The Design Prize of the Federal Republic of Germany is the highest official German award in the design field. Some 1,200 designers competed for it this year. In February in Frankfurt, ten candidates were awarded the Design Prize in Gold, five of them in the field of communication design. One Design Prize in Gold went to Dan Reynolds for his design of the serif font Malabar, which is marketed by Linotype. Malabar has been designed for use in modern Indian daily newspapers.
The jury said: “The font is a key element of every publication’s brand identity. The outward appearance, the robustness and the choice of language are important factors for a medium in this context. When two writing systems are to share a single font family, as in this case (Devanagari and Roman characters), they have to work together seamlessly. At the same time, however, they also have to function alone.”
Dan Reynolds sees the gold medal as an award for typeface design in general: “To receive the German Design Prize as a typeface designer is something very unusual. After all, the prize does far more than honour Malabar: it really puts typeface design onto the map in the design world. Fonts are not about designing letters on the screen – fonts are a top-quality design product.”
Only products that have already won national or international awards can compete for the German Design Prize, which is therefore regarded as a “Prize of Prizes”. Another condition of participation is a nomination either by the economics ministries and senators of Germany’s federal states or by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.
By the way, the name of the typeface was inspired by a brand of coffee. While Dan Reynolds was working on the robust, antique-style typeface in Berlin, he would often drop by Barcomi’s Deli near his apartment in the Kreuzberg district, where he enjoyed plenty of India Monsooned Malabar coffee.
