I made an expanding story called Telescopic Text which led to making tools for writing expanding narratives. I have made some animated films including Talk To Me, Scribble and These Are The Boring Bits, made bespoke websites for Erica Lorraine Scheidt, Steven Appleby, Minus 9 Design, Louise Naunton Morgan, The Human Printer, Christopher Potter, A Small Town Anywhere and others, designed a typeface, created an identity for The Web Copywriter, had a conversation with IKEA, (ab)used the Google Street View API to create a website where you can only look up at the sky, taken portraits of people staring back at Google, and photographed things. Contact [enable javascript to see email address] ⇗.

An exercise in type design

15 May 2008

In order to start learning about type design and better understand how type works, I set myself the not-insignificant task of designing a typeface. The end result wasn’t of a saleable standard, partly because it would need a much bigger character set and a few different weights and styles to be useful, but I learnt a lot in the process so I thought it would be interesting to document that here.

To start off I just kept collecting bits of type that I liked, or at least something I interesting about them.

I found that pixel typefaces have a kind of economy that could provide an interesting way to understand what parts of letterforms are crucial for recognition and differentiation. Although originally intended for computers, to provide clarity on a black and white or limited colour display, I thought it could be quite a useful starting point, so I made my own version of a pixel typeface to begin.

I traced a set of characters from the pixel typeface (which I redesigned a few times):

I played around a bit with the letterforms by hand.

Then the transition from hand-drawings to digital characters.

It didn’t actually take too long to rough out the basic alphabet, I was surprised at how quick it was, although I did have a fairly simplistic design and fairly homologous letterforms. The really hard work was to come later though in revising and tweaking, spacing (amount of space either side of a character) and kerning (space between pairs of characters).

The typeface went through numerous revisions. Some characters changed more than others. Over time, I attempted to eliminate superfluous detail and make it all increasingly coherent, at the same time as retaining characterful features, like the thin ‘m’.

In the final printed checks of the letterforms, a few appeared too thick so I made some modifications.

The ‘g’ needed refinement in order to appear thinner, and the link needed adjusting to allow for ink bleeding:

The ‘k’ was printing too thickly around the middle, so I adjusted the strokes:

The ‘y’ was printing too thickly around the middle, so I reduced the width of the two strokes slightly to compensate:

The ‘w’ was thinned out in the middle to make it appear more balanced:

Spacing the font was one of the most time-consuming and difficult parts, but essential. My first printed sample of the typeface (below) showed me just how important spacing is. It was a good exercise in attention to detail.

I didn’t make a type specimen (because I don’t like them), but here is a text sample and a close up…

…and a full character set.