Farleys Coffee on 18th Street


Reading Why the Starbucks “15th Ave” Store Is Doomed to Fail on HBR in which Peter Merholz talks about the dishonestly behind a new concept coffee shop called 15th Ave, that tried to capture the lost magic of Starbucks.

My favorite San Francisco coffeehouse, Farley’s, which is amateurish (and I mean that by its Latin root: done for the love) and personal. Faking it is not a good strategy in bed or in retail. Perhaps my biggest beef with 15th Ave is that it’s fundamentally dishonest. Everyone knows it’s run by Starbucks, but the website and the store do all they can to suggest it’s a true independent (though the high level of interior design suggests a bankroll out of the reach of most entrepreneurs).

Photo credit – Flickr

Erik Spiekermann

Erik Spiekermann, born 1947, studied History of Art and English in Berlin. He is information architect, type designer (FF Meta, ITC Officina, FF Info, FF Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk and many corporate typefaces) and author of books and articles on type and typography.

He was founder (1979) of MetaDesign, Germany’s largest design firm with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco. Projects included corporate design programmes for Audi, Skoda, Volkswagen, Lexus, Heidelberg Printing and way-finding projects like Berlin Transit, Duesseldorf Airport and many others. In 1988 he started FontShop, a company for production and distribution of electronic fonts. He is board member of ATypI and the German Design Council and Past President of the ISTD, International Society of Typographic Designers, as well as the IIID. In 2001 he left MetaDesign and now runs SpiekermannPartners with offices in Berlin, London and San Francisco.

In 2001 he redesigned The Economist magazine in London. His book for Adobe Press,“Stop Stealing Sheep” has recently appeared in a second edition and a German and a Russian version. His corporate font family for Nokia was released in 2002. In 2003 he received the Gerrit Noordzij Award from the Royal Academy in Den Haag. His type system DB Type for Deutsche Bahn was awarded the Federal German Design Prize in gold for 2006. In May 2007 he was the first designer to be elected into the Hall of Fame by the European Design Awards for Communication Design.

Erik is Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts in Bremen and in 2006 received an honorary doctorship from Pasadena Art Center. He has just been elected an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA in Britain.

New York Times critic, Herbert Muschamp.

New York Times architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp rhapsodizes about Seattle’s new Central Library calling it, “The Library That Puts on Fishnets and Hits the Disco”. Seattle is a town with a big case of boosterism. Towns with this affliction usually have an inferiority complex derives from their envy of big cities like New York, Los Angeles and even San Francisco. This is precisely the case here. So when a big, bold, beautiful new edifice goes up, the local papers pull out all the stops. And they won’t disappoint with their coverage of Koolhaas’ Central Library. NY Times article