Typo

Until the late 1990s, German plates were set in DIN 1451 — the same engineering typeface behind the country’s road signs. Its clean, modular letterforms read well at speed, but that same modularity was the weak point: a pot of black paint and about thirty spare seconds was enough to turn a P into an R, an F into an E, a C into a G, an O into a Q, a 3 into an 8.

That wasn’t just petty fraud. Through the 1970s and ’80s, altered plates on stolen cars turned up in attacks by the Red Army Faction, and West German authorities went looking for a typeface that couldn’t be casually rewritten. Development started in 1978; the result, phased in from the mid-1990s and made mandatory nationwide by 2000, was FE-Schrift — fälschungserschwerende Schrift, “script that makes forgery harder.”

The brief was really three problems stacked on top of each other: resist forgery, read cleanly to the automatic plate-recognition cameras just then coming into use, and stay legible to a human glancing at speed. Draw that same imaginary stroke onto an FE-Schrift O to fake a Q and it looks wrong immediately — a whole national alphabet redesigned around exactly that failure case. It’s the demo a post from propaganda.institute, with spizh, ran that sent me down this rabbit hole; the plates below repeat it.