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fe engschrift (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 and punctuation, 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.