BlackBerry Keyboards
While on the graphics team at BlackBerry, I was the graphic designer for nearly every keyboard that went out the door. This involved typesetting, laboriously tweaking each letter form to match the curvature of the keypad, and the careful selection of typefaces to match the personality of each device. Not only that, we did this in multiple colours across 16 different languages: QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, 5 Stroke, Arabic, BoPoMoFo, Cangjie, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Nordic, Vietnamese and Hindi. A major device release could have upwards of 40 design variants between languages and colours.
The keyboard that I will always think of as the best-ever BlackBerry keyboard belonged to the BlackBerry Bold 9900. It was typeset in DIN Next, paired with customized Avenir numbers, and countless other tweaks to get it just right. The work that went into design the first draft is captured in the above video. Below are a collection of some of my favourite designs I worked on.
date 2008-2012
category graphic design
If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.
