Hasta La Ideas

Advanced educational opportunities for typeface design have spread swiftly over the last decade. In January, Troy Leinster’s overview of these new options covered his experience at Type@Cooper and KABK, and concluded with a list of eight other schools that offer specialized type design programs.

Despite this welcome growth, ever since The Cooper Union launched its (now perennially successful) series in New York it has become painfully apparent to me and fellow enthusiasts who live nearby that a true post-graduate program in type design is still missing on North America’s West Coast. There is no shortage of professional talent on this side of the continent — from Vancouver’s “Typographic Archipelago” where Tiro, Bantjes, Bringhurst, and Type Camp HQ reside, south to Los Angeles and its myriad art schools and independent foundries. And outside New York, the region with the highest density of type designers is arguably the San Francisco Bay Area — home to Adobe, Monotype, Emigre, MVB, PSY/OPS (whose newly founded Alphabetic Order now hosts classes), and many other type designers and lettering artists who are a product of this fertile zone where book arts and technology collide.

Even amid this rich ecosystem of type talent, San Francisco still has nothing like Type@Cooper, or SVA’s recently announced 4-week course with its impressive cadre of faculty and lecturers.

Sumner Stone. A still from a video interview for the Type Directors Club.

That’s why I’m so pleased that one of the most lauded of the Bay Area letter legends is doing his bit to bring more type design education to San Francisco. Sumner Stone will teach a 4-day workshop called Structure & Emotion in Letterform from May 28 through May 31.

Most of you know Sumner’s resume. He was Adobe’s first Director of Typography and went on to design many award-winning typefaces, including ITC Stone, ITC Bodoni, and one my favorite families, Cycles/Arepo. Over the last three years Sumner has been teaching at Type@Cooper, and obviously enjoys it enough to do more back in the Bay.

For this workshop, Sumner is partnering with the Letterform Archive where the first two days of class will be held, giving students access to prime material from the 16th through the 21st centuries while they learn letter design and drawing. This is followed by two days with experienced printers in the letterpress studio at the City College of San Francisco, where students will print their letter designs from polymer plates.

At the Letterform Archive, workshoppers get to play with (from top): Van de Velde, a renaissance manuscript, Bodoni, Johnston, and Leach, among others.

I dig this format. So much so that I put my stamp on the event as an official media partner. I’m not sure what that really means, but I do know I am honored to be associated with this workshop. I only wish I could be in the States this month to attend. Do what I cannot: go apply now before the 16 slots fill up. It’s not a full year of graduate study — but it’s a great taste of what could be.

In 2009, after 13 years as a self-employed graphic designer, I decided to abandon the professional world and go back to school — this time to pursue a field that seems related, but is an entirely separate discipline: typeface design.

Although a lot of type designers are self taught and quite successful, I was looking for the opportunity to study letterforms and their construction for an intense and uninterrupted period of time, something you can’t do while working full-time. After attending three type design courses over the last four years I’d like to share my experience with others who are considering a career in the field.

I won’t dig into much detail about individual projects. (They are heavily documented on other blogs, they often change, and it’s nice to have some surprises if you attend.) Instead, my intent is to give you a quick insight into what you might experience from each course, so you’ll be in a better position to decide which one or two might be best for you, and to help answer some of the questions I had before applying. There are a few handy tips in here, too.

The following three courses are a part of my journey to pursue type design as a career path.

Undergraduate: The Warm Up

My first experience with designing letterforms was when I enrolled in the undergraduate Digital Font Design unit VCO3305 at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. You join the Bachelor of Communication Design students that chose the type design unit as an elective for a four hour class each week for one semester — approximately twelve weeks. You begin each class with an hour lecture, then you have three hours studio time to work on your project. A minimum of an extra nine hours during your week is required to complete the assignments.

This unit teaches the basic skills of using a font editor (at the time we used FontLab, now they are using RoboFont), an introduction into type construction, spacing, and some type design history. Our assignments included creating a modular font (A–Z, 0–9), a brush- or pen-inspired font, and finally a self-initiated project. In each you are encouraged to expand the character set to include upper and lowercase, numerals and punctuation. A research assignment on an existing typeface to present to the class was also a part of the assessment. For our final submission we designed a small specimen for each font we created.

