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Elsner+Flake Lives!
A Peek Under the Sleeping Giant's Covers Reveals the Digital Type Veteran Is Still Pioneering
Since 1985, the Elsner+Flake (E+F) collection has grown to over 2500 fonts. Relying on outfits like Graphic Obsession, FontShop, and MyFonts.com for online distribution, the foundry seemed for years like a slumbering giant, quietly doing business without its own web presence. So, while the E+F name is familiar among font buyers, it's easy to forget there is a living, breathing entity behind the acronym. You may know the foundry for its old-school reputation for high technical quality, but you might not know that founding members Veronika Elsner and Günther Flake are still actively engaged in the company. Now that work and energy has a suitable face. It's good to see they've finally built a home on the web.
In our brief email interview, Ms. Elsner related the serendipitous tale of the site's beginnings. After years of false starts and the eternal "under construction" page, an enterprising Carlo Krueger (designer of one of their more successful fonts, Thordis) called Elsner and asked her to type "www.elsner-flake.com" into her browser. What she saw was a prototype for what would soon become the current E+F site, designed by Krueger's design firm: form one.
While I usually shy from complex interfaces built entirely in Flash, form one has leveraged Flash's power to take lots of data and construct a swift, smooth reference and sales machine. Take the "Font Search" for instance: E+F's huge collection begs for a useful search tool and this fills the bill. I haven't seen a better widget for seeking a particular width, weight, and style (Elsner tells me new query fields will be added soon). The results with one-line showings come quick. Click on a result and the font's sample text is customizable and printable! Want to see more detail on the screen? (Here's where a benefit of Flash shines.) Just resize the window. It's all vector, baby. Well… Flash vector.
The drawbacks to the neato-jet interface? 1. It's not searchable or linkable from outside the site. (If it was, this article would be full of links to lots of other cool stuff). 2. The site is a dud in the current beta of Safari. Mac users are font buyers -- hopefully this will be fixed soon. 3. There are some lingering bits of Deutch on the English version of the site.
Further proof that E+F is not dead can be found in their recent custom type work for North German Broadcasting (NDR) (200k PDF) and energy group RWE (185k PDF).
And E+F isn't ignoring their flagship retail library. In August 2002 they added Euro symbols to all 2500+ fonts. They also claim that every font will soon be available in OpenType, but that's a massive conversion project -- I'll believe it when I see it.
Other fun E+F tidbits:
- Curiously, their top 10 list from the "Font News" page is far more display-heavy than the bestseller lists of other vendors. With Pump Triline at No. 7, that trend for retro ’70s design must still be kickin'.
- Last year E+F released two exclusive families from Hans Eduard Meier (famous for Syntax): Elysa and ABC Schrift (more weights of the second family are available at E+F's site).
- MyFonts.com offers the EF Special Edition CD celebrating E+F's 15th anniversary. 526 fonts in a metal box for $777.
- Typographica asks: "How has the type of work you do changed since your beginnings in 1985?"
"Between ’85 and ’91 we worked at a rural location in the countryside north of Hamburg. We were busy digitizing our library and did a lot of custom work for major font foundries. Agencies in Hamburg became interested in our fonts and we sold more and more fonts to the customers directly. As the Internet did not exist at that time, we had to send diskettes per taxi courier to the customers for $40.00 each. Well, the font pricing was stiff enough to do that. I remember that fonts like ITC Anna and ITC Garamond Condensed were the first on the hitlist as Adobe had not released these fonts at that time."
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Comments
Stephen, thankyou, this is excellent, what we've all been waiting for. The scaling to window size is a strategy Flash designers evidently have failed to realize all this time. The compact formatting of the font search tool is a boon. It shows how cumbersome, tortuous and antiquated the Myfonts interface really is. About the snippets of Deutch in the English version - this looks like a wider failing of the translation. What gets me is the clichéd phraseology of the writing, too many instances of, "Not only...but also..." I can't help wondering if that stuff was in the original text, or inserted by the translator as a substitute for more original, creative word smithing. James Arboghast | May 10, 2003 06:39 AM
Well, they're great indeed, but hasn't the site been up for a while already? Rolf | May 10, 2003 08:11 AM
The News PDFs are Mac-only - fart. The text is too fuzzy. The writing is wooden. The colors are nice. Some broken (and apparently interface-fatal) links. But many of the fonts are great. And the search mechanism is super (although in places buggy). Lastly, FontTyper is refreshing in a "large" font house. Printing rules. One more thing: MyFonts's functionality I find superb. Like where else can you see a huge rendering of a single glyph you don't own? hhp
Rolf - You're right, the site has been around for about a year. This has been on my Potential Article List for a long time. Still, I'll bet most of our readers didn't know it was up. It was news to even the omnipresent Hrant. Stephen | May 10, 2003 03:17 PM
I am so far behind in my online reading, it's scary. I'd need a break from a break to catch up... hhp
>The text is too fuzzy. True, now that you mention it. My old NEC Multisync compensates unsharp stuff with very small dot pitch. >The writing is wooden. Plod, plod, plod.. . Its hackneyed too. >Some broken (and apparently interface-fatal) links. Yes. Could it be Flash back-end related? >MyFonts’s functionality I find superb. Its not that I dislike Myfonts - its an essential reference tool I use daily. But the interface I think could be simpler (I overdramatized in my first post); too many elements on-screen distract the eye from type samples; by comparison E+F's low-key layout, low contrast and intelligent use of color eases pixel-induced lo-res eye strain. Non-flash based makes me think 'antiquated'; the antithesis of the Talmud project, users can't interact dynamically. And that awful font used for the Myfonts headers puts me in an unreceptive 'mode'. >Like where else can you see a huge rendering of a single glyph you don’t own? Beautiful isn't it!
The fact the site has been up for a year, but is news to me, shows how fresh I am to the type biz. If someone had asked me if it existed I would have said, "Elsner + Flake? Erm, sure, probably." James Arboghast | May 11, 2003 08:18 AM
While the fact the site has been up for a year, but is news to me, shows how fresh they are to the type biz. ;-) hhp
>how fresh they are to the type biz. ;-) '_' Maybe I'm underrating myself here. If you didn't know, that is a glaring omission. I can't recall noticing many links to E+F on other foundry sites; inconspicuous text links at Myfonts and Linotype - yes, but no banners. An open Google search may prove illuminating. >POSTED BY: Hrant | May 11, 2003 08:27 AM He's right, you are omnipresent ;-) James Arboghast | May 11, 2003 09:18 AM
Well I knew about the site… Colin | May 12, 2003 06:40 AM
I thought I'd mention that my company, Agfa Monotype, is also a distributor of the E+F library. Brian Allen | May 12, 2003 09:06 AM
My '92 toyota tercel is for sale. Best offer. Gary | May 12, 2003 09:27 AM
Colin -- You are really cool. Funny, Gary. Brian -- I am more impressed with you than I am with your company. I know you aren't responsible for their website, but please pass this along to those who are: their lack of design savvy is forcing picky font buyers to look elsewhere. Font.com's look is a put-off and the bad specimens are not helpful. Of course, keep in mind, I am more picky than most. Yikes. Do I sound like a piss-cracker this morning? I'm really not. Sorry. Stephen | May 12, 2003 09:39 AM
Stephen, I tend to agree. It seems the more funding there is, the less useful the site is. Damn those evil capitalists. Oh, wait... John Butler | May 12, 2003 10:46 AM
I agree about fonts.com - I won't buy from them simply because I can't see what they have to offer. EP | May 15, 2003 12:36 PM |
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