SteveMacKley design

I Love Typography has posted a woderful article by Gerry Leonidas (Senior Lecturer in Typography at the University of Reading—UK and Programme Director of the MA in Typeface Design).  Entitled A few things I’ve learned about typeface design Mr. Leonidas covers his observations about typeface design (and its pedagogy). Some of the pertinent topics include: 1. Design has memory (even if many designers don’t), 2. Design is iterative, and improved by dialogue, 3. Scale effects are not intuitive, 4. Tools are concepts, 5. The Latin script is the odd one out, and 6.A teaching formal environment can teach the functional aspects of design, but can only help them at a distance to develop the aesthetic qualities of their typefaces.

The article in highly astute.  As someone who has been thrust into the “creative hermit” model of type design, I feel his insights are poignant. Of particular note for me was this passage:

A common example of problems connected to scale effects arises whenever a student follows a writing tool too closely as a guide for designing typeforms: whereas the ductus (the movement of the stroke) and and the modulation can be preserved across scales without much difficulty, the details of stroke endings and joints cannot; typographic scales demand a sensitivity to optical effects that simply do not apply at writing scales.