Aspects of quality for a typeface

Winston Scully

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?

Dave Crossland

Glyph set coverage

Ray Larabie

Does it need a gimmick?

To attract the desired audience a typeface can benefit from fleurons, dingbats, symbol sets.

Andreas Stötzner

Hard to measure all typefaces with one rule. A brilliant text face is difficult to compare to an excellent display face.
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.

scannerlicker

• Quality and consistency of form (in individual glyphs and throughout the glyph set).

Winston Scully

Nice @Andreas Stötzner. Thanks for the thoughts.

Craig Eliason

I suppose it goes under aforementioned quality of drawing, but also important is awareness of and adjustments for optical illusions (horizontal vs. diagonal vs. vertical thicknesses, overshoots, x-offsets, etc.). 

Jens Kutilek

It’s tricky. Nearly all of the aspects mentioned here can be intentionally done differently and still make a good font.

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.

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Andreas Stötzner

Jens Kutilek said:

…
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

…

Well, in that case, those choices were based on a particular reasoning, which was important for that special design. And then, executed accordingly, it shall be right and that makes it good.

Christopher Bergmann

One factor I would like to emphasise is technical quality.

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.

Theunis de Jong

(Christopher: it's not the site. If you go to http://www.myfonts.com/foundry/Sudtipos/ and enable Small Caps, you can see all of their fonts. Some of them have small caps and the same problem. One has small caps and does not have this problem!)

Christopher Bergmann

Theunis de Jong said:

(Christopher: it's not the site. If you go to http://www.myfonts.com/foundry/Sudtipos/ and enable Small Caps, you can see all of their fonts. Some of them have small caps and the same problem. One has small caps and does not have this problem!)

Dank je wel, Theunis. I was pretty sure it was not the site, but I did not have the time to check, so I mentioned both possibilities in my tweet. Also, I think that the responsibility to do some quality control lies both with the foundry and the distributor, so I thought both could use a heads-up.

Andreas Stötzner

Small capitals: I still believe that putting them in a seperate font is more sensible, anyway. Saves me a bunch of extra work, for the font user it is equally comfortable or even more handy. And it avoids that stupid case when it also transforms the first Capital letter of a name (which I mark in order to change ist to sc.) which is annoying, of course.

As I said earlier, features are overrated by many.

Mark Simonson

There is a problem with that approach. Many apps have a small caps button or command. If the font includes small caps, they are used. If they don't, the the caps are scaled down. Your users will need to know to ignore the small caps function and change fonts instead.

Nick Shinn

What Mark said.
I use <command shift h> in InDesign—very clever and useful, and can even be executed with one hand.

John Savard

This reminds me of the famous quotation:

"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.

Yªssin Bªggªr

Most great typefaces don't solve problems, they convey something.
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".

Nick Shinn

I don’t consider quality as a degree of excellence, but as a distinctive characteristic.

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.

Beau Williamson

I would be very interested in a breakdown of 'quality of drawing'. Just a few points to watch out for in specific, such as curve quality (not bumpy).

Paul Miller

Beau Williamson said:

I would be very interested in a breakdown of 'quality of drawing'. Just a few points to watch out for in specific, such as curve quality (not bumpy).

My definition of 'quality of drawing' are those aspects fo the design which affect the perception of the font.  Smooth flowing curves with no lumps where they are not supposed to be.  Consistency of stem width, compensation for the optical illusions which plague the perception of a font.

In other words a design which is pleasing to the eye.

This usually comes from attention to detail.

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jeremy tribby

"It's a variable font"