I was born on Palm Sunday 1941 in Trieste, Italy. According to the journal my birth occurred exactly at noon. I didn’t think much about that at the time, but was told later that there is something special with children born on a Sunday. And were they born on a Sunday at 12 o’clock they would be destined to become geniuses. I had a teacher in the secondary school who firmly believed in such things. What she achieved with her ‘admiration’ - she declared it before the class - was that I had to live with the nickname Genius for a while. I didn't tell her that the newborn Franko was put into the same childbed as a newborn girl - and that she was a Gipsy! According to some well informed ladies whom my mother knew, that fact alone would bring me extraordinary luck in life. I cannot imagine what my teacher would have made out of that.

If you have ever met me, you know of what value those sensational facts are.

Those were war days, and war had some impact on me. Once I was on the edge of causing a major political crisis. An aunt of mine, who was opera crazy, had taken my mother and me to the local opera house, Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, so that we could enjoy some nice singing. That was during the Winter 1944/45 season. I am sure about the time because my father was not with us. He had been arrested by the Germans and sent to a labor camp in Berchtesgaden in southern Germany.

There we were, enjoying the ‘bel canto’. To keep me quiet I was given an apple. I forgot to tell you that we had our places in the first row on the balcony. The right side, I still remember that. Eating my apple and leaning from the railing, I suddenly dropped the apple. Unluckily, it fell on a German officer sitting right beneath us, who was also enjoying the ‘bel canto’. He made a lot of fuss, the performance was stopped, and it took quite a while to find out that a half-chewed apple wasn't exactly a hand-grenade. I am not sure, but I think we left the opera house very very quietly, and in a hurry.

What has this to do with typefaces, you may wonder. Well, nothing. I just wanted to give you some backgroud. If you think I should limit myself to the essentials, I’ll do that.

One of those essential facts is that I am not Italian. Yes, I was born in Italy, but in Trieste, which is a very cosmopolitan town, once Austria-Hungary’s main port, still noticeable. My parents are Slovene. I am Slovene myself and my primary and secondary schooling was in Slovene schools. In 1945, after the war, Slovene schools were restored and I had the privilege to learn to read and write in my mother tongue - a privilege denied to my mother, who was raised during the Mussolini era, when even her name - Zora - was changed to an Italian Albina.

Another essential fact is that I left Italy for Sweden in 1961. After a while, I found out that design, printing, typography and graphic arts in general interested me. I had, earlier, been interested in literature, architecture, and the arts, but not enough for me to dedicate my life to any of them. For a short time, I even had the mad idea to become an interpreter, but woke up after half a year of studies to realise that running from one conference to another and retelling in one language what somebody else had just said in another wasn’t exacly what I wanted to do.

Speaking of languages, when I was 15 I became interested in the international language Esperanto. That’s another essential fact. It took no time at all for me to learn and speak it. I found my wife through it, and a lot of friends throughout the world. Esperanto has given me a wider perspective on the world and a better understanding of different peoples’ values.

Finding out that typography and design interested me, it was easy to stake out my future. I found out that a school called Grafiska Institutet in Stockholm was almost ideal for my interests. In 1967, I was graduated from the institute and was ready for the market.

My first job after graduation was with the Swedish telecom company Ericsson. They needed someone to take care of printed matter at one of their divisions. It was located in Tyresö, a suburb to Stockholm, so that’s why I live in Tyresö. For some twenty years I remained with Ericsson serving their information needs. The job was straightforward, nothing fancy.

In 1989, I decided that I wanted to try something new. I left Ericsson and founded my own company. I continued to do much the same work, mostly for Ericsson, but taking on new customers gave me the opportunity to work with magazines and books. What was new was that I was able to decide what to do with the spare time, since the workflow through the year can vary quite a lot. So, I took up designing typefaces.

I had become interested in typefaces during my studies at Grafiska Institutet. I had even made some attempts to design two or three typefaces in the early 1970’s by cutting the single letters in rubelith film. None of them became a ready typeface. Only 20 years later, with a Macintosh and Fontographer, I was able to make usable solutions.

What drives me to design new typefaces? I cannot say really. Interest in single characters and details, of course, often the basic question “What if...?”. Most of them never become ready - you should be glad for that. They remain just sketches, ideas not worth fulfilling. Some reach the final stage and are presented to the public.

I am not much of an experimenter. Most of my typefaces are quite traditional. I have the conservative idea that they must be easy to use and read, but they must have a touch which makes them special in a way.

Lately, my design work has changed in its character. It has become more and more directed toward the internet and interactive web solutions. I am an autodidact in that area, but I have always been open to new ideas. Of my internet jobs, the one that gets most attention is a directory of links to worldwide news media. It's one I prepared for the Swedish Esperanto-Federation whose site I administer. It has become one of the largest directories of its kind, with over 15 000 links as I write this. This directory - named Kiosken, in case it interests you - can be traced back to my old and deep interest in newspapers. While I was still in primary school I used to buy newspapers for the money I should have used to buy snacks. Real newspapers and magazines, not comics.

Now I’m diverging again. Or maybe not. For some time I was teaching “Web typography” at the Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm. Many of the students will be working with newspaper design, both in print and on the web. In this way my different interests are tied together; interests only vaguely related are suddenly part of a whole.

That’s the reason why I am now waiting for the most obvious predictions made at my birth - those about extraordinary luck and becoming a genius - to come true. It isn’t too late yet.