An Introduction to Professional Type Design

»Designing Fonts« paves your way to professional type design. In a clear and well-founded way, the type designer Ulrike Rausch and I guide you from the letter sketch to your own typeface. Whether it’s a decorative display typeface with interlocking and alternate letters, a well-developed headline font with multiple weights and OpenType features, or a version of your handwriting: This book shows you how to do it.

Type design is often either presented in such detail-obsessed complexity that it’s impossible for beginners to understand, or simplified so much with the help of apps that the fonts created are barely usable. With this book, we’ll show you how to design professional fonts—without first having to fathom all the mysteries of type design.

Type design – thorough and easy to understand

»Desiging Fonts« teaches the basics of type design using display fonts and thus provides an uncomplicated but sound introduction to type design. With easy-to-follow instructions, many examples, and practical tips, you will learn how to design individual fonts – tailor-made for your own projects or customer orders.

The book has two parts. Part one explains the theoretical, design, and technical basics of type design and font production. Six chapters take you from the alphabet to the font: you find and develop an idea for your typeface, design harmonizing letters, produce your font, and expand it with special functions.

In Part two, you’ll learn how to design and technically implement different types of fonts in eight workshops. For your very first font, we take you by the hand and explain step by step how to produce a simple font with uppercase letters. In the other workshops, you’ll learn to design seven other types of fonts, including script fonts, monoline fonts, layer fonts, and dingbat fonts.