Type Design Journal — Part 6

I’ve spent the last weeks working on some details of the typeface. Most of the time was dedicated to taking care of the spacing.

One of the most noticible changes is that I decided to change the “p”. According to some feedback I received, the way it used to connect didn’t make much sense. It wasn’t very natural. Since I feel that (at least in script) letters like “p”, “b” and “o” should particularly relate to each other, I figured I should also make adjustments to the “b” and “o”.

I had to give this some serious thought, because I was happy with the way the “o” looked like. Another thing, is that in earlier versions, I had used the “o” as an example to create characters like “p” and “b”. Confusi ng right?! But, sometimes you have to pay attention to your typeface and listen to what it asks you to do. Yeah, I talk to my typeface… (not literally of course) What I also noticed is that combinations like “or” “pr” “br” seem to be better now. Curves are more natural and I was able to delete some ligatures, that I only had to fix the problem with the weird connections. So I believe this was a good decision.

Before:

After:

These changes makes the overall design a bit more lighter and maybe more elegant. Now I also need to decide whether I should change the connection of “v” and “w”, because they have similar connections to “p” “o” and “b” of the previous version.

You might have noticed that the “y” also looks a bit different. But I’m not 100% sure about this. The one on the top looks more elegant, whereas the other one matches the other characters better.

Making a typeface is a lot of problem-solving and decision making. I like especially the problem-solving part. Decision making however is something I still need to improve a bit. I tend to overthink things. Oh well… what can one do about this?!

As I mentioned before most of the time was spent working on the spacing. I still feel that I need to have more experience to get better at it, but I feel that I’m getting closer the more I work on it.

A great tip I got from my mentor is to make specimens and to print them out. It’s a really great advice. Here is one of the test prints I did.

These test proofs are really great to spot mistakes and it’s quite easy to just take a pencil to mark everything and to write notes on what needs to be improved. Sometimes there are things that I just can’t notice when I’m working on the computer. I also print everything out when I do lettering.

I’m not done with the spacing yet and have not started with the kerning. So you might see still some inconsistencies. I’m working on it :) Feel free to comment if you’d like. It’s always useful to have another pair of eyes.

So this is moving slowly but I’m convinced it’s getting somewhere.