Over the years, numerous other fonts and even typefaces have emerged from the original FF Meta Pro, including FF Meta Serif and Headline. Spiekermann was always involved in the design process, which probably indicates just how committed he is to his work. But if you look at the FF Meta Headline a bit more closely you’ll see that it lacks some important elements of FF Meta Pro to fulfil certain needs. These are details, I’d say, that might have been crucial to understand what was and is still so interesting about the original font.

This is Meta Heaven. A new headline typeface made from FF Meta Pro. I’ve tried to keep the details of the original that I believe are important, especially the strange cuts on certain letters – like on the “w”, while neglecting the basic idea of it, namely its legibility at very small sizes. The outer and the counter shapes are much rounder now, softer even. I also increased the contrast of the stroke widths to get it far blacker than was possible before. Maybe it’s even a bit too black in some points, but it is a font intended to be used for headlines or display texts, so nobody should complain about having a lot of black dots in a row when printing it at 7 points. FF Meta Pro Black was my template. Here I already had some higher contrasts, which I could easily increase. I made all the letters far wider and adjusted the ones that seemed too small for me to get even wider even besides their relatives. It is now a bit hard to tell where Meta Heaven comes from. But you can still feel FF Meta Pro somewhere if you’re familiar with it. That was the part that was most important to me.