Type Design

Hi all,

Typeface design—project 5

As the final project of the semester in a Type class, it seemed logical to give you the opportunity to design your own typeface. We will be using FontLab Studio (free trial available on fontlab.com), the premier font creating application. 

The project hand-ins are –

1.) Hand rendered drawings of your type face components

2.) A digital file of your working typeface—all lowercase characters and punctuation. Uppercase characters are optional if you have time.

3.) A type specimen poster of your typeface—11×17″

The theme and structure is up to you, be it geometric, cursive, hand-drawn, serif or sans-serif, fun, serious, creative, experimental, abstract or realistic etc etc. Maybe it reflects your personality? Maybe your typeface is based off of an existing typeface, and carries a historical component? You choose. But, as a word of warning—I wouldn’t make things too complicated, otherwise you may run out of time! You must give your typeface a name (nothing too cheesey).

A typeface is built up of structural components, rather than whole letters individually. These components make up the ascender and descender, bowl (curved elements of o, b, p, d and so on), serif (if necessary), horizontal and vertical strokes, curvilinear stroke (for the body of the ’s’), and  are designed based upon a consistent structure (thicks and thins, serifs or sans-serif). So, theoretically, if your components have been designed consistently, when you piece them together (for example, the bowl, vertical stroke, and an ascender), they will create the letterforms (in this case, d or b). The graphic below demonstrates visually what I’m talking about. The link to this image is here – http://www.stonetypefoundry.com/Resources/WA%20Dwiggins%20Lecture%202007%20im.pdf 

In the process of type design, your initial drawings are the most important step, as these are what you’ll be converting to digital files. Rather than draw out the whole alphabet, it will be easier for you to make your components as close to perfect as possible, so then you don’t have to spend extra time in FontLab catching up. When drawing your components, consider using an x-height diagram, so you can be sure your measurements are relevant to each other. Tracing paper is also a valuable tool in terms of reproduction. This is why I mentioned earlier, you may want to keep things relatively simple. I have chosen to focus on the lowercase, rather than uppercase for two reasons – 1.) I’m not sure we’ll have time to develop both 2.) the lowercase has more contrast, and will display more variety in your typeface. Once you have your typeface designed and manufactured, you’ll designa type specimen poster to show off your new font!

Here are a couple of useful articles from iLT on making typefaces, just for your benefit – http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/22/so-you-want-to-create-a-font-part-1/ and http://ilovetypography.com/2009/03/23/the-first-ones-the-hardest/

What you need to do for next Friday (April 17th) 

1.) Download the 30 day free trial of FontLab Studio, the link is here – http://www.fontlab.com/fontlab-font-editors/fontlab-studio-8212-professional-font-editor/download-fontlab-studio.html

2.) Familiarize yourself with the interface – open FontLab and start playing (you can open an existing font, eg: Helvetica, and start customizing). This will mean it’s not such a shock to the system when we meet on the 17th. There are also tutorials online at FontLab.com—although they’re not the best. Worth a look though. There are also video tutorials on youtube, albeit mostly in different languages. 

3.) Have your components drawn and ready to scan into Illustrator (1st step to making your font digital).

Schedule

04/17 — Bring hand drawn components to scan, FontLab tutorial (I’ll show you the basics and get you going).

04/24 — Work in class developing typeface.

05/01 — Final day of the semester. Hand in finished typeface.

FINALS WEEK — Critique Type Specimen poster & turn in digital portfolio (CD please).

Given the fact that this is a rather large post, I have this info on a pdf for you here (minus the image and links) – project5_brief

Happy Easter! You can always reply to this post or email me with questions.

Phil