InfoD-Cafe: Typeface for wayfinding

[Michael Piotrowski]

On 2008-08-22, Deborah Taylor-Pearce <dtp at she-philosopher.com> wrote:

>> Whether by co-incidence, commission or design, "Netto" is the name of
>> a chain of cut-price, no-frills supermarkets, headquartered in
>> Denmark, owned ultimately by the AP Møller- Mærsk Group, with stores
>> in Denmark, Germany, UK, Poland and Sweden.
>
> Oh, great ... so on top of Mr. Utz's various sins in the icon design
> department, is he also in violation of some company's trademark?

I don't think so.  "Netto" is the German equivalent of "net," as in "net
price" or "net weight."

> (I don't suppose Netto-the-typeface was originally designed as part of
> a corporate branding project?

Unlikely. Discounters prefer bold type.

> Does anybody recall what Netto-the-store's logo and signage actually
> looks like?)

Their colors are black and yellow, the logo consists of a terrier
carrying a shopping basket and "NETTO" in a bold, Futura-like font;
cf. <http://www.netto-supermarkt.de/>.

Note that in Germany there is another, unrelated, supermarket chain also
called NETTO, cf. <http://www.netto-discount.de/>.

Greetings

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                               <mxp at dynalabs.de>
Public key at <http://www.dynalabs.de/mxp/pubkey.txt> (ID 0x1614A044)