
Erik believed that graphic design and typography were a communication device that connects viewers with the information they need. None of his fonts were ever bold or flashy, but functional, as he believed in giving the people exactly what they needed without going too overboard artistically and that the designer was the bridge for users to information. His design company was the biggest in Germany and he even brought it into many different countries as well. Many popular and well known brands were mostly successful because of his design identity. It is safe to say that Erik Spiekermann really revolutionized the design industry with his visual style and typography and made a huge mark on the industry for years to come.
How Influential Is He?
Erik Speikermann has inspired and influenced a lot in the field of typography and has had a tremendous impact in the design industry. There are two major things that Erik did that revolutionized design. One he and his wife co-founded FontShop, which was a shop where you could buy premium fonts for way cheaper. This was also attributed to being the first ever occurrence of selling online fonts through mail orders. This completely changed the design space, as now anyone could easily access fonts, even smaller, less wealthy designers could now have access to a whole lot of fonts.
Another instance of Erik taking design and changing it forever. Erik also, as mentioned before, did not approve of basic fonts like Helvetica, but pushed a move for more humanist fonts in the design space that had more human attributes to them, by looking more hand drawn. This led to creation of a lot of these fonts being created to replicate some of the things Erik was doing. Erik really set the standard in design and heavily inspired a whole generation of typographers and designers to use his techniques, font choices, and elements and create great things with them. Erik was not only a great designer and typographer, but he influenced and inspired a lot of designers, media, and companies to try to think outside the box and add human elements to their designs to try to replicate his unique take on design.