MyFonts Interview with Rob Leuschke
via new.myfonts.com
MyFonts interviews Rob Leuschke, type designer of handwriting fonts such as Corinthia, Babylonica, Ambiance, Italianno, and many more.
A Type Designer's Journal
Musings and resources related to type design
Filed undertype design process
Developing Typefaces for the Xbox 360
via youtube.com
An excellent hour-long presentation by Steve Matteson, Director of Type Design for Ascender Corporation. From YouTube: "Steve presents the path to the Xbox 360's new look from the type designer's perspective: the evolution of the product, the design brief, the creative process, and the unique challenges of developing a font for less than optimal screen displays. Steve also discusses the business and technology of fonts, the work for the Android platform and, most importantly, why type matters in an age of multimedia and text messaging."
I particularly enjoyed Steve's comparison of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic in terms of the "fluidity" of the letterforms. (I would be tempted to say "sensuality".) I've become increasingly aware of these differences as I write out my ancient Greek lessons and begin to add Greek lowercase letters to some of my fonts. Harmonizing the extreme differences between Greek and Cyrillic esthetics can be challenging.
At around 40:00, Steve discusses the evolution of the Droid family of fonts. (You can see the final versions on MyFonts: http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/ascender/droid-sans-pro/) Fascinating how constraints influence, and sometimes even improve, a type design.
Steve's type design portfolio can be seen at: http://www.ascendercorp.com/custom/portfolio/commercial/
The Design of Rumba: Concept and Process
Rumba is a delightful typeface family designed by Laura Meseguer from Spain. You can download an excellent description (43 pages) of Mesguer's design process below. I encourage beginning type designers to take a look at this. (Even experienced type designers might find something useful here.) I've only read the first 20 pages so far, and already have some new ideas for going about designing type in the future: designing more ligatures to avoid awkward letter combinations, providing better support for minority languages such as Catalan, etc. Maybe someday my design process will be as conscious and methodical as described in this documentation! Click the link below to download the PDF, or visit the TypeCulture website. Rumba was one of "Our Favorite Typefaces of 2006" at Typographica; you can read a short review there: http://new.typographica.org/2007/typeface-reviews/rumba/. Even more impressively, Rumba has been awarded a TDC Certificate of Excellence.
By the way, if you search for 'Rumba' on MyFonts.com, you will find a different typeface by that name, by Manuel Eduardo Corradine. (Also a nice design.) To purchase the version of Rumba shown above, visit FontShop: http://www.fontshop.com/search/?q=rumba&x=0&y=0 Note: My goal here is not to sell fonts, but to collect useful information for myself and other type designers.
from http://www.typeculture.com:
The Design of Rumba: Concept and Process
Date: 2007-09-04
Written by: Laura Meseguer
Most typeface families are designed along an axis of weights ranging from light to bold, but what happens when a family is designed along an axis of expressiveness? Laura Meseguer’s graduation project in the Type and Media program at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (Netherlands) became an acclaimed typeface family with varying expressive qualities for different size applications. As if that weren’t complex enough, the special typographic demands of four specific languages were also targeted. This documentation contains the brief, method, process and resolution of her project.
Work in progress: Stencil fonts
Here are two stencil fonts that I am currently working on: (1) Zuboni Stencil, based on a Russian design by an unknown designer, and (2) Plantain Stencil, based on my Plantain which in turn is based on Plantin Adweight, which was one of my first commissioned projects (by Smarter Image, long before they went bankrupt). If I weren't having so much fun this week with starting this blog, I probably would have finished kerning these and released them by now. Ok, I'll get to it tomorrow! And yes, the first one (Zuboni) includes Latin letters, but Plantain Stencil does not include Cyrillic ... yet. For those who are curious: Plantin is a modern revival typeface, cut under the direction of F. H. Pierpont in 1913, who based the design on that of a famous 16th century printer, Christopher Plantin, for whom Pierpont's font was named.
Technical notes: One of the interesting dilemmas of doing a revival — as with both of these fonts — is how true to stay to the original, and what, if any, changes to make in the design. I always work on the assumption that the original designer knew what he was doing. But, I inevitably end up making some changes for one reason or another. (Yes, I'm one of those people who cannot follow a recipe without tweaking it a bit.) For example, while creating Latin glyphs for Zuboni, I became more aware than ever before of how many more diagonals there are in the Latin uppercase than in Cyrillic, mostly thanks to the last five letters our alphabet (VWXYZ), all of which are mostly diagonals, and none of which (except X) are part of the Cyrillic alphabet. All of a sudden, the glyph elements that had worked so well for Cyrillic started to look really awful when applied to some of the Latin letters. So, I had to experiment quite a bit, and in order to make everything work together, I had to change some of the other glyphs. For example, the 'M' in the final version is different than the one shown here. I don't make that sort of change without some deliberation, but some things work and others don't. What works for a Cyrillic alphabet may not work at all for Latin, and vice versa. So, it can be challenging to come up with solutions that work for both. Then, if you add Greek ... well, that's another essay.
Another thing that fascinated me was adding the cuts to Plantain to create a stencil version. Not quite as straightforward as it might seem. But, what was a pleasant surprise was how much "sparkle" the cuts added to the design. I guess it's a similar effect to that of adding an inline to a font; but, I wasn't expecting it. (Unlike a lot of type designers, I rarely have a clearly defined agenda when I start on a design — for better or worse — so I often have surprises in the process.) Anyway, I guess it makes sense, because there is more light (white) bouncing off the paper (or monitor) where the cut has been made in the letter.
Ok, if these sort of musings are REALLY boring to you, this is probably not going to be your favorite blog. But, if you find it interesting, perhaps you will want to subscribe. In either case, please feel free to leave comments, suggestions, whatever. You don't need to register to leave comments here.
UPDATE: The fonts shown above are now available directly from CastleType: Plantain Stencil, Zuboni Stencil.
