A Year of Type Design

Photo

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 01:00:02 +0100

Book covers from 1960s. These are from the American Geographical...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:45:59 +0000

Book covers from 1960s. These are from the American Geographical Society’s Around the World Program of children’s educational books. More on Flickr.

How can you design a typeface for a language you don't speak?

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:12:02 +0000

This is a question I’m often asked by people who haven’t come across type design before....

Filling out the character set of Lumen Sans Heavy.

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 16:18:23 +0000

Filling out the character set of Lumen Sans Heavy.

explore-blog: Ten Things I Wish I Knew Sooner Rather Than Later...

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 23:59:55 +0000

explore-blog:

Ten Things I Wish I Knew Sooner Rather Than Later — timeless life-wisdom from the brilliant Debbie Millman, who is wise.

Nice.

This experimental sans was something I drew in my sketchbook...

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:08:50 +0100

This experimental sans was something I drew in my sketchbook whilst travelling in 2010. The concept behind the design was to see what would happen if black and white shapes became somewhat disconnected. Counterforms are made of perpendicular straight lines while outer edges are wide superellipses.

Despite its heavy weight, Argon maintains its counterspace areas in two special ways. Firstly, junctions of straight lines are drawn apart (as on M or N), which allows the counters to retain their full height. Secondly, joins between curves are given a pronounced notch or ‘bite’ out of the junction (as on B, R or 8). The result is a spurless, retro-futuristic display face.

After drawing the Latin in FontLab from sketches, I decided to try the same design with Thai script.

The family will include a couple of avant-garde outlined inverse cuts (shown below), possibly working as a layered font for «double foreground» special effects.

This example, using my typeface Mint, shows that creating an...

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 00:32:00 +0100

This example, using my typeface Mint, shows that creating an oblique style is not straightforward. Automatic slanting of the upright creates diagonally pinched letterforms. Stroke widths get messed up, angle of stress changes and curves completely lose their balance and tension. Type designers need to correct the effects of mechanlcal sloping to attain optically balanced obliques. One trick is to define a new set of curves that can be tweaked for individual letterforms; also it’s vital to keep comparing the upright and the oblique to check the speed of the curves and stroke weights are optically the same despite the translation.

(Click images to enlarge)

Between black and white

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 13:57:26 +0100

This week, the annual ATypI conference is taking place in Hong Kong. Unfortunately I’m not...

The MA ends

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 09:47:34 +0100

Our fantastic year at Reading is now complete, and the class of 2012 has dispersed to make way for...

typolka: Mastering Type – Mota Italic – Berlin The Mastering...

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:00:47 +0100

typolka:

Mastering Type – Mota Italic – Berlin

The Mastering Type exhibition now on at Mota Italic in Berlin features the work of type design students from KABK and Reading.

Lovely printed sheets from my MATD typeface specimen!

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 16:24:02 +0100

Lovely printed sheets from my MATD typeface specimen!

The Paradigm of the Stroke

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:07:00 +0100

Recently, we were visited by Will Hill, ex-Reading student and now Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design...

I’ve been meaning to give Spiro curves a try for a while....

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:29:00 +0100

I’ve been meaning to give Spiro curves a try for a while. By now, I’m fairly confident with Bezier curves, but I’m always interested in finding other ways to do things, and Spiro curves have a very different quality to them. As we all know, Bezier splines are especially nightmarish when drawing curves that don’t have an even radius — think of a slightly bowed vertical stem leading into a much tighter serif bracket. The problem is Beziers only allow control of the slope of a curve, without balancing the curvature. So extra points and handles are required to create smoothly connecting curves. With spiro curves, on the other hand, as points are moved, the equation instantly rebalances to maintain a smoothly changing curvature, even when the curves have a significant change in radius from one point to the next. There are no control handles to worry about, making it easier to quickly adjust letterforms.

I used Raph Levien’s Spiro tools on FontForge. FontForge was a complete nuisance to install, and doesn’t feel very natural yet, but my first adventures with spiro curves seem quite promising, and it would be hugely interesting if FontLab could add support for this alternative way of drawing in the future.

The best thing about Spiro on FontForge is when the equation can’t be solved and the curve pops into loopy madness! I’m looking forward to seeing the more sensible results of this little experiment.

Whence originality?

Tue, 01 May 2012 00:07:00 +0100

David Březina (@MrBrezina) came to visit us last week, to talk through his career in type design and...

It's May already!

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:31:00 +0100

The year has flown past at an alarming speed — not that it’s over yet, but as our project...

Figuring out a system for my floating marks.

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 01:33:00 +0100

Figuring out a system for my floating marks.

Finally, Burmese begins to click

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 17:19:00 +0100

Our Spring term has flown by, and progress on my typeface was honestly a bit disappointing. Perhaps...

AFDKO Workshop. Caution: geeky.

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 11:56:00 +0000

The Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO or simply FDK) is a set of command line tools...

The typographic tradition in non-Latin scripts

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 19:45:00 +0000

In Europe, the various strands of typography came together over centuries. Even before the arrival...

Designing the design

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 19:30:00 +0000

There’s a phrase that pops up from time to time in the department; it’s probably a...