Stuart from Daalton Maag came into speak to us about type design and type anatomy and carried out a workshop with us. He firstly spoke about his process when dealing with clients, specifically so when designing the typeface for the BBC.
When designing a typeface for a client they begin with small groups with different workshops. Which helps the designers to understand what the client wants and what they're looking for. The workshops consist of looking at their existing brand fonts and looking at the positives and negatives of each, then they bring together a gallery of images which each have a typographic association which moves the brand world into the typographic world. They also have an axis of key words which relate to the brand where they place different typefaces to gage what types best represent their brand values.
The client then chooses their top 3 fonts and that is when the design can actually be started properly. A team comes together of around 10 or less designers, where they begin to discuss the brief and start to sketch and digitalise ideas. Legibility, use on screen, use of the typeface across all different medias are all aspects that needs to be considered. For example the BBC originally had helvetica, however the spacing is too tight and does not work well on screen, which is predominantly where it is used. The BBC wanted a large x-height, open counters and a humanist design, therefore the fonts chosen were manipulated to fit these characteristics.
To begin digitalising the typeface, the letters are drawn out in Postscript, using as few nodes as possible, then they move to True Type to develop the typefaces further.At first on the characters a, e, h, i, o, p, t and v are looked at and developed as these have the most important characteristics which will then shape the rest of the typeface. Generally around 7/8 ideas are worked on at a time, then the client can narrow these down to 3. After this punctuation, and the rest of the uppercase and lowercase letters are introduced, however, just using a regular weight at this point. When the typeface is decided upon and the client is happy, this is when extreme weights are looked at, so extra bold and extra light, therefore everywhere else can fall between these two.
Finally an Ascii set is produced including all uppercase, lowercase, numerals and punctuation and currency etc. The next thing to look at is the spacing and kerning and how the typeface is best well read. After this is the engineering part which is the other 50% of the job making sure that the fonts can work across all platforms consistently. Hinting is the next step which is controlling the way the pixels dit into the pixel grid to get better quality characters. Then finally the different versions of the typefaces are produced to fit with Desktop (TTF), Web Fonts (which are compressed versions), and App fonts.
Optical Principles
We then took part in a workshop which was all about learning how to draw out letters and the characteristics that each letterform has and what needs to be considered. For example, the application of contrast which comes from the calligraphy behind the letters. The weight needs to be taken out of horizontals and the round on oval letters needs to be compensated for. When writing a 'H' and 'X', the bar and the cross have an optical centre rather than a mathematical centre as it needs to be adjusted to be balanced. After learning this, we had the chance to apply this new found knowledge ad previous learnt knowledge on type terminology together and try and draw out correctly aligned and proportioned letters.
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