If you are living in Australia, I highly recommend this course as a good introduction to type design while still having the ability to continue your freelance work. And for those living elsewhere, the good news is that undergraduate courses with a focus on type design are becoming more common. Check in with your local university or art school.

Type@Cooper: The Sprint

For those seriously interested in creating type, the Type@Cooper Condensed Postgraduate Certificate in Typeface Design might be for you. This course, based in New York, is a five week type design bootcamp for fifteen selected participants from around the world. The course is setup especially for international students, so be prepared to benefit from new lifelong friends at your future travel destinations.

Type@Cooper condensed class of 2011 with teachers Sara Soskolne, Cara Di Edwardo, Sumner Stone, and guest lecturer Matthew Carter.

Type@Cooper is an intense course from day one. It compacts the contact hours from the yearlong Extended program into five weeks! You will work around twelve hours a day, seven days a week to keep up with these guys. The moment you arrive at Cooper you start drawing type. We worked with the broad nib pen and brush to learn the basic structure of roman letterforms before moving onto developing our own typeface.

The historic Cooper Union Foundation Building, New York.

History and theory is taught with visits to many of New York’s famous libraries and museums and the amazing Herb Lubalin Study Centre of Design and Typography located in the beautiful Cooper Union building.

This course will truly test your interest in type, giving you the opportunity to work on your own typeface for the duration of the course. You are required to present your progress to your teachers and fellow classmates on a regular basis while learning how to constructively critique the work of others. Your teachers at Type@Cooper are among the best type designers in the world, so you are in extremely good hands. My experience at Type@Cooper gave me a solid understanding of history, construction, spacing, digitization using RoboFont, and some basic font production and Python coding. I highly recommend this course if you are ready for a challenge and prepared to put your working life aside for five invigorating weeks.

The application process is seamless and you will find out if you’ve been excepted before or on the date they publish. I submitted a folio of typographic work, including my first attempts at type design from the course at Monash University. I showed I was able to find my way around a font editor and had an understanding, and a substantial interest in creating type.

Once you’ve been accepted you will need to find accommodation in New York, which is not cheap and is a little bit of a challenge. I arrived in the city and stayed in a hostel for a week while looking for a place, but I would recommend trying to secure something before your arrive. I finally found a share-house on CraigsList in East Village within walking distance to Cooper Union which proved to be very handy after a long day of drawing type. It’s also good to be close to other classmates so you can work together on weekends and grab a beer and a meal after class. When you’re accepted, try to link up with each other on Facebook and Twitter before you arrive.

KABK: The Full Marathon

Type and Media at The Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, The Netherlands, is the granddaddy of type design courses. It’s like Type@Cooper on steroids. The yearlong master’s study is intense, and the intensity expands the full year. They offer you the chance to put your life on hold and focus purely on type, learning from the best type designers in the field. Holidays are really not holidays and weekends are pretty much for working. This is the first time in my life where I lost track of days, and where weekends blended into the working week. Having said that, if you like type you will enjoy every minute!

The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, The Netherlands.

Taught in English, Type and Media is a combination of experiences designed to allow you to distill your own way of working and producing typefaces. It’s not a course where you are hand-held and shown “the way” to do things. Each teacher has different (sometimes conflicting) ideas and methods of working. It puts you in a position to find your own direction. Looking back, it feels like every experience had a purpose and the structure was a truly tested one.

Pen work and sketching is a big part of this course. The broad nib pen, flexible pointed pen, and hammer and chisel were tools we got to know from the start. Sketching, sketching, and more sketching was encouraged for exploring ideas before any digitization. The TypeCooker website was a tool we used often for pushing the limits on what you can achieve when mixing different type parameters. We had a lot of fun and many wild ideas were hatched during these classes.

The research side of things is not forgotten. Trips to libraries and museums in The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and the UK led us to the elusive names and history of forgotten pre-nineteenth-century typefaces.

