I’ve designed basic glyphs of the Latin alphabet and numbers. Making them consistent in form, weight and contrast takes a lot of time.
I’m still struggling with the letter and the stroke widths. Initially, my values were too small, resulting in letters that were too narrow and too light. The letters are still too light.
I bought two books on font design:
Designing type by Karen Cheng. Unlike most books that only touch on general topics of typography, this one goes through the design process for each letter.
Size-specific adjustements to type designs by Just Another Foundry. I’m not even close to implementing optical sizes, but it’s interesting to read, and it’s beautifully made.
I’ve also started to notice details in fonts that I previously overlooked. This might be what Ellen Lupton describes as typomania:
Introduced through the innocuous pages of a college textbook, typography will soon stalk you everywhere. You cease to find solace and sustenance at the supermarket; instead, you puzzle over the diamond-shaped tittles that dot the i’s of the Triscuit logo…
One day you step off the edge of the subway platform wondering whether the words ‘STAND BEHIND THE YELLOW LINE’ are set in Akzidenz Grotesk or Helvetica.
I first wondered why I’m doing this when there are so many Helvetica alternatives available online. But then I always remember how much joy I get from working on my font. Regardless of the many others that exist, this one will be mine.
I found this song from Bo Burnham a while ago, but I keep returning to it again and again.
When I was a kid, the internet was my way to get out and have fun. Today, the internet feels claustrophobic and stifling—a place I want to run from.
I’m still learning how to live with all this. I’ve ditched Google and am slowly abandoning all services that use auto-generated feeds. I’m returning to simple technologies — pictures stored in a folder on my computer, RSS readers, notes in text files, and my paper notebooks.
But I’m not there yet. And while I’m learning, the best thing I can do for my mental health is to laugh it all off.
Design workflows at most tech companies follow an incredible number of structured tasks: for each project, designers must create user personas, user stories, journey maps, wireframes, user interviews, and much more. However, driven by a desire from businesses to turn design into a process-heavy, measurable function, we’re filling our time with checklists instead of focusing on the very thing that makes designers relevant.
… and he’s right. People don’t think anymore. They mindlessly follow rituals, hoping to create something useful. This is how universities and bootcamps teach “design”. Check any university website, and you’ll see that it’s all about creating personas, user flow diagrams, low and high fidelity prototypes. While being useful at certain cases, they don’t gurantee “quality”.
If you look at design methodologies, most of them are created by either professors or consultants. None of these people practice product design. But they do get bonus points and money by reinventing the wheel. Design Thinking? What were people doing before Design Thinking?
He then makes another good point on the gap between designers and engineers:
For years, I’ve argued the design profession – fueled by how we educate designers – operates on outdated ideas about the separation of labor. Designers are expected to come up with the ideas, while engineers are merely there to execute them. Design stays in a corner away from technology.
The idea “I’m a designier, I don’t code” is so artificial. If you want to create good solutions, you cannot delegate understanding of technologies to other people.
In the past, designers were engineers who loved and respected computers. Today, it’s rare to find a designer who genuinely enjoy creating software.
[…] they decided to spend millions of dollars churning the font used or read by billions of people to a new one which looks eerily like a squarer Calibri and which is indistinguishable from MS’s previous Segoe, Google Roboto, Apple San Francisco, or Helvetica.
He supports his argument by an image of the letters of Aptos, Roboto, San Francisco, and Helvetica.
Whether Microsoft should have changed its default font is a separate discussion. I’d like to focus on typefaces matter even when they look similarly.
For the experiment sake, let’s consider Helvetica and Univers. They are both based on Akzidenz-Grotesque (also called Standard). They were released in the same year. They don’t have any serifs, and their letter shapes look almost the same. There are some minor differences in letter forms — especially a, k, K, G, R, and Q, and some differences in weight — but is it enough to justify using one over another?
Now let’s compare texts that are set in these fonts. The difference becomes obvious. Helvetica has a more familiar feel as you have seen many times, it is also pretty hard to read in such small sizes, and it appears somewhat “mushy” as if letters were thrown together. In contrast, Univers conveys a sense of orderness and mathematical precision; it’s also easier to read.
Typography is close to cooking where mixing ingredients together and then adding a small pinch of spices creates something better than the sum of its parts. You can’t predict the flavour of a dish by just looking at the ingredients. Similarly, you can’t appreciate a typeface by just looking at its letterforms.
I’ve started drawing my first font. It’s the perfect pastime activity — you massage letters until they start looking good. It’s soothing.
What the process looks like
There’s no end goal besides drawing something that I could use for my website. This means I don’t need to think about covering all the glyphs — the basic Latin alphabet would be enough. I’m not even using italics here.
It feels weird not to know the scale, for example, what cap height or x-height to choose. Most of the time, it feels like “I don’t know what I’m doing”. But this is a good feeling because I haven’t felt “stupid” for a while. When you design something for the web, you at least keep your knowledge from using HTML and CSS, so you know the scale. Here’s the medium is new.
For now, I want to push as far as I can without thinking about the font metrics and edit the letters later. It means that I will need to do double work, but it allows me to focus on mastering the tool first.
