Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest Erik Spiekermann
Unknown Speaker 0:02
Hey everyone, welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard, an audio podcast. We have a typography legend on today. He’s the founder of meta design and Ed and speakerman, and he gave a defining look to Berlin’s public transport system, The Economist and companies such as Audi, Volkswagen and Bosch, among others, his work has been recognized with Europe’s most prestigious prizes and honors, including the royal designer for industry title from the British Royal Society of Arts. He spends his time split between Berlin, London and San Francisco. Please join me in welcoming Eric speakerman, welcome. Hi. Good morning. Are
Unknown Speaker 0:41
you ready for 20 questions? Yeah, I must admit I didn’t really read them, because I have this
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belief that I only talk about stuff I know about, and if I prepare myself, I might start uttering bullshit, so I just wing it more often than not. Okay, cool, bear with me with these. These are the questions that I ask everyone, so you can, you can criticize them or whatever, but we’ll go with them. Number one, tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do you do? Well, officially, as I’m 75 I’m retired. I’ve been retired for seven or eight years, but so I don’t do any commercial work anymore. I used to be, as you said an information designer, graphic designer, brand designer, type designer, but now I run a workshop for old fashioned letterpress printing and type sitting in Berlin, and we’re trying to work out how we can connect the digital and the analog. So, you know, we make in
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documents and send data to
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a plate maker that we developed ourselves, and then we print on an old fashioned Heidelberg printing machine from the 1950s
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trying, we call it hacking Gutenberg. So we’re trying to combine the advantage of modern typography on a computer with a old fashioned letter press, which gives you a more tactile result.
Unknown Speaker 2:00
Nice. Just to know for our audience. You know, in my world, everybody knows who you are. I think I first stumbled on you in art school 20 years ago when I read stop stealing sheep, and that was a key book for me.
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Number two, what’s a key piece of knowledge that makes you different?
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I noticed a long time ago, when I was in meetings and traveling, that I seem to have I’m very curious, and I seem to make connections more quickly than other people. If I’m in a meeting with a, you know, half a dozen people, it usually after five minutes. I know how this is going to work, and how what people need and what people want. So I read communication, both visually and verbally, very quickly, and I think that’s my, my biggest talent, and that’s why I’ve been successful in cracking fairly complex projects. You mentioned the Berlin transport I’ve designed wayfinding for airports and cities and universities, and they tend to be really, really complex problems that some people get scared of. And I don’t get scared any because I know that it’s it’s all there, if you look at it carefully, and the answer is, in the problem.
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Great. Another note for the audience. You know, there’s no doubt this is a big episode. If you’re interested in the bigger guests, check out the episode with John Maeda or Debbie Millman. Those were both fantastic ones.
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Number three, why this? Of all things, why do you do what you do?
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I noticed also, I can’t remember, sometime in my childhood, I am terribly curious. I would, I guess, like most children, would ask their their parents until they couldn’t hear it anymore. And I was always the same. I would, I would query and question everything at school, at university, which often didn’t, doesn’t make you popular. You know, if you keep
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not answering questions that teachers pose you but questioning back, it doesn’t make you popular, but this curiosity, I think, is what made me first study History of Art, because I wanted to find out why things look the way they do. Then I went into the history of architecture because I wanted to find out, why do cities look the way they do. Why do we build things? So the why question, I think, has been my my thing. I’m incredibly curious, and I I get on people’s nerves, because I always want to find out why and how something works. I think that’s what makes me do what I do.
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Nice. Number four, what does your future look like?
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Oh goodness, I’m 75
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I’m, I’m I’m not planning, and we may come to that later. I haven’t ever had a plan. I just, I improvise. Sometimes, disaster, disastrous results. Of course, I’ll be happy if I live another 10 years. Because I want to make this workshop work, I need to raise some money, because it’s, it’s a charity, and my money is around.
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I was a millionaire 10 years ago, and I spent 100,000 years. So I’m not a millionaire anymore.
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So that’s the future, trying to get this business, not business, this charity going, get people interested, try and find friends and supporters, and run the few projects that I have in mind. Have a few things that I really want to do before I die.
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When I first saw you launch the printing press
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charity, I was, I was so excited. I thought, wow, here’s a Quentin Tarantino Jackie Brown project, you know, a real labor love thing. And I was super excited. Number five, we say, is unique to this podcast. The question is, let’s talk about location. How does the notion of place play into what you do? Well, I think I already hinted at that. I am curious in why things look the way they do most more than what they are, because that’s what you know, as a designer, you’re concerned with the way things look. But of course, in order to make them look or change the look, you need to know how they operate. And I am very, very curious about how cities, how countries operate. That’s half the reason why I’m very busy in public transit projects and generally like to find out about what’s going on, like the lack of trains in North America, for example, all public transit drives me crazy. We have a project coming up here that I’m little involved in with one of my my former companies.