The major project in the second half of the year is where all that you’ve learnt and experienced during the first half of the year is focused. This is your opportunity to put it all into practice and develop a fully-working typeface of your choice. Presenting your ideas and progress is an important element in the process. We met regularly with our teachers and classmates to show where we were at and to explain our journey. Your classmates’ experiences are also important to your own progress throughout the year.

Type and Media graduating class of 2013 with teacher Jan Willem Stas.

Many hours are spent with your fellow classmates, and they become your family. Students from eleven different countries were plucked out of our everyday lives and placed in a pressure cooker for a year. Not only do you learn about type here, you also learn about different cultures, personalities and a lot about yourself. Don’t expect to come out of this course the same person as when you went in. There is not much time to meet outsiders, so operating as a team, functioning happily and productively, is an important part of this unique experience.

Getting into Type and Media is a battle in itself. With over 150 applicants each year being one of the twelve selected was a great honor. The application process involved submitting a letter of motivation to attend. Basically you have to convince them that you have enough interest and experience to be considered for the enduring time ahead. After submitting your application, don’t be disheartened if you don’t hear back from them immediately, or if at all. But waiting to hear if you’ve been accepted is quite painful. It will not necessarily be on the date that they publish, but you will hear back from them eventually. Keep an eye on the @typemedia twitter account — sometimes this hints at where they are in the application process. If you’re not accepted, but you’re still serious about attending, don’t give up. Improve your skills and try again the next year. You won’t be the first person to have applied a couple of times before getting into this course.

Once accepted, you will need to organize your big move to The Netherlands. This can be quite a task if you don’t speak Dutch (Nederlands) as all governmental and business correspondence is written in the local language. Having said that, most Dutch-speaking people are also happy to speak in English, and Google Translate will become your best friend for all written documents. Be sure to get in contact with the graduating students as they can help you with any questions you might have, including lodging. There are a few “unofficial” Type and Media houses that have been passed down from previous students which makes life a lot easier — especially if you are not from Europe.

Type and Media is truly an experience you will carry with you for the rest of your life. I highly recommend this course if you intend for type to be a big part of that journey.

Choosing Your Own Path

I decided on these three courses over other type design programs because of the hands-on experience they offer. While there is a different level of theory included in each, making type is what they are all about.

One important distinction is that they focus mainly on designing Latin typefaces. Still, at Type and Media I spent some time designing a Greek and my revival project was a Javanese typeface. Whatever your interest in non-Latin type, in my opinion, learning the principles of type design and exploring shapes initially is most important. Once you have this under your belt, exploring other scripts become more about understanding the language, its script, and how it’s used.

But my path may not be yours. Before you choose a program, check out these other specialized type design courses around the globe:

Argentina
Universidad de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires)
CDT-UBA, Carrera de especialización en Diseño de Tipografía

France
École Estienne (Paris)
DSAA Création Typographique
École supérieure d’art et de design, ESAD (Amiens)
Post-diplôme Systèmes graphiques, langage et typographie

Germany
Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, HGB (Leipzig)
Klasse für Type-Design

Switzerland
École cantonale d’art de Lausanne, ECAL (Lausanne)
MA Art Direction: Type Design
Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, ZHdK (Zürich)
CAS Schriftgestaltung
MAS Type Design and Typography

Mexico
Centro de Estudios Gestalt (Veracruz)
Maestría en Diseño Tipográfico

United Kingdom
University of Reading (Reading)
MA Typeface Design

Science fiction is a mirror. It’s rarely good at predicting the future, but it’s great at telling us what we’d like the future to be, or what we fear it may become. Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick: familiar names that guided many imaginations to think about societies spanning the galaxy. Then Star Wars finished off what 2001 started: rich visual textures and soundscapes made it ever more difficult for our imaginations to keep up.

But there were two things that always bothered me about science fiction. First, everybody speaks the same language, or understands the other person’s locutions without so much as an “excuse me, can you repeat this?” And, most frustratingly, nobody ever reads. Nobody. Sometimes there are symbols, diagrams, and gibberish that brands a vehicle or a building, but that’s pretty much it. It is as if some mundane version of mind-meld has rendered obsolete those moments between you and some letters on a surface in front of your eyes.

