I'm trying to design my first typeface and I have found some mistakes and tried to correct them. But what about the mistakes I can't spot easily? How do I know if my characters were badly drawn?
If it’s a first typeface then they’re badly drawn. That’s just how design works, and it’s ok. Unless you have a compelling reason to release your typeface just stop working on it and design more typefaces. When you finish those go back to where you started and revise everything based on what you’ve learned.
And after you've drawn a lot of typefaces? You may still find that your first-draft letters are badly drawn. As James says, you need to put this away for a while a come back with fresh eyes.
Also: get some other eyes on it. Whose judgement do you trust? You can try showing it round here on Typedrawers, too.
A good thing to look at specifically with new typefaces is checking the consistency of your strokes. Do your thicks match each other, do your thins? Are your curves optically complementary? And then, spacing--Matthew Carter once rightly said that a well-spaced typeface with not a lot of 'personality' is preferable to something that tries to pack a lot of expression and is spaced poorly. Good designers don't want to use the latter.
Yeah, spacing is vital – even apart from questions of expressiveness, even a badly-drawn typeface can often be made to work decently if it’s spaced well. The other way round, not so much.
You cannot get overnight results. The best would be to start another typeface (e.g. gain more experience) and then come back to this. When I draw the regular, for example, and I can't see the mistakes, I just start drawing drawing the bold or the italic. After a few days, come back to the regular weight and you will see it with different eyes.
It's all about training your eyes. Join a workshop, like the very well priced one I will be teaching this month TipoBrda (there is one more called Type Clinic. Both in Slovenia, lovely people, twice a year, everybody is welcome) and having one-on-one help, lectures, and the influence of others in one intensive week will teach you how to look better.
Speaking of clinic – there is also Tal Lemming’s Glyph Nanny, a plug-in that gives live feedback and pointing out drawing mistakes: https://github.com/typesupply/glyph-nanny
This might be a personal thing, but I find it quite helpful to look at extrapolations from time to time when designing a Regular and a Bold simultaneously. This way it is fairly easy to spot weird or bumpy curves and inconstancies in proportions between the masters.
Comments
If it’s a first typeface then they’re badly drawn. That’s just how design works, and it’s ok. Unless you have a compelling reason to release your typeface just stop working on it and design more typefaces. When you finish those go back to where you started and revise everything based on what you’ve learned.
Also: get some other eyes on it. Whose judgement do you trust? You can try showing it round here on Typedrawers, too.
I'm not sure I would have gotten the same amount of feedback had the font not been open sourced.
It's all about training your eyes. Join a workshop, like the very well priced one I will be teaching this month TipoBrda (there is one more called Type Clinic. Both in Slovenia, lovely people, twice a year, everybody is welcome) and having one-on-one help, lectures, and the influence of others in one intensive week will teach you how to look better.