Germany’s Stiftung Buchkunst just published the “Best Designed Books” of 2012 on a new website. I quickly distilled the typefaces in use. All other details regarding design and production, as well as photos can be found on the individual pages for each book.
What is interesting to note is that – compared to former years (I recorded the font use of some years back 10 years ago) – the diversity is much higher. Only few typefaces appear twice, or if we count the different Garamonds three times max. This is a great development in my opinion. Current fad: monospaced fonts.
The best designed books of Germany are well documented and would make a wonderful resource to not only log type use over the years, but also trends among designers (or the trending designers themselves), paper stock, formats, typesetting technology (who is still working with Quark XPress e.g. :) If only everything was in a dynamic database you could search and not a static, yet very much improved, website.
List of the typefaces used in the 25 best designed German books 2012
The numbers refer to the winning book on Stiftung Buchkunst’s website.
1 Univers, Corporate A
2 Yonkers
3 Chaparral, Futura
4 Lexicon 1, National
5 Miller Text (Winner of “First Price”)
6 Fedra Sans Alt, Fedra Sans World
7 Neue Helvetica BQ (really?), Monospace 821 BT (Helvetica Mono)
8 Lexicon
9 URW Grotesk, Dolly
10 Akkurat
11 Compatil Fact, Letter, Text, Exquisit; Mrs. Eaves, Univers
12 Neue Helvetica, Clarendon
13 Bembo BQ, Gill BQ
14 Stempel Garamond, Futura Condensed
15 unidentified monospaced typeface
16 Adobe Garamond Pro
17 Lyon, Calibre
18 ABChanel Couture
19 Bureau Grotesque, News Gothic, Pica 10 Pitch BT
20 Adobe Garamond Old Face, Bembo, Futura, Pica 10 Pitch
21 Trinité 1
22 handwritten / lettered
23 Apollo, Courier
24 Gill Sans
25 handwritten / lettered
Ah well, just counted again – Futura is another triple favourite.
indra,
every data about the »schönsten deutschen bücher« is or will be stored in a database. this was the hardest part of the new website project.
and there will be a search option, too.
but we manage this pro bono project only little by little.
:)
cheers,
ulli.