Hello, I am new to type design and I am currently working on my very first typeface. So far I have sketched out most of the lowercase and uppercase letters on paper.
I was wondering, at what point do professional type designers start digitising the letters in a font editor? Is it better to move to the computer only after completing the design on paper first or is using a font editor earlier preferable?
Would love to hear your thoughts on this and learn about professional type designers workflows.
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I second everything Chris has said about practising seeing. A lot of type design is looking at what you've made and figuring out why it is wrong.
They did not want to be copied ;-)
At that time the only way to digitize analog artwork was manually using the IKARUS format in combination with a tablet plus lens cursor. However, an IKARUS system cost roughly DM 250,000 back then. In the mid-1980s the relatively very affordable (DM 7,500 inclusive Aristo tablet plus lens cursor) Ikarus M application became available and I started manually digitizing myself. And the latter is what I do at DTL still using DTL IkarusMaster (see also the most recent post on my Facebook page).
I like to draw on paper because it gives me more freedom than drawing on the screen. Also it is easier to preserve very subtle details when for instance making a revival. The production of DTL Fleischmann is a good example of this. Nowadays at DTL we often make an analog start and subsequently proceed on screen (although printers are used for judging the outcomes).
I wonder to what degree this is due to poor editing paradigms for quadratic curves? If tools were to enable smooth, tangent and corner properties for quadratic on-curve points, might there be better parity between cubic and quadratic outlines as productive drawing tools?
The main correlation with that was age. Older type designers were more likely to sketch first, and that chance went up fairly linearly with age. So the oldest ones it was more like 75% sketching first, and the youngest ones it was more like 25% sketch first. Or something like that.
I do not particularly think people are more likely to sketch as they gain more experience with type design, so I suspect the percentages are continuing to shift a bit with time, as the existing population ages. Probably it is a bit less than half who sketch first, today.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try to find a copy. The book I am using for reference is Designing Type by Karen Cheng. I found it made me more aware of the subtle differences in typefaces.
I started off by making fairly tight sketches and tracing them in Illustrator as I was finding it easier to get certain curves to look right if I have a sketch to trace over. But this was turning out to be a slow process so I decided to roughly sketch out all the letters first then move to the computer.
With drawing on paper it's easier for me to get more complex or organic curves looking right, such as the "s", but it's harder to maintain consistency between letters. With bezier curves/digital I find that it's much easier to do the more constructed/geometric parts of the letters so there are definitely pros and cons to both methods for me.
As I wrote above, roughly 40 years ago as student I just had to make analog drawings because there was no other way to design letters. I have always been very pleased with this training. I think that today at type courses manual digitizing should be demonstrated and that students should play around with it. If they decide not to use it and to sculpture directly in Bézier format, that would be a decision, i.e., a choice, based on experience and knowledge. Also it makes sense to show the IKARUS system if one wants to place the current digital font technology in a historical context. On the aforementioned Facebook page Juergen Willrodt states that FoundryMaster will support manually digitizing in the near future too. Yeah!
To garnish my plea for good ol’ manual labour, I post a few drawings here based on an italic by Guyot, which I made 22 years ago for DTL VandenKeere. I made these drawings with pencil, pen, and brush (you can see traces of white paint) next to prints of the regular version –which was drawn on paper first too and then manually digitized, of course.
To me the real benefit about sketching on paper, is that you forget about precision, which allows you to test out ideas more rapidly, with less scrutiny. In saying that I don't think it's worthwhile to draw an entire alphabet first, rather you just get the basics down (o, n, H, O, "a d h e s i o n", etc) and then use the computer to quickly duplicate common shapes and build out the rest.
As far as how much deviation occurs for me, I tend to find that the ideas I put down on paper sound great at first, but after drafting them up digitally I start to see optical problems and other things I couldn't take into account originally. For instance, here's a pencil sketch of a typeface I'm working on, where I wanted a particular angular / hexagonal shape to certain letters:
(This is the actual extent of what I sketched for this design, as I felt a natural impulse to draw the rest up on the computer.) But you can see in the actual drafts below, it made more sense to tone down the idiosyncrasies (but not lose too much of the flavour either!)
These sketches formed the basis for the initial drawings.
And, of course, the final drawings were manually digitized using the IKARUS system.
How do I create my own comic handwriting font? on Quora.
I think it may be interesting to followers of this thread.
In for instance DTL VandenKeere and DTL Fleischmann no serif is identical –on purpose. These details are easy to draw and to manually digitize. Hence, at DTL we normally draw revivals on paper, or at least we start that way.
Also I believe that being able to adjust one’s tools directly positively influences the quality and originality of the design.
For instance Elmo van Slingerland’s DTL Dorian is the result of digitizing letter forms made by a very skilled calligrapher who is extremely capable of drawing with pencil, pen, and brush.
In case of for example Hermann Zapf or Jan van Krimpen, I don’t think that their type designs can be separated from their skills as calligrapher and type drawer. Even if we take into consideration that the technology was different in the past.
As for drawing, I tend to do nearly all of my sketches with a brush, using a pencil only to rough out vague proportions. It's my experience that starting digitally often leads to poorly balanced letters that one wouldn't likely derive from a manual process. Granted, the subtleties are probably easy to overlook for those unencumbered by tool experience.
Often in the process of reworking print proofs by hand I notice some small refinement afforded by the tool which would be lost working only from the screen. As for the tool itself, a broad edge glides in a particular way and where this implicates stroke order it directly impacts the structure of letters. For this reason I find refined pencil drawing to be largely inadequate. Like purely digital letters, ones modeled with a stylus are overly rational.
I don’t digitize my analog drawings per se, in the sense of tracing over them or copying— they are rough sketches used to work out ideas.
Now that I have amassed a body of work in various genres, I often develop new work by transforming or cannibalizing the old. And that too is drawing.
However, I have made script fonts by drawing over scans of my writing/calligraphy—which are not drawing.
And I made Handsome by writing directly into Fontographer.
Drawing by hand, at least when it is small, doesn't offer the crisp lines that digital design does, so it is more difficult to add subtle details like corners in curves and that stuff. When I draw by hand I am forced to add personality to my letters in a deliberate, even obvious way. The advantage of hand drawing letters is that it is more difficult to rely on older designs to make a new unique font, and so the result will be more creative.
This is just my opinion and I step to the digital part right after drawing the basic alphabet because digital drawing does offer superior flexibility in adding details that will really make the letters work. First I draw an alphabet, then scan, then trace, then refine. Also, I suck at drawing with a computer and personally like fonts that have a more humanist and handmade flavor.
Really this way is hit or miss but it is my workflow. Hope this helps