Practical Font Design

by David Bergsland

This book presents a very practical explanation of what it takes to design a new font. It takes you step by step through the development of a new unilateral serif font. It starts with a brief type history. Then it goes through the development of the characters, the assembly of composite glyphs, the addition of OpenType features, letterspacing, kerning, and exporting the finished font. It uses FontLab 5.
Here's a table of contents:
Welcome! to an experiment in font design
DEFINING TYPOGRAPHY
Quotations on typography
What you can reasonably expect
TYPE CLASSIFICATIONS
Various systems & making sense of the mess
TYPE PARTS
Some glyph terminology
A Practical Approach To Classifying Fonts
A practical list
Minimal Serif Font Classifications
OLD STYLE FONTS: READABLE AND BEAUTIFUL (1500-1750 OR SO)
Venetian characteristics
Aldine characteristics
Garalde
French Oldstyle characteristics
Dutch Old Style
English Old Style
English Oldstyle characteristics 15
Transitional
The entire oldstyle period of font design
MODERN
FAT FACES
SLAB SERIF CHARACTERISTICS
Geometric slabs
Type for the common man—ignored by almost every classification system
ART NOUVEAU
LATE 19TH & EARLY 20TH CENTURY
CURRENT SYNTHESIS
Sans serif classifications
Geometric Sans
Populist commoner
STYLIZED SANS
The relatively friendly sans serif styles
Stylized Sans characteristics
HUMANIST SANS
Readable, modulated sans serif fonts for text
DECORATIVE
What about the rest of the type styles?
MIMICKING HANDWRITING
Type drawing tools
Vector drawing tools & techniques
The Pen Tool
How do you add that skill?
How do you draw with paths?
Corner points, Curve points, & Handles
So, how does the Pen tool work?
EXTREMA
Path rules for drawing fonts
Crossing handles
Too many points
Points on top of each other
Part two: The creation of a font
A step by step procedure
I wouldn't dream of proposing a standard design procedure
A new unilateral serif font
Picking a name
The Font Info dialog in FontLab
Name & style
OpenType-Specific Names
Additional OpenType Names
Copyright Information
Embedding
Designer Information
License Information
Version and Identification
Key Identification settings
Panose Identification
IBM and MS Identification
Metrics and Dimensions
Key Dimensions
Hinting settings
Setting up your workspace
PREFERENCES
FONT WINDOW
KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
TOOLBARS
There are many ways to start a glyph
Looking for typical pieces
Copy/Paste procedure
Setting up guides
FONTLAB DRAWING TECHNIQUES
Shaping the glyph: Cap I
Shaping the glyph: Lowercase l
SAVING BUILDING PIECES
Vector Paint
Shaping the glyph: lowercase h
Shaping the glyphs: y, v, & w
DRAWING WEIGHT BALLS
Shaping the glyphs: n & m
Shaping the glyphs: b. d. p, & q
Moving to the p
Designing the q
Shaping the glyphs: o
Shaping the glyphs: r
Shaping the glyphs: i
Shaping the glyphs: j
Shaping the glyphs: . (period)
Shaping the glyphs: x
Shaping the rest of the lowercase
STARTING WITH THE CAPITAL LETTERS
Shaping the glyphs: H
Shaping the glyphs: J & K
Shaping the glyphs: M
FINISHING THE NUMBERS & LETTERS
This is where we stand now
LETTERSPACE FIRST!
Some tips before we go on
Making composite glyphs
Generating the basic characters
Shaping the glyphs: Æ
Part 3 Adding OpenType Features
The fun part of the new OpenType capabilitie
Here comes the fun part!
Yes, this is coding. Yes, I do not do this well
What is an OpenType feature?
This is code so typos break the function
WRITING AN OPENTYPE FEATURE
Feature names
How a feature works
Using classes
Saving your feature sets
Adding features to our new font
Finishing the glyph designs
Shaping the glyphs: Oldstyle figures
Shaping the glyphs: Lining figures
Shaping the glyphs: Small caps
Resizing the caps to small caps
FRACTIONS, NUMERATORS, AND DENOMINATORS
INFERIORS & SUPERIORS
ORDINALS
LIGATURES
Building ligatures
Shaping the glyphs: tt
Shaping the glyphs: ct, ck, ch
Shaping the glyphs: sh, sk, st, sp
Part 4 Letterspacing
I do not trust automated solutions
Some definitions
The decisions needed for good letter fit
Basic methodology
First we distinguish between 3 types of glyphs
FONTLAB'S METRICS PANEL
Letterspacing: Hs & Os
Typical adjustments to spacing
This varies a lot by font
Display or Text?
Some letterspacing tips
Generating fonts for testing
To generate a font
Kerning your new font
The Metrics window
The need for a kerning text document
Adding your kerning text document
Using the Metrics window to kern
The kerning process
Moving from pair to pair
Moving from line to line
Adjusting the kerning
So, how the heck do I know what to kern & by how much?
The tricky part is remembering the spacing
Spacing is a major part of your design
KERNING GUIDELINES
Let's go through and show you some above/below samples of kerning
Using real words
Watching glyph weights & shapes
Classes
Finishing it
Tracing drawings & artwork
Placing into Illustrator
Make sure the scan is clean
Live Trace in Illustrator

Genres: Design

128 pages, Nook

First published February 20, 2010

About the author

I've been a compulsive reader since I was eight years old. It's not uncommon for me to read a book or more a day. I became a fine artist during my hippie days from 1967-71. After graduation from U of Minn, I almost immediately got into publishing, first as an illustrator, then as a graphic designer, then a typographer, art director, instructor, program director, author, font designer, online teacher, self-publisher. All the while I did some art, wrote a lot, and kept myself busy.

My main blog and Website is The Skilled Workman which covers resources for publishing books and ebooks with InDesign, plus training for designing fonts.

These days it's primarily a solid food believers site.

The spiritual blog is
Reality Calling which covers my Christian writing and books, plus the books of authors I represent and/or design for.

I sell my fonts at MyFonts.com for the most part, but also at fonts.com

Reviews

[David Bergsland · Rating 4 out of 5]

My best selling book. This one has been radically updated to the Third Edition. You should read that one instead.

[David Bergsland · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the most recent version of my personal best seller at Radiqx Press. It is still selling well and getting a lot of positive feedback.

[David Bergsland · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my most popular book, by far.