Opinions can differ greatly among type designers and typographers when it comes to decisions about letter shapes. One of the most contested letters in that respect is the German sharp S, even more so its cap variant, especially among native speakers of German. Recent publications such as Hermann Schmidt Verlag’s ‘niße’ book, the addition of the cap sharp S to Unicode, and most recently to official German orthography, show that there is ample need for discussion. In this double presentation, an opinionated Swiss and an opinionated Austrian will discuss this letter, possible and not so possible shapes, good and bad design decisions, and will attempt, but will probably fail, at settling these questions once and for all.
Date
Wednesday, September 12th 2018
The German sharp S
Speaker
Bruno Maag
Bruno Maag is a trained typesetter from Zurich, Switzerland. After graduating from the Basel School of Design with degrees in Typography and Visual Communications, he emigrated to England, where he worked for Monotype creating custom typefaces. After a year in Chicago with Monotype, he returned to England to start Dalton Maag, focusing on the creation of custom typefaces.
Bruno is the Chairman of Dalton Maag and in recent years has spearheaded projects for large global companies and small enterprises alike. His interests today extend to scientific research on reading physiology and psychology.
Speaker
Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer
Rainer Erich (‘Eric’) Scheichelbauer was born in Vienna. A trained photographer, Eric holds both a philosophy and a Dutch studies degree. He creates typefaces, works as a digital punchcutter for other type designers, and gives type design workshops on a regular basis. Since he has joined the Glyphs team in 2012, he has been writing articles, tutorials, and Python scripts, as well as the blog and the handbook. He lives and works in Vienna, where he runs his type studio Schriftlabor.