Well, it didn’t turn out that way. We know that people read more than they ever did. Perhaps they read fewer of some traditional thing or other (and even that depends on the region) but, overall, more people spend more time looking at strings of letters. What was once a dedicated activity has expanded to fill out the previously empty spots of the day: news, a story we saved for later, the playground utterances of Twitter, the trivial ego massages of Facebook. It pains to imagine Dick’s Deckard checking his smartphone while slurping at the noodle bar, but you can bet that this is exactly what he’d be doing today. And we have only begun to see what ubiquitous tablets will do. Many years from now, these very few years at the beginning of the century’s second decade will be seen as a key inflection point: The combination of portable, personal, ever-present, ever-connected screens will transform our ideas of learning, of exchange, of creating new knowledge to degrees unimaginable by our idolized authors.

There is one problem, however: the future is turning out to be more complicated than we had imagined. Instead of a single, Esperanto-like über-language, most of us are growing up with two parallel identities. One is based on a commonly-owned, flexible, and forgiving version of English, with a rubber-band syntax and a constant stream of new words that spread like an epidemic to other tongues. The other is our regional and historical identity: local in geography, and deeply personal in its associations. This identity is awash with the memories that make us who we are. It comes in the language we dream in, the language of our laughter, our exasperations, and our tears. Overwhelmingly, this language is not English, and quite likely it is not in the letters of the Latin script.

Indeed, just as globalization brought a wave of uniformity, it also underlined the rights of communities to express themselves in their local languages and dialects, in the script of their traditions. But the growing urban populations (over half of everybody, now) are contributing to a demand of complex script support. The equivalent of a single typeface rendering a plain-vanilla version of a language is not a new thing. For about two decades we’ve had the equivalent of a global typewriter, spitting out a single-weight, single-style typescript for nearly every language, with varying degrees of sensitivity to the historical forms of the script. Great if you only speak in one tone, only typeset texts with minimal hierarchies, and don’t care much about the impact of typography on reading. Indeed, the typewriter analogy is supremely fitting: the limitations of typewriter-like devices migrated onto subsequent technologies with astonishing persistence, despite the exponential increase in the capabilities of our typesetting environments.

Stage One: getting fundamentals right

So, here’s the context: globalized technologies and trends, with localized identities and needs. But typeface design is nothing if not a good reactor to changing conditions. Indeed we can detect a clear path for typeface design in the last decade, with two-and-a-half distinct stages of development.

The first stage was about rethinking how we develop basic script support for global scripts. Starting with pan-European regions (wider Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek) and gradually extending outwards to Hebrew, Arabic, and mainstream Indian scripts, typeface designers moved away from re-encoding the dated, limited typefaces of the previous technologies. This development led to two narratives that are increasingly central to typeface design. On one hand, an understanding of typemaking and typesetting technologies, and their critical impact on character sets, the design of typeforms, and the possibilities for complex behaviors along a line of text. On the other hand, an appreciation of the written forms: the relationship of the tools and the materials used for writing that determined the key formal features of each script.

For many designers the depth of research required to tackle a new script was a surprise, and not always a welcome one; but increasingly the dimensions of the challenge were respected, and understood. This research began, very slowly, to liberate global scripts from the formal tyranny of the Latin script and the expediency of copy/paste. Notions of a uniform stress at a steep angle, and of serifs to terminate strokes, are gradually seen to be primarily Latin-specific. And the faux-geometric, over-symmetrical, pot-bellied International Style typefaces are steadily unmasked as an intensely North-Western style, meaningful only as a response to the post-war trauma and urban explosion of the 1950s and 60s. Already dated by 1985, their continued adoption serves only to discredit their users and promoters. When taken as a model for non-Latin scripts, they are increasingly recognized as the typographic equivalent of a cultural straightjacket, limiting innovation and the expression of a more sensitive and current identity.