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So location, you know, I’m here in San Francisco, or rather, I’m on the other side of the bay in Tiburon. It’s very different from what it would be right now in Berlin. I work differently. I think differently. I sleep differently. So the place is incredibly important. If I go elsewhere, for example, I don’t like going to places where I don’t speak the language. And I speak several languages, but I don’t speak Chinese, for example, Japanese, which is interesting, but also makes me tariff feel terribly lost and desperate because I cannot communicate the way I’m used to by writing and by reading. So place is incredibly important, both in a in a challenging way that it makes me aware of my shortcomings, but also an encouraging way that I realized there’s always different answers to the same problem in different places. And I like to learn. I just come back from Los Angeles, which is a play that I find fascinating ugly, incredible, inspiring, annoying, all of the above, because it has all of the above. And I’m really, really inspired by by going to places like this.
Unknown Speaker 7:34
We’re recording here, from Vancouver, Canada. And I take the train here. And every time I take the train, I look at the way finding typeface, which is meta. And I, I think back to the art school days,
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but you know that my, my, my other company applied information. We did the way finding for Vancouver just in time for the Winter Olympics. What is that 10 years ago? Right? That’s why meta is in there. It wasn’t me, but, you know, it was kind of my spirit. I guess we also did Toronto, the metro, okay, I love it. It doesn’t look overly post modern. It looks really good. Yeah, it’s age well,
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number six, if you had to start from the beginning, what advice would you give your former younger self?
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Maybe have a plan. I said earlier, I never had a plan, which is good in a way, that I tackle things that anybody would say is are too big and impossible, like this workshop or the companies I’ve started. But if I’ve had a bit more of a plan, I might have not annoyed so many people by just doing things sporadically that are difficult to explain. I’m I’m. My poor family has always suffered from my sudden turns of direction, just because I dreamt and got up in the morning I said, I’m going to do this. And I’ve had way too many ideas, way too many plans I never got. I’m never going to get them finished. I mean, I need to be 150 years or just to read my books. So that was one thing I wish I’d started earlier. Make proper notes, make write down projects, stick with them, and tell people about my plans, rather than just going ahead and doing things at the spare of the moment. It’s it may be a quality being spontaneous, but I know it has upset a lot of people the way I just run around and and do shit that people just don’t follow.
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One of our early guests was from the typography world as well, Keith Tam, and for his episode he he took copious notes and and really, kind of
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wrote the whole thing up in a blog post. It was really great.
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Number seven, what’s a day in your life like? By the way, just as a I met Keith, and because he did work for actually, in Vancouver, I don’t know, about 10 to five years ago, what’s my day like? It’s very different. We come back to that notion of place, whether I’m here in the Bay in San Francisco.
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Or in Berlin or in London, because the place is different here. I because I’m a I’m nine hours away from Europe
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by the time I get up, like I met my desk at eight o’clock. The Europeans are just going home. It’s five o’clock there, so I get very little overlap, and then I got the rest of the day for myself on my own without any interference. Whereas, if I’m in Europe, my day starts at eight and I’m I’m interfering, I’m interfering, I’m communicating. I’m dealing with people all day long, which is obviously very different. I don’t get anything long term done there. I get long term done here. I sit down here. I’ve got an empty desk. I have no excuse other than making coffee and eating ice cream in between. But write things down, do things that I will never, never, ever get done in Europe. So my days are very, very different. See, I sit on my own pretty much, whereas in Europe, whether I’m in London or in Berlin, I usually by by by nine in the morning, I’m interacting with other people, which is great, but it also means that there’s no time for long term. You know, reading or writing that has to be on the weekends or in the evening.
Unknown Speaker 11:08
Great, and you force out of this number eight, lifelong learning is a popular topic these days. How do you stay up to date?
Unknown Speaker 11:15
I wish I wasn’t such a, such a news addict. I read always when I started reading at three, my mother said, I want to suck in everything that I could possibly do. So I read my German newspapers, obviously, here, I read them online. I download them the evening before, which kind of cool. I try and watch news on TV, which in the USA is pretty impossible, because the news suck and they’re never even live anymore. They’re all streamed so and I read. I try to read a couple of European newspapers and an American one. So I spend at least two days, two two hours a day catching up on the daily news. I try to read, you know, slightly more involved, longer stuff, like I try to read the New Yorker here, or the economist in London, or the Spiegel in Germany. I just read a lot, and I spend too much time properly on on Twitter or on Mau or doing emails.
