Understanding The Difference Between Type And Lettering. Watch Bigwig Designers Explain The Art And Craft Of Typography. Type surrounds us, from street signs and subway maps to cellphone interfaces and the tags tucked behind our shirt collars. Yet, until relatively recently, many of didn’t take notice of the decision-making and craft behind the design of those letters--not until, that is, computers gave us the choice between hundreds of fonts and the possibility to design our very own.
So how do the pros define their work? A new short video titled Type, from PBS Arts’ Off Book series, brings together some of today’s bold-faced names in typography to talk how they arrange typography into systems of information. And one quickly gets the sense that their approaches are radically different. For Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones (the team behind such typefaces as Tungsten, Requiem, and Gotham), the type speaks at a sotto voce, whereas Pentagram’s Paula Scher adjusts the volume to whatever the audience can tolerate.
Respect Thy Typography. Advertisement Good typography shouldn’t have to rely on ornamental crutches to stand tall. Yet despite all the tools and knowledge available to us, we readily embrace a flourishing, decorative typography, with cheap tricks used in a misguided attempt to make it “pop”. This ancient art may rapidly be gaining popularity, but are we paying it the respect it deserves? Take a snapshot of the visual culture that surrounds you—magazines, movie posters, packaging, websites—how much of it relies on typography? Looking Back It’s fair to say that the global webdesign community is experiencing a typographical renaissance. But with such power comes great responsibility. That’s not to say typographic design can’t be ornamental, complex or even illustrative.
Consider Milton Glaser’s “I love New York” logo from 1977, commissioned as part of a marketing campaign by the New York State Department of Commerce. Lovely examples of modern typographic icons. Challenging The Rules But it’s not all gore, of course. 12 Sources of Inspiration for Creating Your Own Lettering or Typeface Designs. This is an article written by guest author Sean Hodge from AiBURN, a blog about design, creativity, inspiration, tutorials, and vector graphics. Introduction Lettering and Typeface design is a creative endeavor that requires constant sources of motivation, influence, and inspiration. If you dream of painstakingly designing the next amazing Open Type Font, desire to craft beautiful Hand Drawn Lettering, or feel the urge to create original Typeface Designs then this article is for you. 1.
Bring Your Analysis to the Process Learn how letters function alone, as typefaces, and in real world design systems. Logic can take you a reasonable way when analyzing. Platelet is a font released by Emigre. Consider how the letters work within the typeface itself. You could certainly bring this same kind of critique to professional grade fonts as well. 2. Since the dawn of the machine age type has evolved into the creation of repeatable designs. Learn the terminology of the craft of typeface design. 3. 4. Respect Thy Typography. 13 Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts. If you're serious about creating a typeface design, then you'll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design.
Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples. Typeface and Font Design Tutorials Designing a Typeface, With Illustrator and FontLab, from Start to Finish - Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 In this three part series Jesse Hora shows us how to design a typeface. He begins in Illustrator and works his way through to FontLab. Build a Geometric Typeface Cypher13 (now known as Berger & Föhr) show us their process in how to design a geometric font.
Design an Intricate Display Font Design a Headline Typeface Develop a Themed Pictorial Font. Type glossary. Aesc (phonetic: ash) A ligature of two letters - 'a' and 'e'. The aesc derives from Old English, where it represented a diphthong vowel, and has successfully migrated to other alphabets including Danish and Icelandic. Aperture The constricted opening of a glyph, as seen in the letter 'e'. Varying the size of the aperture has a direct effect on the legibility of a letterform and, ultimately, readability. Ascender The part of a lower case letterform that projects above the x-height of the font. Ascenders are important for ease of prolonged reading, though the combination of too much ascender-height and not enough x-height can cause problems.
BaselineThe baseline is where the feet of your capital letters sit. Bowl The shapely, enclosed parts of letters such as 'p' and 'b'. Beak The beak-shaped terminal at the top of letters such as 'a', 'c', 'f' and 'r'. Bracket A wedge-like shape that joins a serif to the stem of a font in some typefaces. Crossbar The crossbar connects two strokes, as in 'H'. Helvetica Part One. Movies - TypeCulture® The Creation of a Printing Type From The Design to The Print by Frederic W. Goudy. This silent film from the 1930s shows the preeminent American type designer Frederic Goudy (1865-1947) creating his typeface Goudy Saks.
Goudy fans will delight in watching the master at work, but more importantly, this is a document of his type-making process - from the original drawings in pencil and ink, through the engraving of the working pattern and the matrix to the casting and proofing. (Thanks to Prof. David Pankow for allowing us to post this film.) Watch (00:10:16) Typomania Do you need to explain the significance of type to your parents, your Aunt Edna or the first-year students in your Typography 101 class?
Watch (00:06:59) To a “T” First broadcast in May 2006 on the popular CBS Sunday Morning television show, this is an introduction to the world of fonts that combines well with Typomania to provide newcomers with different views on the purposes and significance of typefaces. Watch (00:03:16) How to Choose a Typeface - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Choosing a typeface can be tricky. The beauty and complexity of type, combined with an inexhaustible supply of options to evaluate, can make your head spin.
But don’t be baffled — and don’t despair. While there are no easy-to-follow rules on how best to choose a typeface, there are many tried-and-true principles you can quickly learn and apply to make an appropriate typeface choice. What Is Your Goal? The first thing you have to do in order to choose a typeface is form a strong impression in your mind about how you want your audience to react to the text. Perhaps the hardest part of breaking down the typeface selection process is understanding which parts are more subjective and which parts are more objective. Legibility It may seem at first glance that legibility and readability are the same thing, but they are not.
Consider this example where the left block of text is set in Tobin Tax, a decorative serif typeface. Quick tips for great legibility: Readability Design Intent 1. The Simplicity of Helvetica. Helvetica is one of the most popular typefaces in the world. Technically speaking, it’s a sans serif Grotesque typeface, inspired by and based on the Akzidenz-Grotesk typeface created by Berthold around 1898. In practical terms, though, it’s used by designers at independent firms, big corporations, and everything in between, from all over the world.
Helvetica has been featured by MOMA in New York and has received a number of awards and worldwide recognition. There’s even a documentary and a few books about it. But why is Helvetica so popular? What is it about this font that seemingly tries to be inconspicuous that has made it such a part of our culture and daily lives? We see it dozens of times every day, from product logos, to websites, to packaging, and numerous other items. A Brief History The original Helvetica was designed in Switzerland in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas type foundry (Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei). The original Helvetica brochure. Rise In Popularity. Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement Even with a relatively limited set of options in CSS, typography can vary tremendously using pure CSS syntax.
Serif or sans-serif? Large or small font? Line height, spacing, font size and padding… The list goes on and on. To find typographic design patterns that are common in modern Web design and to resolve some common typographic issues, we conducted extensive research on 50 popular websites on which typography matters more than usual (or at least should matter more than usual). We’ve chosen popular newspapers, magazines and blogs as well as various typography-related websites. We’ve carefully analyzed their typography and style sheets and searched for similarities and differences.
Ultimately, we identified 13 general typographic problems and issues related to typographic design and tried to find answers to them through our research: How popular are serif and sans-serif typefaces in body copy and headlines? 1. 2. Verdana is used minimally for headlines. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. (al)