Type Tricks

I have immersed myself in type design for the last 4 months as I developed my first professional typefamily for my senior project (currently sitting at 12 fonts, two families, 1,548 glyphs). I’ve looked up countless resources to make sure I create my typeface to professional standards.“Type Tricks: Your personal guide to type design” by Sofie Beier is an excellent little type design resource. It’s full of fun tips and tricks on how to take your type design to the next level. While this is a great resource that a beginner can learn a lot from, I wouldn’t recommend it as your only resource. It’s not really laid out in a manner for teaching the craft from scratch. It already assumes you have a baseline understanding on how to create a typeface. Its main goal is to elevate your existing understanding of the topic or as a reminder by showcasing fine details, you may not have considered or had forgotten.I also love the size of this book. It’s small enough to fit in pretty much any bag or a particularly spacious pocket. This makes it a great reference book to carry with you. The book is more illustrated then it is text which makes it feel very approachable to flip through if you aren’t the type for heavy reading.If you are looking for a single resource to learn type design from scratch, then I would start elsewhere. All the resources below I recommend as both an initial starting point and as a companion to this book.“Designing Type” by Karen Cheng is more suited for learning how to create a type family from scratch. It goes over all the terminology you should know and important behind the scenes details that most people don’t even consider. Where it truly shines is in how much depth it goes into for creating each letterform. It has a two page spread dedicated to the nuances and common variations for EACH glyph. All uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuation, and diacritic marks are covered in great detail. This book very much reads like a textbook. Its purpose is to be an educational reference first and foremost.“Making Fonts: a comprehensive guide to professional type design” by Chris Campe and Ulrike Rausch is another great book for learning type design from scratch. This book feels much more fun and approachable than “Designing Type” though it doesn’t go into nearly as much detail into the individual glyph construction. This book is a more wholistic approach to font design than a hyper fixation on the construction of the characters. It covers more of what to expect in the font design software, exporting a working font, a showcase of OpenType features, and publishing and selling your font.If you learn better by watching rather than reading then I highly recommend Charles Nix’s classes on type design on LinkedIn Learning. “Learning Type Design” and “Design an Italic Typeface” are two of the most comprehensive type design video lectures I have found. I also recommend watching “How to Space a Font. FontLab Studio 5 tutorial with Thomas Phinney” on YouTube which covers the art of spacing in great depth.

Very useful

Habe es in der Schule das erste Mal gesehen und war sofort vom Design und Layout überzeugt. Der Inhalt ist ebenfalls sehr überzeugend, allerdings eher etwas für Nerds. Ich liebe es und schlage dort auch gerne Dinge nach.

C'est un vrai livre pour les type designers ou 'concepteurs de polices'. On y parle en long et en large de la forme de la lettre, de sa construction, des différentes règles optiques, de la lisibilité, de la connotation typographique, de l'attraction visuelle, du kerning, du spacing, etc. Bref... Pour un livre aussi petit (rentre dans ma sacoche) je trouve que le contenu est très pertinent et super dense. D'après moi il faut bien sûr enrichir ses connaissances 'typographiques' via d'autres sources et d'autres moyens que les livres et surtout ne pas toujours suivre les règles édictées pour pouvoir faire de belles rencontres avec les formes

Existen muchas opciones para iniciarse en el diseño tipográfico, pero sin dudas el libro de Sofie Beier es el que mejor condensa lo más relevante de este arte centenario y, además, lo presenta de una manera dinámica, muy visual y sencilla.