Reddit reviews Designing Type
We found 15 Reddit comments about Designing Type. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews Designing TypeWe found 15 Reddit comments about Designing Type. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
You can make guides out of any outlined object in Illustrator with CMD+5 [Mac] and CTRL+5 [Win], otherwise accessible via View > Guides > Make Guides. These can be hidden, locked and manipulated just like the standard horizontal and vertical guides.
For a closer look at type design in general (a HUGE topic), most will point to Designing Type as a good starting point. Taking a peek at typophile and perusing the Critique forum would also be extremely helpful from a conceptual (less technical) point of view.
Edit: Taking another peek at the letters and your question, if I were to approach a similar typeface, I'd definitely start off by selecting and removing specific nodes from a circle object and extending lines from them.
A few recommendations from my bookshelf:
I've been on a total typography book binge recently!
Finally, I strongly don't recommend Type Matters! If you see it in the store you may be tempted - it's a very attractive leather-bound book with sexy black and red illustrations - but I found it to be overly simplistic. It also looks like there's quite a lot of reading to be had, but the vast majority of the text in there is all repeated sample copypasta. (And if I wasn't disappointed enough in the book, the elastic came loose on my copy!)
I recommend the following books:
Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton.
This book is the essential introduction to typography and probably should be the first type book you get.
Lettering and Type by Bruce Willen and Nolan Strals.
This book provides an introduction to different types of lettering and typographic work, as well as a brief introduction to designing your own typeface.
Designing Type by Karen Cheng.
This book covers the intricacies and design considerations of each letter one by one. It's a great reference when designing your own type, or even if you just want a more in-depth look at letterforms.
I'm a type designer, so feel to ask me questions.
To keep the look and feel consistent across the entire font largely depends on understanding the fundamentals of visual communication design, typography, and the relationship between characters.
The process starts with a design with specific parameters, a "skeleton" of a typeface. You need to decide if it's going to be a serif, sans serif, slab serif, display, etc., then move on to the qualities of the typeface. What characters would it have (cold, friendly, fat, loud, etc.)? What purpose would it serve?
Once the design is settled, the work in creating a typeface from scratch involves lots and lots of tweaking to maintain a relationship with each glyph. Drawing glyphs is a lot of work, and yes, a lot of the work is done by eye. Each character could be "generated" and be mathematically accurate as a foundation, but it will be largely optically incorrect and loses an important quality, a human touch.
Extrapolation with fonts can be done with Superpolator and interpolation with RoboFab, but it doesn't make the typeface design better if it is not drawn correctly in the first place.
The best fonts out there, upon close inspection of their glyphs, show that their forms are derived from the written hand. See Gerrit Noordzij's The Stroke for more.
Karen Cheng's Designing Type is another good read. Another book that's coming soon is Fred Smeijers' Counterpunch 2nd Ed..
As glasspenguin mentioned, Typophile.com is a great message forum on type design. You will find a lot of information there.
I highly recommend the book Designing Type by Karen Cheng, it covers everything you could possibly need to know from a design standpoint.
http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Type-Karen-Cheng/dp/0300111509
Get your hands on books, especially this one can help a lot.
Start from scratch, expect garbage. If it's not garbage, then awesome, but it will be. Keep going, do more. Try to start with typefaces which aren't artificially created by your mind (such as Helvetica), but which come out of the tool youre using. Get a wide marker and just write. Start with just uppercase or lowercase letters, don't get overwhelmed. Hang out in r/typedesign and stay humble, ask experienced type designers for help. Good luck.
edit: oh and don't use Illustrator etc. if you can. Programs made for fonts (Glyphs, Fontlab, Fontforge) may feel rigid and obsolete (except for Glyphs maybe), but they offer much more control over anchor points and their handles, and they take only 30 minutes to learn the basics.
Draw alot. And not just letters. I like figure drawing, and the movements and curves I learn from figure drawing inform the shapes I make with letters. So the more you draw, the more refined your line work becomes. and the more you draw outside of letterforms, the more versatility you can have when you do draw letterforms.
Also, saturate yourself in what you like. Find out who all is doing what you like, and who is doing it the best. Then break down how they are doing it, and apply that knowledge in your own practice. Designing Type by Karen Cheng is a great reference book on letterforms.
