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fe mittelschrift (1 weight)
designed by stephan mueller, 1995-1997
in 1995, the german government introduced a new typeface for german car registration plates - a somewhat bizarre, assymetrical design by an engineer foreign to the craft of type design - with the goal to make it "virtually impossible" to manually change letterforms or numerals (e.g. changing "L" into "E", or "3" into "8"). this aesthetically hopeless and technologically ill-informed effort to eradicate counterfeit registration plates was undermined by our swift publication of the original design as a postscript font, complete with full lower case, accents, punctuation and alternatively as a condensed version, thus making the "unfakeable" design available to any computer user within weeks of its introduction. it soon made its onscreen debut on a title sequence of a national german television chain.