#typeface selection

Typefaces shown: Platform, Futura ND, Battling (based on Elegant-Grotesk)

TypeCooker is a drawing exercise for students at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, one of the few schools that offer a Masters degree in typeface design. But you don’t have to be a letter maker to benefit from the site. Its handy list of parameters — illustrated in instructor Erik van Blokland’s signature no-nonsense style — offers a simple but comprehensive summary of the visual traits found in typefaces. These are the core attributes that define letter styles. Once you know these you are much better equipped for selecting and pairing typefaces, not to mention discussing them intelligently with colleagues.

This book by Sofie Beier has an unfortunate title. Some readers pick it up assuming it is a comprehensive treatise on what makes letters legible. Others are looking for a manual on how to design typefaces. There are bits of this and that, but it is really neither of these things. But it is a pretty good overview of the decisions a typeface designer can make and how those decisions affect the type’s performance in different settings. It gathers a lot of resources that I haven’t seen in print before — certainly not in a single volume. It’s as useful to typographers as it is to type designers and it will help any font user be more informed about how they select and set type.

The challenge with any published collection of typefaces, be it the website of a font retailer or a book like The Anatomy of Type, is that someone has to decide how to sort the stuff. It’s a task that is thankless and sisyphean. In fact, the Classification section in Anatomy begins with a disclaimer about how type classification systems are inherently problematic. Typefaces are not birds or plants, after all. They have no scientific genetic data from which we can derive an absolute typology. The post above, by educator and typographer Indra Kupferschmid, goes into deeper detail about which categorization methodologies don’t make much sense and those that do. Indra and I agree that many of the traditional terms and models can be ambiguous, outdated, and even misleading. So, the way the book is organized incorporates some of Indra’s ideas. Still, we don’t agree entirely. No one would. Which brings us back to the simple truth: type classification can never be perfect, only helpful.