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It’s a large part of my, of my day. But as I’m so terribly curious and almost afraid of missing out, I do spend a lot of time in keeping in touch, keeping connected. Unfortunately, it also means that every day, something new pops up, which gives me another sideline, another thing to get interested in. So I do get a little, maybe too easily diverted from the project I should be doing
Unknown Speaker 12:42
great. Number nine is, what tools do you use? You mentioned the printing press. Are you both digital and analog? Yes, I bought my first Macintosh in 85 which apparently was the first Mac ever bought in Germany, Biograph designer. So I was a very early adopter. I did some type for the Newton, which is obviously before your time. I think Thomas in I think 9293
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so I’ve had Newtons, I’ve had, you know, the Palm Pilots, I’ve had all the gadgets. I was a very early adopter of pads and phones and what have you I mean, I was dealing with computers in the 70s, but there weren’t computers in the sense that we see them these days. It was writing code, green code on a black screen.
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So yes, I do use electronic media, but I have lots of notebooks. I write stuff down all the time. I sketch things, but then I forget where I sketch them. I have about a round around me. I’ve got a dozen notebooks of different sizes. I try and have notebooks that have only, like 16 pages in them. Make a mistake, so it’s one for each project. But the problem is, then I have so many that I always forget. I know I wrote it down somewhere, and then I spent half a day finding what I what I’ve written down. So I’m very much in between digital and analog. I do know that the analog is becoming much more important because we’re losing it and touching things, and getting hold of things, and leafing through a book or a newspaper or a magazine is incredibly important, and it’s also science has this already down. It’s much better for retaining knowledge. Reading online, reading on a piece of glass
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is good for getting information, but it doesn’t stick as well. We won’t go into this now, but there is plenty of science that same whatever we read in a three dimensional environment on paper, we remember much better and much more deeply Nice. Halfway. Number 10, how do you deal with work, life balance? Ask my wife, I don’t she complains, I’m always at a computer. But, you know, computer is what we do these days. I’m work on a computer most of the time, and as I like what I’m doing so much, whether I get paid for it or not, now I don’t get paid for it. I never really had the difference, because my work was my hobby, and my hobby is my work. And now.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Or the work I do I don’t get paid for so now it’s called your hobby. If I got paid for it, it wouldn’t be a hobby for me. It’s no difference. I’d rather I do the same stuff, where I get paid for it or not. So my work life balance is pretty bad, or
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maybe it’s pretty good, because I like it
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number 11, if you weren’t doing what you do now, what would you be doing
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that’s a very hypothetical question.
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I don’t know how to answer that. I’m doing this, because I’m doing it. I could, okay, there are alternatives. I could be sitting on right now. I could be sitting on the we have a deck here overlooking the lagoon in Belvidere. I could be there, because I think it’s the sun is on it, but then I will be sitting there. I would be reading, but properly falling asleep after 10 minutes in the sunshine, which is rather nice. But other than that, I don’t think I would be doing my life wouldn’t be any different other than the location
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- What would you not like to do with your career?
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I don’t like to
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be defined and bossed around by other people. I’ve always I’ve either been freelance or I’ve had my own company. I’ve never, I think I spent three months in my life, and I’m 75 being properly employed by somebody else who told me when to get but then that was running a little print shop back in Berlin in the 70s. But even then, after two weeks, the boss said, oh, you know what? You do it. And he went on a six week vacation. So even then, I was running a place, I seem to not be employable, so I don’t like to have to answer to people who are who I don’t respect. It’s never really happened very much. I mean, there’s been the outline to, you know, you know, okay, I he’s not doing his job as well as I could be doing it. So it’s not arrogance, but it’s the fact that I have a very hard time obeying orders. And I’m very on German there. I guess I have a very hard time
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doing things that I don’t define myself.
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Nice. Do you have a favorite word, quote or sentence?
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Yeah, my motto has always been but it’s German Alice with good which is very short. Unlike most German sentences, it means everything will be fine. I’m this incredible optimist. You know, whatever happens, whether we’re in complicated meetings where everybody says, Oh my God, this project, you know, we never crack this one. I’ve been in many of those meetings where you all think, oh shit, you know, this is the one job that will fail. We are, you know, we never do this. We all have egg on our faces. I am this internal, eternal optimist, and I think it’s going to be okay. I have no idea why, but it’s going to be okay. The universe will combine to make it okay. Even right now where I’m desperately out of money, I know something is going to happen. Some somebody will intervene. Something is going to go whether you know, in spite of the war in Ukraine and COVID or the rest of it, I think it’s going to be okay, because I believe it’s going to be okay,
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good. And least favorite word, quote or sentence,
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obey.