This does not mean that new typefaces with non-Latin character sets were all good, let alone perfect for their purpose. But people started questioning their assumptions, and put their money where their mouth was. Most notably, Microsoft (with a global perspective early on) and Adobe (starting with Europe, and gradually expanding its horizon) asked themselves, and others who could help, how to get things right. Their typefaces with large character sets raised the bar for many subsequent designers, and in many ways continue to determine the default level of script support on a global scale. (Regrettably, Apple never claimed a seat at this table: throughout its ecosystem its use of typefaces remains persistently unimaginative and pedestrian, abandoning any aspirations of typographic leadership.)

Stage Two: linear families

The second stage in global typeface design came when development migrated from the big developers to the publishers catering to the publishing and branding markets. The briefs for typefaces mutated from very broad specifications (for fonts that ship with operating systems and office suites, or bundled with page layout applications) to the needs of very specific documents, with rich hierarchies and multiple styles. While Office could muddle through with four Latin styles and one each for most non-Latin scripts, a newspaper or a magazine demands a range of weights and widths — especially if the templates are imported or designed to match an existing house style. Headings and subheadings, straplines and pull-quotes, footnotes and captions, for starters. And, hot on the tails of global publications and multi-script branding, come the limitations of doing the same on smaller screens, where the color palette and the typefaces may be the only elements that transfer fluidly with some consistency across materials and devices, bridging scales from the pocket to the poster.

In the previous stage designers had to ask themselves what are the fundamental differences, for example, between Arabic-script typefaces for Arabic and Persian and Urdu texts. Now the matter shifts to something like, “What are the typographic conventions in these language communities, what are their traditions, and what are the rules for differentiating between contrasting kinds of text within the same document?” In real terms, this moved design from the single typeface to the family: how will a bold Devanagari relate to a text weight, and how far can you go in adding weight? Can you squeeze, condense, or compress? And how light can you make the strokes?

Juliet Shen’s typeface for Lushootseed, the language of the Tulalip Native American tribe.

The answers to these questions stem from a deeper engagement with the script, and an understanding of which elements are integral to maintaining the meaning of the glyph, and which are there to impart a style and build the identity of the typeface. All typeface designers (native or not) need to understand the impact of type-making and typesetting developments on the script, engage intensively with the written forms, and consider the development of typographic norms within a community. But we know, through the evidence of many successful typefaces, that designers need not be native to a script to design well for it; in many cases, they might not even be able to read the text they are typesetting. This may seem counterintuitive. However, good typefaces rely hugely on the designers’ dialogue with convention, and their understanding of very clear — if not always obvious — rules.

Having said all that, this stage of typeface development for global scripts is inherently conservative. The recognition of the formal richness of non-Latin scripts, and the efforts to design new typefaces that respect this complexity and represent it adequately, is a corrective against past sins, technological and human. Typefaces that are well-designed and comfortably read by native communities, while allowing multi-script typesetting for a range of different applications, are a Good Thing, but nothing to be particularly proud of. This is the typographic infrastructure of a connected world. These typefaces are elementary, and essential. They have to be many, because the documents they are used in are hugely variant in their specifications and complexities; and when contemplating multi-script typesetting, the specifics of the document determine which typefaces will do the job better.

But for all the celebration, these new, expansive families are refinements of fundamental forms, without raising difficult questions. It is a relatively simple process to add weights to a typographic script, hindered only by the scale of the work, when the character set is substantial. The challenge becomes interesting only in the extremes of the family, the very dark styles, and the very light ones. At these extremes designers need to deal with loops and counters, stroke joints and cross-overs, and all sorts of terminals that may not accommodate a dense stroke within the available space, or dilute the distinctive features of the typeform. Indeed, these extremes demonstrate clearly how the neatly expandable grammar of the Latin script, with its misleadingly simple-to-modulate strokes, is a crippled model for a global typography.

Problems compound with scripts that have only ever been implemented in type with a modulated stroke, or a monoline stroke, but never both. As the weight approaches the blacks, monoline strokes have to gain some contrast to fold around counters, and to save terminals from turning into blobs or stubby appendages. In the opposite direction, towards the thins, critical modulation may have to be sacrificed, and strokes that have only been experienced as curves turn into long, nearly straight strokes. Unsurprisingly, designers had overwhelmingly steered clear of these extremes for their non-Latin typefaces.

