Hello all, been a bit of a lurker around here for a while and finally mustered the courage to ask you fine folks a question. I am a graphic designer and frustration and annoyance with my job has given me the drive to learn something I have long admired but never done (other than the odd bit of custom lettering here and there), which is font design.
3/4 months ago I started my journey by learning calligraphy. As advice from a couple of others has told me that to understand type I must know its origins and forms intimately. I have done this by studying Johnstons Foundational hand and now feel I have a good grip on it. But I am not sure where to go next on my journey, as with a mortgage and wedding coming up doing a masters at Reading seems a distant dream (though I might be able to do
[email protected]). Any advice would be appreciated.
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Out of the workshops there are 3 good resources, http://blog.craftingtype.com, http://www.thomasphinney.com/type-design-resources/ and http://designwithfontforge.org (which has all the essential information we cover in the workshops, plus more.)
The best single introduction book I know of is http://www.tipo-e.com/publicaciones/como-crear-tipografias/ - although note that it is in Spanish
However, first I wish you all the best for your wedding.
Also Igor thank you for posting that thread, I was starting to think at 30 I have begun to late. So good to hear I am not the only late starter in type design.
And finally Mark (big fan of your foundry by the way), I would like to do a course if I can. I am hoping I can possibly self-fund it if I can start doing more freelance. Though until I get the funds I am going to get my feet wet by learning as much myself as I can.
Kayley, formal education is the quickest way to end up producing polished, mainstream work. But to me autodidactism remains the "slow food" movement of education: you will take much longer to get somewhere other people are interested in, but contribute much more of yourself to the craft. However this also depends on your character: if you can manage to duly come out of the shadow of your teachers, formal education might still be the best avenue. Always keep some healthy doubt handy.
Oh, and do run all this by your future better half. :-)
Maybe Kayley might even benefit from this method. Even if it is just for playing around. She is curious about type design and should keep all possibilities open and find her own way in the end.
I know I have learned a lot by doing calligraphy, the Noordzij way.
Kayley, calligraphy is not much more than a scenic shortcut to typographic popularity. It can elegantly reward a maker's creative urge, but distracts from the needs of users. It will confine you to the same continent virtually everybody else has been exploring for five centuries. Do learn how it works, but mostly to understand why it doesn't.
Look into shorter programs since grad school isn't an option. Typecon, ATypI, and smaller type conferences offer great introductory workshops. Cooper Union has a condensed summer program, and sometime years Reading offers summer programs. And good calligraphy lessons can be found almost anywhere.
Since you are a practicing graphic designer start using calligraphy and lettering in your work. Some grear type designers started this way.
'Fonts and Logos' by Doyald Young, 'Designing Type' by Karen Cheng and 'On Stone' by Sumner Stone. The Young book is fantastic for pointing out small details, the Cheng book covers the basics and the Stone book covers a specific case in great detail.
my two cents on Calligraphy: practicing calligraphy helped me enormously to see why certain certain curves worked better than others and to learn the logic of certain letter forms, especially using a broad nibbed pen. Suddenly the long 's' made sense!
I sent someone, who I truly admire, an email asking for help and she did not only reply and send me some useful files, to get me started, she actually offered herself to chat via Skype. I was really lucky and you will probably be too.
You can also enrol the alphabettes mentorship program here: http://www.alphabettes.org/alphabettes-mentorship-program/ This mentorship program is free and people are glad to help.
My mentor has been giving me precious guidance and feedback, which is helping me a lot not only to get better, but also with my confidence. It's very useful to have a second opinion from someone who has the knowledge and knows how to give feedback.
I hope this helps a bit and good luck with your journey in type design
I think a good internship is a really great way to start, but this might not be any easier for you. In any case, a lot of practice is the only way. Try designing a Didone, a sans serif, and a humanist serif. Didone and humanist will give you the basic understanding of contrast, sans serif to focus on the quality of curves, where defaults cannot hide behind fancy details.
I'll also add a few cents on starting to play and experiment with digital type. I'd say: start with something extremely simple, something created out of a limited set of shapes and play with it.
If you take the plunge quickly and start working on something intricate which requires careful balance (especially with designs you have a certain attachment to), you'll end up with projects with will become hard to handle quickly. Create Frankenstein projects, discard them and start anew.
While learning the digitisation process you'll run into so many new tricks and methods, that something you created a week ago can quickly look obsolete. Learning these methods will save you time later on, enabling you to focus on the real design problems you need to solve (and you aren't hampered by the fear of having to adjust every node by hand). Try one of the programs for font production and look which works best for you. (almost all of them offer trails). For a starter Glyphs is extremely friendly, both in price and it's manual/tutorial assets.
More important, to my own way of thinking, than learning to produce particular style of calligraphic letter is developing an understanding of the genesis of the normative shapes of letters or other signs within a script, which in most of the world's writing systems begin with, well, writing. In order to start making sense of how shapes can be made, manipulated, changed or, indeed, abandoned, it helps to understand how they came to be the way they are. In this respect, understanding writing is as important as — and perhaps this is what Hrant means — understanding how an accident happened if your job is automotive engineering.
The pervasive intransigent oblivion to the handicap above –whereby we now have three schools teaching Noordzijism– necessitates a well-meaning ideological slap in the face.
The very first ‘modern’ Roman text faces, Jenson and Bembo (as we call them nowadays) are rooted directly and deeply in the best specimen of handwritten body text in books of their time. Which is calligraphy in (rather) small sizes. That need for writing much and small urged the scribes to optimize the letters to the level best, for both writability and legibility. This torture had made the Latin script mature for her new life in type – when that day was about to dawn.
Also wow this thread has exploded a little since I was last online. Great advice from so many people, thank you all. Also I understand all your points about the importance of calligraphy, I was mainly focusing on scripts like Foundational because of their similarity with some serif fonts and to get a better idea of why they are drawn the way they are. As Beau said "understand the logic" of letterforms. But I get what Hrant means by it being a handicap in some instances and will take this advice on board before I persue calligraphy to deeply.
I guess the best thing for me to do now is actually start doing a font. I want to do a book serif based partly on sigils from medival Grimoires (even thinking of doing an alternative characters in Theban Alphabet).
(Late to the thread, btw, but Doyald Young's Logos & Letterforms and Adrian Frutiger's Complete Works are invaluable. So's Cyrus Highsmith's Inside Paragraphs.)
I have no idea what medieval Grimoires are but I’d like to learn … I wish you a great time!
Have no fear, do something that will drive YOU rather than get you fewer negative comments from others.