Type designer Erik Spiekermann in a recent interview talks about the challenge of designing numbers… as if letters would be much easier.
“Anybody can design letters, but numbers are hard. Tech was an interesting challenge that I gave myself: to create a typeface that has no diagonals. When you design numbers, you have to do ABC at least. It’s interesting because I realized that what worked for the house numbers obviously doesn’t work for letters. This was going backwards. But numbers and letters are very different; they have different space, different shapes; they come from different places. Figures are actually my favorite part of type design.