Vaibhav Singh’s Devanagari [PDF] explores changes in pen shapes as the weight moves towards a Black Display.

Stage two-and-a-half: rich typography and typeface innovation

So far, so good. The developments that make up these two stages are not consistently evident in terms of market position or geography, but the trends are coherent and clear. Yet the last two or three years are beginning to kick typeface design onto a different plane. The causes may be a mix of technical developments (webfonts, and the improving support for complex scripts in browsers), a maturity of design processes informed by research, and a growing number of typeface designers working locally but having graduated from structured courses that build research and reflection skills. There may also be factors that are only barely registering in our discussions, that will be obvious in hindsight. Regardless, four notions are clearly emerging.

Most visible is the development of typefaces not only for mainline scripts, but for scripts from relatively closed markets (like Khmer or Burmese), for minority scripts, and for local dialects, with the required support. Such projects may be as diverse as an extension of Bengali for Meeti Mayek, a typeface for a Native American tribe, or the consideration of diacritics for Brazilian indigenous tribes. Only a few years ago these would be esoteric projects for academics, at best — and candidates for typographic extinction at worst.

Rafael Dietzsch’s typeface [PDF] rethinks diacritics for the specific requirements of Brazilian indigenous languages.

Secondly, we can see that typeface design is now, very clearly, a global enterprise, for a mobile and connected community. There are relevant courses in many countries, and no national monopoly. Designers from nearly any country are increasingly likely to be working for global projects, diluting the “old world” associations bequeathed to us by the large hot-metal and phototypesetting conglomerates. We may see young designers cutting their teeth in a European company, then returning to their native region to develop typefaces locally. This is unquestionably the mark of a healthy community of practice.

The third notion is that typographic families are being actively rethought, across all scripts. This process began some years ago with large typeface families moving away from a predictable, unimaginative, and frankly un-typographic interpolation between extremes, towards families of variants that are more loosely related, with individual styles designed for specific uses. Although this is only just beginning to be evident in the non-Latin realm, the signs are there. We can safely predict that many designers across the world will be contemplating the constitution of their typeface families on a more typographically sensitive basis.

The fourth notion stems from this expansion of typeface families. As designers try to address the issue of secondary or complementary styles within a family, the absence of established models opens up new possibilities. We have already seen Latin typefaces with radically different ideas of what may pass for a secondary style. Similarly, in non-Latin scripts designers are looking for inspiration in the written forms of native speakers, in a process that reminds us of the adoption of cursive styles for Latin typefaces. Even more, they are looking at the high- and low-lettering traditions: magnificent manuscripts, as well as ephemeral signs and commercial lettering. These sources always existed, but were considered separate domains from typeface design. Armenian, Korean, and many other scripts are beginning to break these typographic taboos.

Aaron Bell’s Korean typeface [PDF] borrows from native cursive writing to differentiate the secondary style.

So, there you have it: the world may be turning upside down in other areas, but typographically it is entering a period of global growth, maturity, and cultural sensitivity. There will, of course, be many duds, due as much to deadlines as to over-confidence or sloppiness. But we can confidently look forward to many innovative projects, and exceptional designers from a global scene to making their mark.

(N.b. The first version of this text was published in Slanted Non-Latin Special Issue, July 2013.)

For nearly three months last year, I drew some type every day. My “Daily Typesketch” was an experiment — in drawing, discipline, public practice, and in getting less fearful of process and paper.

Let me say this first: I know there are many designers who draw more and better than I; who have sketchbooks filled with lovely letters and exciting experiments. My hat is off to them, because I’m not like that. I’ve always thought of myself primarily as a digital designer — computers are my playgrounds, while paper usually instills in me a vague sense of dread (or at least, inconvenience). So it felt like quite an experiment last year when I committed to drawing some type every single day, on paper, and posting a photo of the sketch to a dedicated Flickr set.

I had been getting a bit frustrated in the months after finishing my first typeface, FF Ernestine. Over the course of three years, I had learned to draw type by making that typeface, and now every letter I drew still looked like it wanted to be part of that same family. I longed to diversify, but wasn’t sure how.

