For this project, you’ll develop the majority of glyphs for a font, starting with sketches before moving into TypeTool:
- full English alphabet in lower- and upper-case,
two ligatures (fi and fl)0 – 9, anda subset of punctuation marks (double and single left/right quotes, period, comma, exclamation point, question mark, em dash and hyphen).
Designing a font requires a lot more work and creativity than most people think, so the project is broken into several stages to make it more manageable.
Design Brief
Begin by writing a design brief for your font. Read this article about design briefs. We’ll share these in class, the you’ll revise them as necessary after getting feedback. Your brief should be 200 – 250 words long.
Things to include (in addition the the general advice from the above link):
- Where does it fit within Lupton’s Type Classification (p. 46)?
- What are some of its distinctive features? What distinguishing characteristics are repeated across multiple glyphs? See Lupton 36 – 37 and the report on Warnock that we reviewed in class (pages 16 – 21).
Tip: Your brief should say whether your font will be designed for headings (called a “display font”) or long stretches of text (“body text”). Display fonts are generally easier to design; body text fonts require a surprising amount of subtlety and skill. You can choose whichever you like, but a display font will likely be easier to do.
Font Comparisons
Find at least four fonts at Adobe’s Font site that you’ll use for inspiration and identify two or three aspects that you’re considering for use in your font. Could be x-height, could be the amount of contrast, could be serif style. Create a Google Doc. Paste in a screenshot of some sample text in each and identify what aspects of the font you find interesting/useful.
Sketch Variations
Start by creating some basic glyphs in at least three distinct variations. Start by referring back to your design brief and the four fonts you found at Adobe’s site.
Then, draw lightly (with pencil) sketch a baseline, an x-height, and a cap height on a full page of your sketchbook. Then (also with a pencil) draw the glyph. After you’ve finished your sketch, consider what things you might draw differently—would you make the serifs more prominent or a slightly different shape? Increase the contrast? Refer (again) back to the four fonts you’re drawing inspiration from.
Create two more versions of the glyph with those variations.
Create three variations for each of these glyphs:
- /H/
- /o/
- /d/
- /t/
You’ll also share the sketches in class and revise them until you’re comfortable with how your handful of glyphs look. I’ll also periodically give you feedback on them (throughout the process).
Handgloves
In the next step, you’ll sketch large versions of the glyphs for “Handgloves”—you’ll do this on 8.5′ x 11 paper. Once you’re done, we’ll scan them so they can be imported into TypeTool as backgrounds for each glyph to guide your work creating the outlines.
TypeTool
Here’s where most of your time will be spent: Designing all of the glyphs in the list above. As we’ll discuss in class, fonts (at least good ones) share a lot of material from one glyph to the next, so you won’t be creating every glitch from scratch. The DNA of a professionally designed font guides glyph construction so that the characters look like they belong together.
For example, if you start by designing the /o/ and the /l/, you can use those paths (or portions of them) to create /p/, /d/, /q/, and /e/. The /H/ can give you material for /I/ and /T/ (and, depending on your specific font, might provide sources for /X/, /M/, and /N/.
Grading Criteria
Design Brief (10%): Is the brief complete and informative?
Four Fonts (10%): Do the four fonts all include some potential elements for your font? Do you identify those elements using correct terminology?
Glyph Variations (10%): Do the sketches show exploration of a design space or are the just rote, minor repetitions?
Handgloves (15%): How well does the font work after the large-scale sketching?
Complete set of glyphs (20%): Does it include all of the glyphs listed in the description above?
Coherence/DNA (25%): Do the glyphs all feel like they’re part of the same font? Note that some fonts intentionally include some quirks to give them visual interest, but those should both appear intentional and should complement, not overshadow, the font’s feel.
Difficulty (10%): A very simple geometric sans requires less work than a humanist serif (usually). And as I said above, a display font is a (often) a little easier than an elegant body text font.