Tiende Festival De Beweeging

Lively FF Rekord supporting performance art

Before becoming a renowned type designer, Martin Wenzel worked as a typesetter for Berlin company CitySatz. FontShop was the firm’s neighbor, and Wenzel was proud to introduce his first typefaces to the world through the FontFont collection. His debut FF Marten (1991) was a narrow rounded sans. Its construction geometric and modular – the kind of font many budding digital designers in those early years chose in order to teach themselves the type design techniques.

Wenzel wanted to get more serious about type design. Berlin friends and colleagues pointed out that the Royal Academy (KABK) in The Hague, Holland, was one of the best places to learn how to do that. One of the first typefaces published as a FontFont was FF Rekord (1994). It was a small family of text fonts – that is, for designers who liked the idea of giving the text a special look. Its letterforms sport classical proportions but lack any curves: they are constructed with straight lines only. In small sizes, it looks lively, in larger sizes it reminds of objects carved out of rocks, like the wheels of Fred Flintstone’s car.

When I was invited to design the identity of the dance and theater festival organized by De Beweeging (the Movement) in Antwerp, Belgium, I felt that Rekord could help to produce designs with a personal and somewhat subjective character – just like Beweeging’s program. For the 1998 edition, its tenth, FF Rekord was used as the only font on the website and posters, and as the main headline face in its newspaper. In that pre-webfont era, we made the headlines into gifs or jpegs and as screen resolution was still pretty low, the screenshots we made were kind of pixelated. But Wenzel’s FF Rekord countered that imperfection with its own roughness – which seemed just right.