Process, Paper, Patience

At TYPO Berlin a year ago, I participated in Erik van Blokland and Paul van der Laan’s wildly popular TypeCooker critique session. I had known TypeCooker before — Erik’s “tool for generating type-drawing exercises”, which, in a manner of speaking, offers guided walks out of one’s type-drawing comfort zone. Pick a type of exercise and a level of difficulty, and the site generates a random combination of parameters, a “recipe” to follow. My TYPO submission was a narrow, tall, contrasted sans that was reasonably hard to draw, and I sweated over it for the better part of a week-end until I deemed it nice enough to show. “This is a very pretty sketch” was the verdict, “but where is the process?”

That was when I realized I wanted (and needed) to get deeper into practice, into the process. Indeed process, like craft, seems fairly obvious to honor in theory and principle, but harder to embrace in practice. In-progress work is uncomfortable, it shows more open questions than answers; and “uncertainty”, as Paul Soulellis wrote in The Manual, “runs counter to how we’re trained to articulate our design values. We’re taught to express clearly and certainly”, but in-progress work is usually not clear yet, craft is messy and dirty, and sometimes you hit a dead end. Facing this is unsettling — maybe especially so for a generation of designers raised with the shiny precision of computers. We love that precision, even if deep down we know that it’s often a lie. The precise numbers of computers can make our work look like we’ve found answers when really all we have are questions, and the only truth we know is vague.

It is in this crucial point that paper is friendlier to the creative process than the screen: It supports (and renders) vagueness, sketchiness, better than computers do.

Type Cooker creator Erik van Blokland demonstrates the type sketching method passed down from Gerrit Noordzij and taught in the Type and Media program at The Hague.

Embracing the famed “inside out” drawing technique was a key to the whole exercise. The basic idea of starting with fuzzy shapes and gradually “bringing them into focus”, making the shapes cleaner as the ideas get clearer, is tremendously helpful (and can, I think, be applied to all kinds of shapes, beyond the classic application echoing the strokes of broad-nibbed or pointed pens). Thus one gradually progresses from general proportions to details. This is likely the correct hierarchy of decision making — first fixing what is most relevant and visible in type, even at text sizes (proportion, weight, contrast, the rhythm of black and white), before getting hooked on little details.

This was an exercise in patience, too. I am better at details than the conceptual “big picture”, better at refining than defining, and the computer makes it a little too easy to jump right into the details, with which you fiddle around forever until you realize something big is off anyway. (I’ve lost count of the times I had to redraw all the curves in Ernestine because I decided the x-height wasn’t right yet after all.)

Letting Loose

So I started drawing, and I drew every day. Most of the sketches were based on TypeCooker, which made me draw things I wouldn’t usually draw, or even think of as good ideas. It asked for wide seriffed faces and compressed sans serifs, but also such strange things as a monospaced upright italic for TV subtitles, a wide light monoline serif with swashes but no ascenders, or a grunge monospaced Helvetica as drawn by Gerard Unger. (Making sense of these turned out to be interesting.) I drew with an x-height of 4cm on an 11×14 inch pad of transparent marker paper, tracing over the drawings in multiple steps when necessary. Typically I’d do 5–10 letters, a variable basic set that could form the basis for a typeface design (for lowercase this was typically an ‘o’ or maybe ‘e’, at least one arch, something with an ascender, something with a descender, one bowl-and-stick letter, and of course some diagonals and special favorites like ‘a’, ‘s’, or ‘g’). Usually I first made a quick, rough pencil sketch of the approximate structures and proportions, then started working with a pen as soon as I dared, sketching rough proportions and areas before filling in outlines and details. (I never quite lost my urge to add outlines prematurely, but doing this too soon invariably derailed the sketch.)

The learning curve was noticeable. A good month into the experiment, I tweeted: “Best parts of #dailysketching: Slowly sensing better where black needs to go; & understanding I can build outwards from that fuzzy vision.” It still took courage to lay down ink; applying a dab of slow-drying Tipp-Ex is not the same as hitting Cmd-Z, and having to cut up a drawing to get the spacing right does not feel the same as adjusting sidebearings on screen, where space is elastic and erasure leaves no marks. But my fearfulness of the physical process was evolving into thoughtfulness, my dread into respect.

