Wicked Problems in Type Design. The history of History by Peter Biľak. Two years after releasing History, Peter Bilak reflects on the process of creating this skeletal system in which different styles are imposed on a Roman capital base. Previous experiments are mentioned, as well as inspiration sources for the typeface. Type design, like many disciplines, has often been driven by technology, each wave of change in printing technology provoking the development of new approaches to design. In the eighteenth century, for example, innovations in papermaking and inking techniques inspired new typefaces with much higher contrast between the thick and thin strokes of the characters.
The introduction of pantographic punch- and matrix-cutting in the late nineteenth century enabled numerous variations of a typeface to be manufactured from a single drawing, transforming typefaces into flexible systems with vast ranges of typographic variants. The History type system was in development longer than any other project I ever worked on. Decoratica by Peter Bilak, 1994. Research Directory - TypeCulture® Anatomy of A Typeface - Lawson, Alexander S - Google Books.
Designing type - Karen Cheng - Google Books. Daily Type Specimen. Thinking with Type | Contents. Typies. Typographer's Glossary. Serif: Serif's are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface that has serifs is called a serif typeface (or seriffed typeface). Some of the main classifications of Serif type are: Blackletter, Venetian, Garalde, Modern, Slab Serif, Transitional, and Informal.
Fonts in each classfication share certain similiar characteristics including the shape or appearance of their serifs. Serif fonts are widely used in traditional printed material such as books and newspapers. Contemporary Typographic Media Research Blog 2012 | type that can talk to you because words have meaning, type has spirit! Designing with Type: Devoted to the Art and Appreciation of Typography. ☙ Theory Lesson Listing | TypEdu ❧ Writing Writing roman and itallic letterforms with the broad edged and the pointed nib dip pen forms a solid foundation for all further study of type.
The instruction is simple and craft oriented. Getting aquainted with the pen and it's behavior on paper informs all future design endeavors. Read more? Four basic lessons to understand type design theory. The Design Space Understanding type design in terms of navigating a multi-dimensional space containing all possible shapes opens the door to real creative thinking. The Letter Model for Translation Typefaces This modular system of building blocks illustrates the analogy of shapes throughout the alphabet. The Two Kinds of Contrast The two basic types of writing tool — rigid vs. flexible — are essential for understanding the nature of contrast in writing and by extension in type design.
Two Types of Construction Roman and italic, different motions in writing result in different character shapes. Curve compensation. Dynamo: Main. Inconspicuous vertical metrics. By Alec Julien Five? There are generally taken to be five vertical measures of note in type design (from bottom to top): descender, baseline, midline*, caps-height, and ascender. But if you delve into the minutiae of font design, you soon discover that there are a slew of important vertical metrics that aren’t much talked about. In this article, I will take a look at several of these metrics, and how they are used in font design. t-height Take a look at the basic alphabet from the venerable Minion, with the top three measures highlighted across each glyph: You’ll note that the lowercase ‘t’ sticks out like a proverbial sore thumb.
The tradition for serif types is, like with Minion, for the crossbar of the ‘t’ to be at the font’s midline line, and for the top stem of the ‘t’ to come up somewhere midway between the midline and the caps-height. Typically, sans serif faces adhere to the same rule, as do slab serifs. Overshoot And typical uppercase overshoots: e-bar height A-bar height And then some. Type and Media 2012. Typedia: A Shared Encyclopedia of Typefaces. Letritas. Web Typography: Educational Resources, Tools and Techniques. Typolis. The FontFeed | Fonts, Typography, Lettering, Design. Directory. Articles & Essays - TypeCulture® The Design of Multilingual Type Families Written by: Jonathan Perez Type designers often strive for a new interpretation of letter forms, but Jonathan Perez seems just as interested in developing new design processes to better address an era of increasing multilingual communication and the rise in diversity of non-Latin scripts.
In this article, he shares the strategies and decisions made while designing a typeface family in collaboration with a team of type designers specializing in different writing systems. Download PDF 161kb Frederic Warde: New York State of Mind Written by: Simon Loxley The book and type designer Frederic Warde is little more than a phantom in most histories of type, known only for creating the typeface Arrighi, and for being the husband of the charismatic Beatrice Warde, author of The Crystal Goblet. Download PDF 186kb Aesthetic Innovation in Indigenous Typefaces: Designing a Lushootseed Font Download PDF 850kb Download PDF 785kb The Scribe and the Silhouette Hearing Type.
Type Theory. Typographic Anatomy.