Case Study: Bang & Olufsen in Detail
Pleks is a Danish design agency based in Copenhagen. Its founding partner Mads Quistgaard has been a long-standing friend of Dalton Maag, and it had always been his desire to work on a font project with us, not only to be able to serve his clients with great type, but also to learn more about the process of creating professional fonts that look great and function in diverse environments. So when Mads was approached by Bang & Olufsen to consider the typography of the menu screens on a variety of its display devices, Mads turned to us for assistance.
Mads had already worked closely with B&O developing brand elements, including a corporate typeface, to be applied to products and eventually across a wider brand environment. With this in mind, Mads and Bruno visited B&O's headquarters to discuss the client's many technical requirements, and to establish which script systems would be needed to properly reflect B&O's global presence. From this visit it was clear that design permeates everything B&O does, from the architecture of the headquarters to the small details which most people might consider insignificant. It is this dedication to quality and attention to detail makes B&O's products so highly respected and durable. And this dedication made them realize that the typographic quality of their displays was, at the time, lacking.
Mads had already developed the branding font for B&O, so this was our starting point for a font family tuned to the challenging environment of the screen and other low resolution devices. He provided our team with the designs for the basic character set which our designers then refined and expanded into a fully-functional font family which met our stringent character set and technical standards. Over several rounds of design refinement we completed the actual letter design, spacing and kerning. The spacing needed careful attention to ensure the texture of words was not compromised even in environments where hinting was not as effective.
Once all parties were happy with the design of all six styles we started the process of meticulous hinting enhancing the fonts for superior screen display. We worked closely with the engineers at B&O to ensure the fonts would be suitable for all their display devices, from basic black and white to sophisticated sub-pixel rasterization techniques. The final fonts were hinted flexibly enough to allow B&Os engineers to even extract bitmap fonts for use in remote controls that have limited resources but very specific display requirements.
Although sub-pixel rasterization is more forgiving to inferior hinting, we as font designers cannot control or predict where a font is going to be used – we have to target all possible devices and all possible methods of rasterization. Many non-computer devices, such as set-top boxes, depend on high-quality hinting to ensure that fonts are displayed at their best whether the screen is CRT, LCD or plasma; whether the ratio is 4:3 or 16:9; whether it's SD or HD. In fact, with today's growing range of screen-based communication methods, hinting has become more important than ever. The B&O font suite beautifully illustrates how fonts enable companies to communicate succinctly with their customers by maintaining a coherent visual appearance, irrespective of medium.