Visiting Professional - Type Design

Type Design: A Process - Dalton Maag

Custom typeface project:

• Choose a steering group of people who have a kick-off workshop - what the client wants and how to get there/Information grabbing. 
• Talk about the clients existing brand.
• Look at core values of the organisation brand by association pictures.
• Typographic association.
• Font grid:

• Then start to look at shared design features.

Revisit the Brief:

• Choose a team (about 10 designers).
• Then discuss the brief and what the client wants.
• Then take into consideration the type features and whats needed.
• Draw in: PostScript Outline
• Deliver in: True Type Outline
• Normally work on 7 or 8 ideas at a time.
• Once some ideas a present they are then narrowed down to looking at just the core characters: aehinoptv - These ones are used because they are the ones that contain all the features that need to be looked at. 
• Then introduce capitols.

When designing:

• Start with normal weight - when these are complete introduce the extreme weights - light and extra bold.
• Normally have to explore the details (make things smaller, lighter, smoother, etc)
• When the client is happy: ASCII set - Upper case, lower case.
• Interpolation - symbols, change in weight.
• Once the design work is sorted - move onto kerning.
• 50% of the job is the engineering of the font - add opentype features (stylistic alternatives, proportional figures)

Finally add hinting - controlling the way the characters will look using pixels.

Develop: Desktop fonts, Web fonts, App fonts.

Optical principles of drawing letters:

Contrast - imitating the hand written. Application of contrast is extremely important to get correct.

• Weight need to be taken out of horizontals.
• Round elements need to have an overshoot to prevent them looking too small.
• Crossbar need to be slightly higher than the centre.