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Creating types : some designing tips
It's time to transform your idea into shapes, and draw the whole letters you planed to include into your typeface. This is also time to decide whether your're really controlling enough your soft to start working with your computers or not. A lots of type designers are still drawing all the letters on paper, using tracing paper for example, or grided paper sheets. The choice is yours, as it either depends on your computer skill level and on your personnal inclination for spending hours facing a screen...
But drawing letters directly on-screen helps being mathematicaly exact since the very beginning, and it saves a lot of time, as it avoids drawing letters twice. That's why we mostly do it like this at Point Central.
We're either using Adobe's Illustrator or Macromedia's Free Hand. The two softs are great and offering all the tools you need to make postscript drawings, and the difference is, as far as typographers are concerned, mainly philosophical...
But we prefer to use them than the font making soft : both are providing a single workspace where you can work on all letters, and see them at one glance. This helps a lot for homogeneity.
Besides, specialized softs offers more accurate and versatile tools for drawing, cutting, pasting, joining or manipulating curves.
Final advantage, they're both using postscript technology, which is considered more exact by professional typographers (this point is still discussed, but we personnaly find True type editing much too sensitive : it is less easy to precisely edit curves...)
You can scan your sketches and import the images as a model, but it is usualy a good idea to re-start from scratch : it helps improving things again.
THE GRID: HOW TO DECLINE WITH STYLE
Whatever how and where you do it, you now have to build the typeface's grid. It marks the various spaces where the letters are drawn, and features the main curves that are shared within various groups of letters.
In fact, and that is a key point in creating fonts, the quality of a typeface depends on a sublte balance between differenciation, which allons the eye of the reader to see recognize each letter within words, and consistency, that allows him to follow the flow of the text, and that makes the typeface personnality. This means letters must be either different in global shapes, but using common local shapes.
The following image show how similar (and slightly different) are some letters. In this example, we used Helvetica Black.
So, designing a typeface is a kind of game: you design a letter, that gives you some shapes that can then be used to build the following letters, and so on.
At some point, the type starts to act by itself, letters compelling you to follow their own rules! It also acts like an organism: if you change something in a specific letter, it will have cascading effects on some others. Sometime the face will even refuse to comply! Then you feel that you've created something: IT'S ALIVE!!, said Dr Frankenstein!
Below is a kind of declining guideline, that shows how letters can be grouped by shape similarities :
At this point, you'll have all shapes needed to build numbers, punctuations and symbols.
Of course these guideline groups are quite academic, and will produces regular typeface. But once you'll know them well, you shall introduce variations, and alter or break some similarities to express some feelings. In fact, those groups are showing you the skeleton of a type, the underlying architecture. So they are a starting point and type designing is about how you're going to alter those ideal (essential/eternal/basic) shapes and relationships in order to create something personnal and unseen.
During this lettershaping process, the grid will not only become your reference guide, but also the workspace, the anvil where you're going to shape each letters.
So, start by using the letters you've drawn to set the metrics of the grid: X-height, ascender, descender, EM square, etc... If you're not friendly with those notions, it would be a good idea to have a look at the
Anatomy of the letterforms article, in the Handbook of Typography).
Here's what a grid might looks like (more or less!):
Now that you have your working grid, start drawing the letters. While you're doing it, include in the grid the various re-usable shapes : curves, stems width, etc... It is also often a good idea to have nearby the grid, other small shapes like serifs for example, or joining curves.
This will accelerate your work, and avoid mistakes.
From time to time, or when you're having a doubt, gather letters to form various words to see if they're standing well together.
WEIGHT MATTERS
While you're into designing letters, think global. It takes few second to create a acute, a grave, or dieresis accent, but lot of people in Europe or eastern Europe will need it.
A minimal charset for a type would include capitals or lowercases, numbers, punctuations and some few essential symbols like arobace, dollar, sterling pound or &.
Including some international letters or accents will only take few minutes, but can make the difference between a cool face and a worldwide hit...
Another easy to do but important point is about weight. In order to be usable in conjonction with other types, your face need to have an adjusted weight. Of course, you can make a skinny regular, a heavyweighted ultra-black, but if your regular is a bold or your book is a light, this will just be a pain in the ass for designers to use your face, and...well, so long for the fees! Here are some average weights:
Now, after some hours or days of drawing and improving, you must have within fifty to one hundred shapes on your working space. Time to make them into a font file.
Let's see how to do it.
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