When in the type design process do you start drawing different weights and styles?

Fielding for opinions here. How long into designing a typeface do you wait before getting started on the bold or italic faces? Do you design them as a set from the get-go? Do you fully finalise one weight or style before starting on the next?
Personally, I tend to start on different weights once I've reached a fairly competent rough draft of my main letterforms, then fill out things like punctuation, diacritics, etc. together from there. This has its drawbacks, though, as it can lead to inconsistencies I need to iron out in subsequent passes.
What do you guys think?

Answers

  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,350
    I try to plan out the whole design space in my head first so, although it will probably change somewhat as I progress, I some idea of target weights and styles. Then I test a few glyphs in median and extreme weights—usually a mix of core and complex shapes—to make sure its all going to work. So that’s the stage at which the first different weight and style outlines are created. What I concentrate on next depends whether I am creating an intermediate, core master, e.g. Regular, or am planning to design only extrema and interpolate everything in between. If the latter, then I work on the extremes simultaneously, and check the interpolated instances as I go.
  • Nick Shinn
    Nick Shinn Posts: 2,253
    For a family with roman and italic, and a range of weights, I start with the Regular Roman, upper and lower case alphabets, and test and adjust prototypes in various settings, until I’m satisfied with that, before proceeding further.
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 974
    Being somewhat of a traditionalist in temperament, I tend to work out full U&lc alphabet plus basic punctuation and figures in the Regular before working on auxiliary weights. Since I am mostly text-focused, I find that I won’t decide whether it’s worth pursuing a design until I can really set a bunch of running text. Limited “adhesion”-like sets and random nonsense text proofs aren’t usually enough to satisfy me. 
    So I tend to only start working on a heavier master once I’ve actually been using the Regular for a while and start feeling a need for the Bold. And usually I end up feeling compelled to work out the Italic before shifting attention to heavier weights.
    That’s not hard and fast, of course. My specific process will vary by design. When I’m working on a sans-serif, I tend to work more holistically across the weight range, fleshing out Black and Light earlier in the process. Or if I’m working on a commission and decisions are being made in concert with a client, where the expectations of the brief are laid out and need to be evaluated differently.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,350
    Tim Holloway always preferred to work on the heaviest weight first, partly for the reasons James explains, but mostly because that weight presents the most problems, especially when working with complex Indic letterforms.
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 202
    Thank you all for your answers to this question! It's very useful to gather all your experience and explanations!
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,954
    My preference is similar to James Puckett, to do just a keyword of characters in a regular weight, and then go to the extremes. I will usually have had the design rolling around in my head for a while before I try to do anything with it, and I try to think about the lightest and heaviest (and any other axis variations) before I even start reifying the design.