you're not my typography

In 900 years of time and space, and I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.

How to design your own typeface

As a follow-up to my summary of the short Type Design (TDi) course at the University of Reading, I wrote a list of design tips based on some of the methods I learnt. I’m hoping this will be useful to other beginners thinking of starting out with designing their own typeface.

Although there are some excellent resources on the subject, I’d found it difficult to piece together the first steps and ensure I was on the right path, for the long journey. This concise list, published by CreativeBloq, includes some the main processes that helped me get started:

Formulating your ideas into a brief

Choosing what to design

Which characters to start with

The process of drawing and moving to your computer

Which is the popular software

Refining your design and taking it further

Plus I put together this short reading list:

I Love Typography: So you want to create a font - A good starting guide, if a little dated now Thinking with Type - Good resources for those interested in Type Design Typographica.org - A discussion on good reading lists Reading lists and resources - actively used on the Type Design MA at Reading Type Cooker - Type drawing exercises Typeface design - Final work from the University of Reading 8 Faces - Interviews with leading designers about typography and lettering Adhesion text - Dynamic text generator Diacritics Project - All you need for designing fonts with the right accents Typophile - Very active type design forum with resourses, sometimes quite opinionated

Signs For The Homeless

a typographic miniature golf course by ollie willis

london based graphic designer ollie willis has created a typographic miniature golf course. willis is not a golfer, but he does design typefaces and he found an analogy between golfing and graphic design — they both require patience, precision, and are often considered by their respective professionals to incite a range of emotion: frustration but ultimately fulfillment. in the structure, bright green astroturf is fitted into a contoured wooden frame and the course follows the curve around the lowercase, sans-serif letter ‘g’, the first letter in willis’s series.

Voyage Font by Emil Karl Belter Publisher/Typefoundry: Fenotype

Ex Boyfriend Series - Screen Printed Posters

Screen printed series called The Ex-Boyfriend Series with various post break up sentiments. There are eight different prints in total - each one is a cheerful typographic study of a frustrated post break up sentiment from a friend rendered as a crazy screen print with gradients!

This started while I was out to dinner with a dear friend who was lamenting about an old boyfriend, someone she was sure she was meant to be with but who seemed really disinterested in being a decent guy to her. In describing their break up she said all she kept thinking was, “Let me love you, asshole!". I couldn’t help it, I started laughing, it was just too perfect. So I took a brief moment to grab my trusty notebook and scribble this down before returning to consoling her. And thus the ex-boyfriend series was born.

dirtybandits.com

Go check them all out on Etsy. They’re available as 22x30 screen prints or as digitally printed postcards.

Little Letters.