I've been thinking on this today, and I've quickly written up a few things that I find to be the main points that make a typeface of quality. I would love to know if anyone has something to add to this list.
I feel like I lose site of a lot of these overarching themes when I'm in drawing mode, so I'm trying to make a comprehensive list of things to think about so I can constantly be assessing them while I'm drawing. Any additional thoughts would be appreciated!
- concept
- does it solve a problem?
- who will use it?
- why are you making it?
- quality of drawing
- individual glyphs are drawn well
- spacing
- do the negative and positive shapes harmonize with each other?
- features
- does it have interesting alternates & ligatures?
- expansiveness
- How many weights does it have?
- does it have alternate styles?
Comments
To attract the desired audience a typeface can benefit from fleurons, dingbats, symbol sets.
Features and range of weights are much overrated, i.m.h.o., whereas drawing and spacing are far too often underestimated by fontists.
Idea and concept I would rather leave aside here because that you can’t measure objectively.
I would distinguish essential requirements from extras and individual aspects.
1. Essentials
• Quality of glyph outlines (drawing)
• Quality of spacing (width and sidebearings)
• Quality of kerning
• Character coverage
2. Extras
• Font family concept (Italics, weights, widths, others)
• Languages supported (apart from the usual suspects)
• Figure sets and fractions
• Ligatures
• Variant glyphs and alternate sets
• symbols and ornaments
In my opinion, a basically well crafted single font with 400 glyphs and no feature extras is worth more than a feature- and alternates-packed superfont of 2000 glyphs which are lousily drawn and poorly spaced.
The aspect of character coverage is an interesting one. It always evokes a ‘search for completeness’ but in practice this is hardly to achieve. Who is going to tell you what goes in and what does not? Nobody. Out there is no reliable common standard which tells you that. Even well-known references (e.g. the Adobe glyph sets) are not entirely reliable in that respect.
E.g. FF Trixie, the original distressed typewriter font.
- Quality of glyph outlines = horrible
- Quality of spacing = monospaced, what do you expect?
- Quality of kerning = kerning is nonexistent
The font would fail by these criteria, still it is an important milestone for OpenType fonts.Not to say that quality criteria don’t matter, but it’s the old saying, if you know the rules you can break them.
In my opinion, ligatures and alternates are overrated. Type designers (including myself) can get carried away adding them. Most users will never find the alternates. Ligatures (esp. ones that are active by default) can do more harm than good if they are added to designs that don’t really need them.
This includes the correct working of all features the designer has built into a font. The nicest typeface is not worth much when it comes in a font that does not do what it is supposed to do. I often find that even seemingly simple features, such as small caps, do not work properly, presumably due to insufficient testing (here is an example I stumbled upon today). This problem is exacerbated by a growing number of characters and features, some of which only seem to be added for marketing purposes. In the worst case, you end up with a feature that nobody needs or uses, but that nobody would want to use anyway, given that it does not work the way it should. In any case, I agree with what others have said: The sheer number of features does not say much about the quality of a typeface or font. Features and alternates have to be evaluated in terms of aesthetic necessity, accessibility and technical functioning.
As I said earlier, features are overrated by many.
I use <command shift h> in InDesign—very clever and useful, and can even be executed with one hand.
"If there were an individual, readily recognized quality or characteristic which the type designer could incorporate in drawings that would make any one type more beautiful, legible, or distinguished than another, it is obvious that only type of that kind would be designed." - Frederic W. Goudy
It was obvious to me what he meant by that. So many songs are written and recorded every year, and only a few catch on and become popular. So many expensive movies are made with high hopes, and then flop. As with music and movies, there's no easy way, no shortcut (in the vein of "more cowbell", humorously advocated for country music), to designing a typeface so that it will be accepted.
Craftsmanship in the design of a typeface is essential, but it doesn't guarantee a good result, it only makes one possible.
If you really need the tired problem-solving narrative, then let's say good typeface solve the problem of "I need a typeface that looks, feels, evokes X".
For retail typefaces, I always try to create an emergent quality, something new and different, starting with a unique concept and then working it out it as I craft the fonts.
Whether the end result will have any utility is not wholly my responsibility, but is also determined by what typographers can contribute when they work with the fonts—which is also emergent.
In other words a design which is pleasing to the eye.
This usually comes from attention to detail.