Do Type Design and Product Design Overlap?
How and where can type design skills overlap with that of product design?
Usually, when people talk about design, they often bring up the common talk- Once you are a designer, you can design anything! However, they mostly refer to it in the broader scheme of things and generally mean the ‘eye’ for good design or the principles of design thinking or even just the basic process, sometimes.
In my opinion, all forms of design require a specific set of skills that need to be learned and mastered over time. It is not that an interior designer can never turn into a sound designer but it’s important to look at how and where these two fields of design overlap.
I have been appearing for interviews with various designers and leaders since the last year and this got me thinking about my story even more deeply.
One question that I have been recurringly asked in most of my interviews is why did I move from type design to product design and how do I think they both overlap
Apart from the basic principles of design, here are some places I think my year with type design has really influenced how I think and work as a product designer.
Zooming in and Zooming out
The most important skill that is needed to design type is to view type as a unit and as well as a part of a larger picture i.e. being able to zoom in to a character, work on the details and its curves and then zoom out and view it as a part of a character set.
A similar principle applies to product design as well. While designing a product, the most important skill is to be able to design an experience that makes sense on a granular level and also as part of a whole. A simple example could be designing a product wherein the designer has to discreetly consider and design even the interaction of clicking a button on a micro level and also the overall experience of the entire product. Here, the designer has to also consider how the design fits with the business as well as with other products on a macro scale.
Thinking in systems
Type systems and design systems work quite similarly for While design systems work mostly as Atomic design principles, like defining the atoms and molecules that add up as organisms, and templates and pages. In most cases, a type designer would also follow a similar practice and start with defining a style for some root characters which would then add up and reflect in the rest of the characters and, thereafter create the typeface with all its weights, sizes, and alternate style sets.
Innovation without compromising Usability and Legibility
Usability and legibility in design are few of the key principles for both product as well as type designers. However, in a world where innovation and standing out from the rest is as important as usability, both type and product designers need to address this problem in a similar way.
Both disciplines of design make use of the designer’s learning and experience that reflects in her personal or brand’s character not always in adherence with the otherwise universal interaction patterns or globally accepted scripts. While routinely conducting tests with their users to understand the limit and extent, it can prove to be a good exercise to explore and even experiment.
Working with optical compensations
Type designers work and learn to trick some optical illusions that the human mind plays with us. Things like optical sizing, and alignment as well as optical corner rounding are essentially important to a digital designer.
To illustrate an example, a user will not know if an icon is mathematically the same size as the one adjacent to it. Still, the user will be able to judge correctly if the perceived size is similar.
The most popular way to understand this is by looking at the use of overshoots while designing type. The circular characters are usually designed to be a little larger than the other characters so as to make sure that all the characters are perceived to be of similar height.
Some of these have been highlighted in great detail by Slava Shestopalov in his article. It is an amazing read if you are looking forward to know more about designing with optical compensations.
Balancing the Negative and Positive
Apart from designing a cohesive set of characters, type designers tend to spend an eternity on designing the spaces between these characters. These spaces are designed with the same laws of proximity that help product designers define and group similar and different tasks on a screen.
The goal for both while designing these spaces is to ensure that the negative spaces inside, around, and between these elements exist prevail in perfect harmony.
Let me conclude with the words of renowned typographer, Roburt Bringhurst “An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns — but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.”
I believe that this applies not only to poetry, writing, and type but to all modern interfaces.
This article was first published in Vainavi’s personal medium blog, you can read the original article & follow her writing here