I learned to think about type in new ways, practiced looking at it differently. I squinted, “unfocused” my eyes, and used a reduction glass. I learned to see the space between the letters as an inherent part of the design. I tried lots of different pens and attempted (mostly in vain) to trim the Tipp-Ex brush just the right way. And I began to feel more free to take on new ideas and try them out on paper without over-thinking details right away. Six weeks into the experiment I was “letting loose on … things I’ve exactly never drawn before”, as I wrote happily in the caption to a funky, brushy, reverse-contrast script sort of thing that I wouldn’t have conceived of trying to draw before. I had finally stopped worrying so much, and I was making letters, every day. Letters that didn’t look like Ernestine. Letters that didn’t look like they were finished, or had to be.

Public Practice

The decision to make drawing practice a daily exercise was a trick to make me stick with it. Keeping it up was a challenge sometimes, but it also brought beautiful opportunities, like drawing together with friends I happened to be visiting. In a similar way, publishing the work online was intended to up the pressure and confirm my commitment, but I also hoped it could trigger discourse that might prove helpful to me and maybe also inspiring to others.

Of course, if embracing sketchiness and vagueness on my desk was hard, sharing it publicly was really scary. But I felt I needed to overcome the anxiety of showing something that isn’t as “clean” and “finished” as can be — for sometimes polish is simply not the point. In contrast to other “daily” doses of impressively final-looking work (like Jessica Hische’s famed Daily Drop Cap), sketchiness and roughness are at the heart of my experiment. My sketches are snapshots from a process, stills from a learning curve.

The project ended about as spontaneously as it began. After almost three months of daily drawing, and quite a bit of welcome input and exchange, I went on a vacation with a barely functional internet connection and the desire to disconnect from my routine for a bit. I look back fondly. I’ve learned a lot: much about the myriad shapes that type can take; some sketches have spawned little digital typeface prototypes; and I got out of my deadlock and frustration. While there remains so much that I haven’t yet learned, there is this: It’s true that if you want to draw type, then go draw type. Every day, if you have to. Try doing it loosely, looking beyond your own preferences, and resisting the pressure of polish. You will find new answers — and, what is more, new questions too.

Austin-based designer Vitorio Miliano prefers to give books rather than lend them:

For me, the important parts of a book are inside me, after I’ve read it and taken it in. So, when I give you a book, I don’t want it back. It’s not a loan: it’s a gift; depending on the book, perhaps the gift of a passion, or of knowledge, or of understanding. The best thing that could happen is that you take that book, and you keep it – and me – in your heart.

So he gave 13 books to the Internet Archive, an organization that scans a thousand books a day and puts them online for the world to read.

One of the items in Miliano’s donation was the 1923 Manual of Linotype Typography, a unique type specimen that is as much about teaching typographic fundamentals as it is showing typefaces. As Joshua Lurie-Terrell wrote here years ago, the Manual is not your standard type catalog. While most specimens of this era mainly show their fonts through paragraphs of sample text and pages of stacked-and-justified showings, the focus of this book is type in use. Filled with mock examples of typesetting, from title pages and chapter openings to leaflets and advertisements, the Linotype Manual gives a good sense of how the printed world looked in the early 20th century.

“Critical Comment: The use of thick and thin rules with the Bodoni face dates back to the specimen sheets of Bodoni himself, and, in fact, to the origin of the modern letter. Its appropriateness is obvious, the thick and thin parts of the rules balancing the stems and hair lines of the type…”

You can see all 286 high-resolution pages of the book in the Internet Archive’s online viewer or download a complete PDF. Unfortunately, while the text is readable, the medium-resolution PDF is not a substitute for a printed copy. Whet your appetite with the online version, then cast your net on a bookseller cooperative like AbeBooks where prices range from $45 to $165.

Read more about Miliano’s donation at his site. It includes another piece of design history that is not as well known as the Linotype Manual, but perhaps just as interesting: The Art & Practice of Typography, Edmund G. Gress (1910). Not only does this book contain instructional illustrations and sample settings, but also some actual published work of the time.