Thesis week 2

Last weeks research was heavily driven by finding inspiration in the Visual History of type book and then diving deeper into why I was attracted to certain type and time periods. This week’s focus was more centered around legibility and the software used to create a typeface.

The first half of the week was spent in the second issue of TypeNotes. In this zine type print asset I unpacked the science behind tracking, kerning and got a first glimpse at a handful of softwares used to build typefaces.

Takeaways:

“Every glyph must have its side-bearings defined according to its correct vertical optical center.”

When building a typeface it’s best to start with and H & O for upper case and N & O for lower case. These contain anatomy to really jump off into building other letters and allows you to start establishing spacing with straight stems and round stems.

The weekend led me into the world of Skillshare.

Lettering artist, Jessica Hische recently released a new Skillshare centered around her work that goes into brand logotype refreshes. While this isn’t fully centered around type design, one of her main points is centered around legibility. The best part is she provides this checklist of things to keep in mind when refining type.

Skillshare Round 2

With the pointers from Jessica Hische fresh in my head I dove into a Skillshare centered around type design. I came across type designer Kyle Wayne Benson, and his walk through of designing type with the program, Glyphs Mini (This is one the softwares I came across in Typenotes). He provided some great tips regarding the math that goes into spacing letters and how it can translate across different letters with similar structure.

Takeaway:

Find inspiration. Digest it. But don’t keep it out while sketching. It’ll begin to influence your work too much.

Ok, some good ‘ol internet research.

I found an article centered around type legibility on fonts.com and these were my key takeaways.

• Theres a difference between legibility and readability. Legibility is a function of type design and readability is depending on how the typeface is used.
• Legible type is contained by big features and have restrained design characteristics. To unpack that further, big features = large open counters and weight changes in a stroke are very subtle.
• Lighter typefaces are typically more legible than heavier weights.
• The best stroke weight is 18% of the x-height.

Final Thoughts:

Something that came up in every piece of research from this week was the subjectivity that goes into type design — more specifically around letter spacing. There isn’t an exact formula to define letter spacing and with that even defining the center of a letter. A lot of this comes down to optically centering and making changes that feel correct.

Thanks for reading.