Typophile - The 'magic' of type-design. - Comments

sorry if the following post

thierry blancpain — Mon, 2 Jan 2006 13:41:51 -0800

sorry if the following post is useless to you, im not really sure about it. i havent slept in about 30 hours, so please bear with me :)

concerning drawing letters im not as far as most people commenting here. but i have to say that my feeling is that you just dont haven’t done the mechanical, the handwork needed to get the lettershapes into your brain. im drawing and constructing and drawing a, b, c or whatever letter i like that day again and again. sometimes i try to match a font i already know and sometimes i just make fun stuff (a hairline-serif lowercase letter with fat slab serifs for example). this gave me a lot of knowledge about where the traps are in typedesign and where you normaly need to work a little bit longer on - for me, the hard lc-letters mostly are a and s.

right now, im struggling with the uppercase-letters of a display-sans im designing. its curvy, its round, but at the same time it still holds a lot of the “normal” features of sans-faces. now, my job is to match each letter to each other so that they work together while still maintain their speciality (its a display-face after all). i didnt have a brief, i started with an idea for two letters. i refined, drew a few other letters. refined them again, changing the whole contrast in the end and redrawing all letters again. then expanded the character-set, and then started with the uppercase... where i am now :)

its hard, but its good.

————

im not sure if im right in saying you’re not experienced enough to do this - but a text-font is a HARD job and needs some experienced hands and eyes to get done.

Some hurried things: The

hrant — Mon, 2 Jan 2006 12:59:02 -0800

Some hurried things:

The magic is there, but it is not conjured - it just happens.

For a text face, start with the boring stuff, like “n” and “o”.
For a display face, the opposite, like “g” and “Q”.

Beware of actually drawing out “skeletons” - that will point you
directly away from good notan. Think instead about boundaries.

The intended usage of a face (like news versus novels) is directly
linked to the font’s vertical proportions, color, width, spacing, etc.
Closely observe fonts that work in their mediums to guide your
own travels.

For a text face, express personal aesthetics only in spite of yourself.

hhp

For a text face, it would be

Nick Shinn — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 14:35:41 -0800

For a text face, it would be better to start with the lower case.
Try and get a lighter touch happening.
Do some words, or a succession of “a”s, and choose the best.

I understand, I think, what

Eric_West — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 14:14:13 -0800

I understand, I think, what the point of this is. But once I get all my proportions worked out and start adding contrast, Am I letting Fontlab dictate form? At what point do the individual characters form?

Like this?

Eric_West — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:36:02 -0800

Like this?

On the right. Skeleton, not

Nick Shinn — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 10:36:19 -0800

On the right. Skeleton, not outline.

>didn’t seem to do much for me.

You’re still hung up on the individual glyphs. Type is about the way the letter shapes interact with each other — and of course this is more evident in a sans, where there is less entertainment at the glyph level.

So, Draw them in the shapes

Eric_West — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 07:26:56 -0800

So,

Draw them in the shapes you want, like the left or the one on the right? Confused about skeleton shapes.

I only ask because I tried expanding trokes with a drawing like the one on the right, didn’t seem to do much for me.

HUMANIST SANS 1. Draw

Nick Shinn — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 22:52:58 -0800

HUMANIST SANS
1. Draw skeleton shapes with pencil.
2. Scan and place in template/mask layer
3. Manually trace path using bezier pen tool
4. Expand stroke/Make parallel path
5. Adjust glyph shapes, and sidebearings based on character juxtapositions in Metrics window
6. Add stroke contrast

Ok, After much (painful)

Eric_West — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 21:48:30 -0800

Ok,

After much (painful) consideration I’ve decide to start over. I believe that with a purpose in mind, I will find it much easier to focus on what I need to do and not just salvaging a re-hash. I’ve also done some thinking as to why I want to do this (type).

Here is my new objective: Comments welcome.

A type for a new magazine on Contemporary Architecture.
A serif version for text, sans for headlines. Humanist..

So, if anyone has thoughts, Criteria for type on nice matte magazine pages, maybe ID magazine quality paper. Not cheepo newsprint. Much appreciated.

Eric

>a text type for a

Nick Shinn — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 22:55:12 -0800

>a text type for a newspaper

I usually develop my prototype against a variety of successful news faces such as Utopia, Nimrod, and News 706, comparing performance in a narrow justified column, all with the same specs.

Then making chages, and compare again. And so on.

It’s really brutal, because I’m trying to match or better their character count without looking too small or too condensed or too vertical or too contrasty or not contrasty enough, and without entangled extenders or ambiguous character combinations.

You could start with any typeface and adapt it to those criteria, by a process of trial and error, call it design.

Once you’ve done one, you start to think and draw more non-verbally. Call it experience, or perhaps magic.

Once the technical

John Hudson — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 21:49:16 -0800

Once the technical requirements and limitations are covered, is it stylistic after that?

It is a mix of things, both personal and cultural, and these don’t come after ’the technical requirements and limitations are covered’: they are part of the way in which you approach those requirements and limitations. Even in the case of a typeface like Microsoft’s Tahoma UI font, which had some of the strictest technical requirements and limitations of any recent typeface, the requirements and limitations are not entirely determinative. So what you get is Matthew Carter’s response to those requirements and limitations, based on his many years of experience and the ideas he has developed about type for specific kinds of environments.

And the mix itself is quite particular. JFP is a distinctly French type designer, and his types are full of references to various aspects of French text and display typography and lettering from several centuries: he belongs to and furthers a national typographic tradition. On the other hand, I don’t think I am a distinctly Canadian type designer, and for me national tradition is much less obvious or important.

I like the bit where your

Nick Shinn — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 12:44:48 -0800

I like the bit where your eye pops out and yo-yos around before flying off.

Seems pretty magical to me.

Eric_West — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 12:22:23 -0800

Seems pretty magical to me.

“Once the technical

dezcom — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 11:44:28 -0800

“Once the technical requirements and limitations are covered, is it stylistic after that?”

Once they are, the stylistic issue will become self-evident.

ChrisL

Thank you all. I think John

Eric_West — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 10:08:50 -0800

Thank you all. I think John hit my question on the head. ’...the result is going to be different from asking JFP to... “

Once the technical requirements and limitations are covered, is it stylistic after that?

The 'magic' of type-design.

Eric_West — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 11:42:13 -0800

In light of recent events...I have been asking myself a question. That maybe someone would give their 2 cents.

1. How is the character of a new type ’extrapolated’ from it’s purpose.

How lets say, a text type for a newspaper vs. a text type for a historical novel vs. a text type for a contemporary design journal.

Thanks

edit: How a types’ character is derived from it’s usage. Like, JFP designed a type for whatever use, what is the driving creative force/philosophy behind what shapes the letters take.