Meta fonts are a humanist sans serif typeface with calligraphic characteristics. Created in 1985 for the German post office, the font was later recreated by Erik Spiekermann and released as part of the FontFont library. The FF Meta® sans serif family grew to nearly 50 different styles and weights, including a Cyrillic version. A serif version was eventually created in 2007.
Meta fonts are a family of fonts with pronounced calligraphic characteristics, not to be confused with the metafont programming language. The fonts that make up the fonts have some variation in line width and are very legible. For this reason, the font family is referred to as a humanist sans serif typeface. The font family is often referred to by the name of the library it belongs to, FF Meta®, and has found international acclaim among graphic designers, with widespread use as a corporate font.
The original design for meta fonts originated in 1985 when London-based firm Sedley Place Design was hired by the Deutsche Bundespost, the German post office, to create a full corporate design. Part of this involved a new typeface that would serve on postage stamps, packaging and fleet vehicles for identification purposes. For this reason, it had to be highly legible in a wide range of formats, easily printable on a variety of paper types, and have distinct fonts. The original conception and design of the font was handled by Erik Spiekermann, who worked in the Berlin office for Sedley Place Design. The Bundespost eventually decided to discontinue the use of a new font family, and so meta fonts were temporarily abandoned.
Spiekermann, however, decided to continue working on meta fonts through his own font foundry, FontShop International (FSI). He recreated the fonts by scanning the original outlines into a computer for reworking and later published them as part of the FontFont library. FF Meta® was released in 1991, with normal, uppercase and bold versions for the family. Within a year, a bold and italic uppercase font set was added, and the font quickly grew in popularity for the rest of the decade. Eventually, the FF Meta® sans serif family grew to nearly 50 different styles and weights, including a Cyrillic version released in 2001.
Throughout the 1990s, as sans serif meta fonts were gaining in use, Spiekermann struggled to create a serif version of the font. He was often compelled to recommend other fonts that complement FF Meta® in one design, such as Swift or Minion . Eventually, he enlisted Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowers to help with the new serif design.
The initial serif versions contained the same x-height, the height of a character “x” from the baseline, as the original meta fonts, but the serifs on the new characters were still overwhelming. Ultimately, the design team decided to adjust the metrics of the meta serif family so that even if the serif fonts didn’t mathematically match the sans serif meta fonts, they still felt like the same. In 2007, the FF Meta® serif family was released.
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