How do you teach type design?

EugB · July 17

Hello type design teachers,

I have been teaching type design to both bachelor and master students for 4 years now and I am interested in learning about how others teach, especially for introduction courses, teaching the basics. I have explored different paths such as making the students:

Make a revival from wood type, from this old specimen book: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ampersandpresslab/albums/72157713781332157/
It works well because there's diversity, so they can chose a typeface that excites them and wood type is usually wonky so there's room for refinement + a lot of letters are missing so they have to be creative in order to figure out what these should look like. But I've done this twice already and would like to renew myself. Maybe some of you could think of other source material for a similar process?
Make a font from a picture of lettering
A bit more challenging, I think it was too hard for some students to translate the organic rhythm of lettering into a systematic typographic system. It makes them want to design script typefaces which I think is too hard for a first font.
Make a font from their own calligraphic work
The first step is an introduction to calligraphy and is usually a huge success but I have sometimes hit a wall when going from the calligraphy by hand step to the digital step. A lot of students can demotivated once they have to redraw their letters in font editors, they realise the letter shapes are not as good as how they looked on paper and they can't figure out how to make them good even with guidance. I think the gap between what they can achieve in calligraphy and what they consider to be a "proper typeface" is too big.
A mixed approach between calligraphy and revival
Starting with an introduction to calligraphy and then moving on to a revival assignment. I find this to work pretty well because calligraphy makes them understand letters proportions and weight distribution in a way that is difficult to apprehend if you go straight to the computer. And the revival work makes it easier to start on the font editor.
Fork an existing open source typeface
It's nice to make experimental stuff quickly and students can learn a lot from just looking at the source file (if it's not a mess) but I feel like they learn more when designing their own typeface from scratch.

Do you have other methods?

I have limited teaching time each year so I am always looking for more effective ways of making the students as skilled, independent and inspired as possible.

Also there's the question of softwares. I have taught Glyphs, FontLab and more recently Fontra. I think Glyphs is the easiest to understand for beginners but it's huge problem is it's Mac only and a lot of students work on PCs and can't afford a Mac. FontLab's interface is all over the place, each year students are encountering new bugs and problems I didn't even know existed and I find myself spending more times debugging their files than actually teaching, it's very frustrating. Fontra is not as user friendly as Glyphs but I have had good result with it, also the fact that it is free and cross platform is great! (with Glyphs and FontLab I could ask for temporary licenses but this meant that the students wouldn't be able to open their files once the educational license had expire, which is a shame). I think I will stick to Fontra for my bachelor students. In the case of master students they usually already have a preferred software so I find that being software agnostic is usually the best way. What do you think? Do you use other font editors for teaching?

I'm looking forward to having your feedback and reading about your own teaching methods!

Nick Shinn · 12:09AM

I was teaching type design as part of a busy 3-year graphic design program at York University in Toronto, 25 years ago, in which there was a lot to cram in to “typography,” including animation. I theorized that type design could be streamlined by asking students to design a unicase typeface (fewer characters!) I thought I’d seen it all, but I was astounded by the variety they came up with. It more than confirmed my belief in such an open-ended approach.

Craig Eliason · 5:16AM

I teach type design at the BA level, and to a wide variety of students. Probably fewer than half are Digital Media Arts majors. Essentially none have previous type design experience (very few have Bezier drawing experience at all). So the class is much more about understanding letterforms and experiencing an intensive and iterative creative process, rather than job-prep.

For their main project I have students invent a brief, by thinking of a text-font document that relates to their major or interests. Examples have included art museum labels, folk music album liner notes, pet supply e-newsletters, engineering tech press releases, etc. We then negotiate an appropriate text font style (I use the chapters of @Stephen Coles's Anatomy of Type book as the style definitions—humanist serif, transitional, geometric sans, neo-grotesque, humanist slab, etc. etc.) Then most of the semester is given over to completing a spaced UC/lc/figures/basic punctuation font in Glyphs.

Having them start with a meaningful brief is key for developing their own judgment about design decisions.

Defining a style as their model, rather than a particular font, gives them precedents to consult but also lets them have some agency in their creation.

There's a "secondary" project that asks them to do additional work, and options include coming up with a weight variant, italic variant, or display variant of their main project. For those I only ask for a "OHandgloves" character set to keep it manageable.

Class meetings are mostly "workshops" in which I circulate around the room coaching students as they work. Among other benefits, having much of the work done in class helps with the drawback you mentioned that PC users can't run Glyphs on their own machines. A switch to Fontra may be likely in future offerings but I haven't done that yet.

John Hudson · 3:04PM

I’ve run various kinds of workshops for students in type design programmes, but not taught a whole semester or run a complete approach. If I were to, I would try to find a way to structure it around seeing and thinking, rather than on making. Projects would be numerous, quick and disposable, rather than spending time working on trying to make a font, and focused on training ways of looking at and understanding shapes and relationships. Software use would be minimal, and limited to apps that the individual student already knows, without any requirement that shapes made in exploratory projects be translatable into fonts. If students want to work entirely in analogue media, that’s fine and even encouraged.

Font-specific tools and software wouldn’t be introduced until a follow-up course on font making, which would begin with technical introductions to text encoding and processing, font formats, and glyph processing.

Chris Lozos · 4:00PM

I find it strange that so much about type design is taught with a calligraphic basis ONLY. Calligraphy today is only practiced by a small number of dedicated people, not the common human. Even handwriting, in our world of key capture, is relegated to a few scrawled notes to ourselves, an occasional shopping list. There is very little mention of any other drawing or designing way to design type. The tools have changed, the usage has changed, indeed, the design methodology has changed. Why have we not changed the way we teach the craft in the 21st Century?

SCarewe · 5:36PM

Because the tools used for calligraphy (and anything else handwriting-related) shaped the way we construct letters and how we read. Contrast, tension, weight distribution, italic models... Everything, pretty much. It's vital to have that understanding, because everything else is based on that. Of course, there are many other ways to make letters and find shapes TypeMedia for example teaches stone carving, students have explored stitching, baking, potato cutting, and many other mediums. However, all starts with handwriting.

How do you teach type design?

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