The characters still need a lot of work. Overall, you're relying too much on perfect semicircles and monoweight strokes. It's a good starting point for a geometric sans, but now you need to go back and do a ton of optical tweaking to make things look right. I recommend picking up Karen Cheng's Book. I would also compare your characters to the ones in other geometric sans like Futura and Avenir. Take note of details like the way the shoulder of the 'n' and 'h' is handled and the thinning of strokes at joints.
Anyways, it's a cool start. Keep at it
I'd suggest a couple other books. Proponents of these two books would probably say they're incompatible, but I think that's usually where the most useful creative learning comes from: comparing two seemingly incompatible ideas and finding your own path.
The first is called "The Stroke" by Gerrit Noordzij (Hair-it Nord-zai), and the second is "Designing Type" by Karen Cheng.
The first focuses on type design as being rooted in calligraphic writing, a tool like a broad nib pen being dragged across a surface. The second is closer to what you're getting at with the Logo, Font & Lettering Bible, this idea of looking at each letter and studying its nuances.
Designing Type is a good start. Also Briem has good notes.
It's a pretty good first attempt, though I'm not sure exactly what is going on over by the e.
Some things you could improve:
The loop at the bottom of the f could use work. There's a hairline space on one side, which looks too small, and no space on the other. I would say the sides should be treated similarly and the spaces should be made to be a comfortable width.
The o is a bit awkward, but don't worry, it can be a difficult character to draw. Try constructing it with geometry, then shearing the resultant o to make it italic.
the r looks pretty good
The g needs to be flipped across its vertical axis. The ear is on the incorrect side and the junction where the loop intersects the bowl should be on the left. Again, as on the f, there are some awkward spaces where the loop intersects with the swash of the f; I would open up those spaces a bit.
Other than that, I'm not sure exactly what's going on with the e, but it looks like (if it were completed as is) it's a bit top-heavy.
I highly recommend Designing Type by Karen Cheng. It's great for learning to properly draw some of the more subtle features of type.
I'm still learning myself so some of these books I'm recommending depend on your skillset and interest I guess. For typedesign and understanding fundamentals: Designing type is a good read, same with Stroke. Free stuff like briem superhandy. As a primer I'd read this before I buy a type design book. For lettering I don't really have books of preference. I generally go googling for info on whatever I may have a doubt in or if I just need inspiration. Like if I were looking at script, I'd look at works by Tony di spigna, tommy thompson, david quay and the like. When I once had a doubt about negative space within letters, I googled and stumbled upon this which helped. so for lettering it's a bit all over the place where I mostly just got info from googling. However if you want a book in lettering for a beginner-intermediate then logo,font & lettering gets you upto speed on a lot of things though he can be a lil old in his methods. Also books by Mortimer Leach and Doyald Young. For calligraphy I think I mostly learnt it from speedball manuals and then just googled but more importantly I did a lot of writing which is why I picked up on it. I think to understand type properly you need to do some calligraphy, once you get a grasp on calligraphy, typedesign makes sense so you go buy type design books, eventually lettering becomes super easy.
In that case get yourself a copy of [Designing Type] (http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Type-Karen-Cheng/dp/0300111509/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1453594661&sr=1-1&keywords=designing+type+karen+cheng), a pen and a piece of paper.
And then go for Glyphs Mini. The book will easily get you up to speed with the basics, and Glyphs Mini really is very accessible.
First time out, I'd go for a serif typeface. I think they are a little more forgiving. Look at classic typeface designs for details. Keep the classic proportions of letters to one another in mind.
Try not to think of a typeface as a systematic design. The alphabet grew organically and is not a logically designed system of symbols. If you have some sort of modular system, sooner or later your system will not work for a certain letter. The letter has to break the system, instead of the system breaking the letter.
The industry standard type design tool is FontLab. I also find Glyphs to be a nice piece of software.
You should design a few control characters first, and typeset pages of words in those control characters. Tweak the hell out of the control characters and get them perfect before you start drawing other letters.
When you feel stuck, get out a pen and paper!
This book is pretty good.