Pleks is a Danish design agency based in Copenhagen. Its founding partner, Mads Quistgaard, has been a long-standing friend of Dalton Maag. It had always been his desire to work on a font project with us, not just to be able to give his clients 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, he 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 that B&O does, from the architecture of the headquarters, to the small details which many people might consider insignificant. It is this dedication to quality, and attention to detail, that makes B&O's products so highly respected and durable. However, they realized 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. From that we had to create 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 that 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 that 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 meticulous process of hinting and 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&O’s engineers to even extract bitmap fonts. These were 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 electronic 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.