Case Study: BMW in Detail
There are few brands more iconic than BMW – the blue and white marque with the simple grotesque lettering stands for quality, value, and German precision. For over three decades BMW has employed a visual identity that has barely changed, signified by a minimum use of colours, a light and bold font, and clean and practical imagery, reflecting the company's ethos.
Interbrand, BMW's brand guardian, approached us in 1999 with the view to designing a new suite of Grotesque fonts to replace Helvetica, which had been the brand font since the 1970s. It was felt that Helvetica had become slightly antiquated and was no longer in line with the basic brand values of modernity, precision, quality. A new font design would help address these issues by moving the identity into even more clarity, and by creating their own font BMW also managed to resolve the logistic and licensing problems that they had been facing, particularly when it came to distributing of the fonts within the organization and to suppliers. The investment clearly paid off for BMW as they have been able to expand the font family into different script systems and onto various devices without having to resort to lengthy contractual negotiations.
Anyone who has ever tried to draw a cube knows that there are few things harder to do – the simplicity of form is deceptive, and there is not an ornament or flourish to hide behind. This is also true when designing Grotesque fonts; the simplicity of the letter shapes demands the highest drawing skills from the type designer. Our design team started the font project by submitting a range of design concepts to explore how far from the traditional model we could stray. Once the concept was approved we concentrated on the design details. Our initial proposal suggested we lift the center of the 'M' off the baseline to help the aesthetic appeal of the character at small sizes but this was rejected as the letter combination 'BMW' is often printed baseline-on-edge of banners and similar. A similar issue arose from reducing the numerals to aesthetically fit better with both caps and lowercase. Again because of large usage and in conjunction with caps such as 'Z3' a smaller numeral would simply be wrong.
The font family consisted of Light, Regular, and Bold, plus a range of Condensed styles in the same weights. All fonts were fully-hinted for best quality screen display. When BMW decided to apply the fonts to its in-car displays and satellite navigation systems they again turned to us for assistance. As their in-car systems did not support hinting, our design team needed to adapt the design of the fonts to suit specific display sizes. We also had to modify the widths of the characters to be metrically compatible with the previous font that BMW used, to avoid layout changes in any of the satnav's standard screens. Working closely with BMW's engineering team we created a font suite that retained BMW's brand values but also fulfilled all their functional requirements.