Steve MacKley design » font design

ILT: A few things I’ve learned about typeface design

Steve MacKley — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:52:43 +0000

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.

Silverback wins at PunchCutters Exhibition

Steve MacKley — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:37:07 +0000

A little late…My (still incomplete) sans serif face Silverback won first place at the Punchcutters Exhibition held in late November. Co-sponsored by the Society of Typographic Arts and the Illinois Institute of Art – Chicago, the exhibition pulled in around a dozen submissions. Rick Valicenti and Linda Blackwell judged.

Needless to say I am quite pleased. Who doesn’t love external validation.

New Font: Now with More Glyphs!

Steve MacKley — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:30:38 +0000

I’ve completed more on the font. Most glyphs are now complete. The biggest addition is accented characters and old-style figures. Small Caps are coming, and then I commence to kerning.

.webfont Gaining Traction

Steve MacKley — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:35:34 +0000

If you have not been following the recent .webfont proposal by Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland check it out. The proposal is rational and workable. Quite a few foundries have voice their support including (these were gleaned from the H&FJ twitter feed)

H&FJ
Klim
Process Type Foundry
Fonthead
Mark Simonson Studio
Porchez Typofonderie
House Industries
Stone Type Foundry
Emigre
Feliciano Type Foundry
Typotheque
Letterror
FontShop
Type Supply
Village
Typotheque

Typotheque has an excellent expalnation and demo here.

New Font: More Complete Character Set

Steve MacKley — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:00:28 +0000

For my font the uppercase, lowercase, numbers and punctuation are nearly complete. Working on international characters and ordinals. I’ve also started kerning and some of the Type 1 hinting.

New Font: Lower Case Nearly Complete

Steve MacKley — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 08:33:25 +0000

Here is the first draft of the lower case for the new font. Kerning, and hinting to follow soon.

Merike Lower Case

New Font Sketches

Steve MacKley — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 05:47:56 +0000

Here are some of the various sketches for the new font. The idea is for a humanist that isn’t as neutral as Univers or Frutiger; but not as expressive/quirky as Meta and Syntax.

Numbers & Puncuation

lowercase g and s