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Okay, obey. I’ve never been good at tell me you do this because I say so. I remember at school being so unpopular with the teacher school say, why? And there was a well, because, and what you know, like kids do when you when you’re three years old. I don’t know if you have kids,
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but, you know, they ask and ask and ask, and I only have one son and one grandson, but I know I’ve always been very patient, because that’s the best thing they can do, is be curious and ask and ask and ask. And I hate people who tell me to do things that I don’t understand.
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So obey is my least favorite word. Great and 15. If you had to pick one word to describe yourself, what words would you choose? Curious,
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what keeps you up at night?
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Well, right now it’s literally this morning again. I woke up very early because I was thinking I had some ideas how to
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get my my workshop going in Berlin, because there’s an somebody I know has started, is going to start running a museum, the Museum of crafts in William, which might be a potential sponsor, or they might be able to take it over. So I’ve been writing all night. I’ve been writing these emails and letters and having these conversations in my in my dream or in my head
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what I should be doing. So usually I don’t get up really early because I can’t stand not doing it, so I sit down immediately and write a little proposal.
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So I guess that what keeps me up at night is the things I should be doing in the daytime.
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And do you have a dream you’re chasing? Yes, this is very simple, as I’ve been hinting at all along. This this workshop which, you know, which is trying to
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slow things down, get people to go back to to do an analog, especially for for digital people like ourselves. It’s my dream that this was successful. I don’t want to make money out of it. I just wanted to keep on growing. I want people to come and enjoy and realize what they’re missing. That is.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
Very, very simple dream, and it’s something that I probably have in my own hands to realize.
Unknown Speaker 20:06
Nice and 18. What inspires you?
Unknown Speaker 20:10
Well, I said my favorite word is curious. So what inspires me is everything else. I meet a lot of interesting people who inspire me tremendously.
Unknown Speaker 20:19
I think I’ve been very lucky. I’ve probably worked somebody worked it out at one time, but I can’t remember. I probably had about five 600 students. I’ve been teaching a lot. I’ve probably had over 1000 employees over the last What, no, 50 years something, and they’ve all inspired me. Going out, looking at things, reading stuff, and mostly mixing with people, inspires me tremendously. Change of environment, finding out new things, it’s what inspires me great. And last couple here, number 19, any advice you’d like to share?
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Well, I have, if you go to the website of our hacking Gutenberg dot Berlin,
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you see the posters we’ve been printing. That’s not the purpose of the of the workshop, but that’s one way to use the machinery and make a bit of money by setting those processes. One of our most
Unknown Speaker 21:09
popular ones is don’t work for assholes, and don’t work with assholes. And that is advice that I formulated after my first crisis when when I split up with partners in in the in the late 90s. So I’ve noticed that whenever I’ve I’ve hired somebody whom I wasn’t really sure about,
Unknown Speaker 21:31
but thought, you know, this person couldn’t do this and that. But personally, I didn’t really have much of a of a relationship. It was a mistake. The same for clients. Some, there’s been clients that I I knew I shouldn’t work for because, you know, it’s something wasn’t right, but you needed the money. And there was 40 people that have been a wage for whatever, or 100 people. So I did it against my better knowledge. So by now, it’s, don’t work for ourselves. And, you know, whatever an asshole is is my in my definition, it doesn’t have to be a bad person, just I can’t work with this person. And the same, or even worse, is if you hire somebody because of a portfolio or because you’re doing some of your favor, but you know, you’re not going to be
Unknown Speaker 22:09
happy having this person around you eight or 10 hours a day. So that’s the motto, not work for ourselves and don’t work with ourselves.
Unknown Speaker 22:16
Great. And number 20, how can our listeners keep tabs on you? What’s a call to action. Are we planning trips to to the brick and mortar workshop area or Yes, well, the hacking Gutenberg dot Berlin is the website where you can see this. I am available on I can’t remember what my my Twitter handle is. I think it’s just e, speakerman,
Unknown Speaker 22:36
s, p, i, e, k, e r, M, a double N. I’m out there. I don’t do as much as I used to do. I used to do. I still have 285,000
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followers for some reason on Twitter,
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but that’s there. You can see what I’m about.
Unknown Speaker 22:50
I think I’m also on Instagram, but I don’t understand Instagram very well. I post up now and again when I’m on when I’m traveling, but it’s fairly easy to keep tabs on me. If you look for Eric speakerman on, you know, I’m sure I come up on, have looked at my Wikipedia for a while, but I dare say I have it somewhere. So it’s easy to follow me.
Unknown Speaker 23:11
Okay, great. Well, you know, thank you so much for coming on. It’s so, it’s so, it’s such an inspiring piece for for anyone to who’s interested in typography. I’m going to share it with my type students for sure. Thank you so much. Good. Nice to Nice. Talking to you, Thomas, bye, see you later.
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