For practice, experimentation, or fun?

Many of the best and most successful type designers, including Matthew Carter, have indicated the importance to them of the design ’brief’: the purpose and use of the planned font. Carter has said in a recent New Yorker article that if you asked him to design a font, without any further specification, the paper or screen would still be blank in another two weeks.

However, the brief need not be purely utilitarian. The goals can be aesthetic as well.

Once when I posted a font for the critique section here the most valuable question or comment was, “what is the type to be used for,” i.e., book text, display for books, book covers, poster display, whatever, and I didn’t have an answer. As William Berkson points out, in the case of Matthew Carter, or most likely many others as well, the design “brief” is obviously important. I didn’t have an answer, although I knew where the design came from, what motivated me to design the font in the first place. I think a very good source for information on the purposes of font design, that is, design with an end in mind, based as it were on a design brief, is Frederic Goudy’s “Goudy’s Type Designs.” He was very clear on what he was doing and why and he explains his ideas well.

This article might help you:
http://www.typographer.org/2005_11_01_digests.html

Why design it if it as no finality yet?

Build it and they will come.

Mariana,
I will be the heretic and encourage you to venture forth with a design in search of a reason. Sometimes you just start to see relationships of form and play with it. Sometimes a typeface might come out of it. I think a path towards exploration of form is just as valid as a job for hire where you are given a task to complete. Goudy and Carter have their way but it is not the only way. If after you kick around a design for a while and a utilitarian mode makes itself known from it, go for it (and tell everyone later that you planned it that way all along :-)

ChrisL

There are different approaches and different reasons. I’d agree that a design brief is the best way to get to a design, when you (or your client) have a specific need. But the other method of creating just to create is no less valid.

Look at fonts from Emigre (Licko, Barnbrook, etc.), T-26, Underware, Veer, etc. and you’ll see plenty of fonts that didn’t have a formal design brief or a specific client in mind. Even Jonathan Hoefler has created fonts for purely exploratory reasons (e.g. HTF Fetish or HTF Gestalt).

If you have an itch, scratch it!

True, Joe, but aren’t those examples you named (Emigre and Jonathan Hoefler) instances where the designer set their own clear brief?

For instance, a lot of Licko’s early typefaces were attempts to design according to the limited digital technology of the day. She made fonts that were quite small in their data size (especially Matrix… hence the latin serifs… similar to the goal that Matthew Carter set for himself with Charter). That’s a brief. Even a brief that comes from yourself is still a brief. Maybe her briefs got less specific over time; as a font’s data size became less of an issue, she started revising her older designs for newer tech. (i.e., Modula). Later, she made revivals (Mrs. Eaves, Filosofia). To me, a revival is a brief—as long as you do it right!

I know less about Jonathan’s work, but I suspect that some of his experiments might have been born out of “what if…” questions. Again, if I ask myself, “what if I design a textura that can be used in 9-point text?,” that sounds a lot like a brief. A customer brief may be a bit more specific, but a brief is a brief, isn’t it? (“Make me a 9-point textura that is based on Wynkyn de Worde’s letters, and not Peter Schoeffler’s. Oh, and make sure that it has CE accents and a little dog-symbol in it, too.”)

Even an “itch” is a brief. But when someone says, “hmm. I want to design a typeface.” and has no other ideas, other than a general desire, they might not come very far.

The issue I think that is emerging here is to what extent type design is art or craft. In his book ’What is Art?’ R.G. Collingwood argued that one of the chief differences between art and craft is that the craftsman has a very clear and precise idea of the end product, whereas for the artist the process of exploration and trial and error defines the end product, and not a predetermined goal. Another feature of art is that its main goal is self expression or communication—depending on which school you belong to—whereas craft has some useful purpose.

I think the reality is that type design is a mixture of art and craft, and how much of each varies with the typeface. Even the division between art and craft is problematic, as design can demand just as creative a process as art, even though the goal of design always has a utilitarian aspect, which art need not.

Also there is an emotional dimension to type design, just as with art. But both art and design are processes of imaginative problem-solving, and problem-solving is likely to be poor without a well conceived idea of the problem.

The following is an interesting account of the development of the excellent recent typeface Farnham, by Christian Schwartz. You will note a mixture of a series of well-defined design problems, but an overall aesthic and emotional goal that led him to change the brief. Here is his account, taken from www.orangeitalic.com:

“I’ve never been able to find a decent digital version of [Vendôme], so I decided to digitize my own, give it a “proper” italic rather than the sloped roman of the original, add small caps and oldstyle figures, and draw the whole thing in at least two optical sizes. A colleague of mine suggested that Vendôme seems to be a parody of Deberny & Peignot’s version of Garamond, so that was going to be the basis for a lot of the work. Partway through, like with so many projects, I lost interest, and later realized that what I really wanted to draw was not an agressively spiky Garamond but an agressively spiky Flieschman: Farnham.”

So I conclude from this story that a well thought out ’brief’ is important to good design, but that the designer may change the ’brief’ as he or she goes along, and partly for artistic reasons.

It may seem like there’s not much philosophical difference between setting one’s own brief or working to a client’s, but in assessing the merit of various options/directions during the design process, the difference between relying on one’s own judgement and someone else’s is huge.

This is not the same issue as designing for a specific usage.

With a specific usage as criterion, the performance of a typeface can be readily assessed, but a for an original “what if” design, the designer has to rely on the creative and interpretive abilities of art directors, graphic designers, and typographers to realize the full potential of the new typeface.

What’s important is not so much “where” a new face will be applied, but “how”, and that will not be apparent to the type designer, and won’t be apparent to the typographer either, until he or she starts to work with the new face and see what it can do.

Having said that, I don’t think that typographers generally approach new faces in such an experimental manner. The norm is to expect new faces to perform similarly to old ones, in conventional layouts, but with some slight difference of nuance.