Wisdom in type

When I enrolled at the Typeface Design certificate program Type@Cooper from Cooper Union in 2012, it started from a wistful craving to design a lowercase double story letter “g.” I quickly snapped out of that daydream to focus on this rigorous and rewarding craft— typeface design is a system, an art and a science — while designing an anatomically harmonious and shapely letter can be incredibly satisfying, the craft of designing type is more comprehensive. The process and methodology of typeface design is rigorous, subtle and emphasizes relationships. Looking through the lens of typeface design, let’s glean some insight towards other areas of life.
1. The space between letters is active — like the space between living creatures.
Letter spacing adjusts the spacing between all the glyphs in a piece of text, affecting the overall tightness or airiness. Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between two individual letters, as you’ll find each letter pair has a slightly different spatial relationship. Both have great impact on readability and visual harmony. Type design is as much about the design of letters as it is about the spaces and relationships between those letters.


2. Pay attention. The particular affects the whole. A smooth, even texture on the page brings clarity and ease to the reading experience.
Are we carefully looking around us and paying attention to the way we go about our daily tasks? It takes practice for a chef to skillfully chop pieces quickly and evenly. Drinking a finely blended smoothie beats a clumpy one. On a larger scale, people, families and communities, make up the fabric and texture of cultures. This speaks to eastern cultures where the collective comes before the individual. While I’m not advocating eastern over western styles of relating, this illustrates that small changes need to be considered as they will make an impact on the greater whole.

“You really learn to look. And it pays off that suddenly you begin to see wonderful things in your daily life you never noticed. And I would say its one of the most wonderful presents you get in art education — to enjoy seeing.”
— Inge Druckery
3. Tyepfaces exist in a system, and like our societies require planning and learning from doing.
Ok, this is a stretch, but hear me out. The great thing about designing a typeface family is you get a chance to be master of a mini universe. You author the parameters and set the rules in this system of relationships and own the choices for how your typographic world is organized. Then you iterate, iterate, iterate, tweak, tweak, tweak, iterate and tweak again. Some systems can be narrow while other systems are designed to be flexible depending on the purpose and application for which the type was designed for. Typeface systems must also exist within other systems, such as (though by no means limited to) books, mobile apps, this blog post. While we have much less control over the systems in which we live, running and organizing schools, workplaces and societies require understanding relationships, incredible consideration and planning. Systems function and thrive when there is give and take from the extremes.

“The nature of systems is to dictate a certain direction; the role of designers is to recognise when the original design idea ceases to work within the system, and then to create exceptions to the system rather than letting the system have a negative impact on the design.”
― Peter Biľak
In Gerritt Noordzij’s theory of type, he emphasizes that “to be able to analyse writing I need to write, and to be able to write I need the analysis. This circle-game is not played in the study, but rather in the workshop.” We learn as we go, making and doing. Noordzij also asserted that “writing is not a series of strokes, but space, divided into characteristic shapes by strokes,” underlining the importance of the relationships of marks.

4. Letters, like people affect our sensory input. Both have an anatomy made up of structure/skeleton, mass/flesh, ornamentation/clothing and communication styles that we all have subjective opinions about.
According to Herman Zapf, “Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability. I would argue that people can be based in experience and imagination, guided by a particular set of cultural and social rules. An interesting illustration is Cate Blanchett in “Manifesto,” an art installation where Blanchett stars in film shorts of artistic declarations from the past century reinterpreted as poetic monologues. Underneath her layers of various ornamentation i.e. hairstyles, makeup and clothing influenced by different time periods, her core is still Cate. Similarly, the letter H will be identified by its “h-ness” whether it is a slab serif or a flourished script.





“Get acquainted with the shapes of the type letters themselves. They are the units out of which the structure is made — unassembled bricks and beams. Pick good ones and stick to them.”
— William Addison Dwiggins
As we continue to pursue excellence in our disciplines, may more insights and wisdom surface. For a closer look at type anatomy and typographic nuances, check out Thomas Jockin’s Fontribute Review series, a comparison of two fonts and their different considerations and approaches.
