It all began in 1993, when the Wuppertal musician and inventor Hans Reichel was trying to design a CD booklet. “I was trying to fit an enormous quantity of text onto twelve tiny pages.” He decided to use Futura Condensed, but the legibility left a lot to be desired because it was a typeface made for headlines rather than texts set in small type.

Several days later, he was pondering how a readable, space-saving typeface might be achieved. Then, with a fine felt-tip pen and a bottle of Tipp-Ex, he drew FF Dax Condensed. Its distinguishing features are a narrow width, little contrast, and the absence of spurs … all features more common in headline fonts. But when a talented typographer like Hans Reichel, a pupil of Günter Gerhard Lange’s, gets it into his head to make Dax into a text font, it is guaranteed to work.