Type DNA - Design Your Own Custom Font

Taking the class is a good place to start, as it will certainly demystify the whole type design process helping you to discover that it is logical and straightforward. This is because every typeface consists of a visual system. Typographic systems are sets of visual rules that determine all of the decisions you make when designing a typeface, and enable characters to work together dictating their shape and size. If you follow this system, your typeface will be sound and well made

This class will teach you how to understand and define the visual system of any piece of lettering or signage so that you can find its DNA to use as your starting point to design your own professional display typeface. This is a satisfying and fun process. Once you have drawn your full character set, Type design is essentially a series of tests that eliminate all spacing and DNA inconsistencies, so that no one glyph dominates over the others.

Identifying parent forms enables us to group letters together that bear some resemblance to one another so that we can continue to design a whole character set using similar shared features. It isn’t as simple as it sounds though because when we try to combine the modular shapes of letters in the same way that we design lego, our words will look clunky. Letters need to be shaped in relation to all the other letters, which means that we need to also look at the space between the letters. This is why type design is related to lettering.

Key Understandings You Will Leave With

A clear understanding of difference between Typography, Lettering, and Calligraphy and their relationship to one another

Optical Adjustments

Overshoot

Why certain letters look the way they do (due to the calligraphic tools that originally created them)

Key Skills You Will Leave With

How to make optical adjustments (knowing how to make different letterforms appear to be the same size)

How to analyze letters to find and replicate the core DNA of a Group of Letters to create a new set of letters.

How to adjust the space between different letters for an evenly spaced professional word.

An efficient process to quickly and accurately draw great letterforms (Helpful tips and tricks) and then refine them. (sketching fast enables you to think big and is actually faster than drawing on the computer). You will be working with layers to quickly develop your solution.

What's included

Comprehensive lecture and visual presentation, hand outs and access to the School's library of Type Design books, and specimens.

Requirements

Camera (Phone is ok), A3 pad of tracing paper, Graph Paper, 2B lead pencils preferably a clutch pencil either . 7 or .5, Note taking material