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BIORHYME contents 1. INTRODUCTION 2. DESIGN CONCEPT 3. FROM LOGOTYPE to PROTOTYPE Scale, typographic range & context 4. BUILDING BLOCKS FOR A TYPEFACE: DEFINING D.N.A. 5. FROM UPPER- to LOWER- CASE Proportions and personality: Influences Spacing Caveat 6. SPACING (Generally) 7. FAMILY PLANNING

1. INTRODUCTION The relationship between hand and eye in the design of letterforms Biorhyme started life as a logotype for a musical duo called Mercury Mercury. The idea for the logotype started with an ‘R’ I found in a Conner’s type foundry specimen book and fell in love with. I had it in my back pocket and was waiting to find a use for it. When I started to work on the logo for Mercury Mercury, it seemed to fit the needs of the brief. The logo was intended to show an organic and evocative approach to music combined with a systematic and methodical and primarily digital workflow. There

are many ways of approaching this kind of brief, and indeed most typefaces consist of a balance of these very concepts, with a requirement for modularity and mechanical consistency to be harmonized with the requirement for expression and identity. Kris Holmes describes this interplay beautifully in the Tufte produced documentary about Inge Druckrey Teaching to See, where she describes the relationship between the eye, who desires order, regularity and rhythm, and the hand that translates thoughts into the written word, whose main impetus is toward movement and expression ‘the radical hand’ she calls it. There is in any typeface the record of this movement. Even in the most geometric and modular of typefaces, the requirement for recognizability is dictated by the conventions our eyes have become accustomed to expect, largely grounded in these precursor skeletal models and constituted as conventions in each new typeface and thoroughly rooted in the earliest forms of our alphabet in inscriptions, carvings and bookhands of the pre-moveable type eras. That being said, I decided it was time to dust off my little pet project, since I thought that the lean weight of the form and the playful kick of the leg on the R was a nice approach to take to express this concept, although this is only one of a myriad possibilities. So I pulled out my little shot of the R, and began working on the other letters of the word Mercury. I developed an identity system around these letterforms, and handed it over as a finished logotype. I left it there for a while, until l had an idea to see what a lowercase would look like for this typeface, and once I had started that, got to thinking about how this single style could be built upon to create a more useful family. The idea for this, came from an ongoing preoccupation with expression in typography. I wanted to build out this very expanded, very light

weight into a family that would include a regular width, regular weight version, allowing the user to be playful and dramatic in one, and purposeful and to the point in the other. While I was in the middle of this process, the opportunity to create a documentation of the process of making a typeface arose, and I decided BioRhyme would be a good fit for this purpose, covering a lot of the main factors and considerations involved in making a typeface. Type designs are regularly born out of a logotype, and even more regularly families are built based on a client-led project resulting in some weights that then lend themselves to expansion into a fuller typographic range. Couple this with the need for this type family to work on screen, and the fact that I wanted to use interpolation as a design tool, and the type seemed to fit the brief of being an educational example. I will admit straight off the bat, I am not the most methodical of workers, or at least not the most tidy! The process of getting BioRhyme to completion is more of a circling pattern than a linear trajectory, but I would argue this is not thoroughly unusual for all but the most seasoned of type designers. In my meagre experience, the process always includes doubling back, side-stepping, and last minute design decisions, in spite of all best practices and laid plans. With this in mind, my objective with this site is to be as open about my confusion and indecision as I am about the logical and methodical steps I have taken. I will endeavor to always include links to relevant literature I might have consulted, or have referenced in my typographic education that might be useful to the novice designer. If there is anything that is unclear, or you would like to pick a bone with me about, please feel free to get in touch. I will be happy to correct any errors, provide more information, or

connect readers with better resources. I will proceed in chronological order, aiming to pull-out micro discussions as I go along where they might be insightful. 2. DESIGN CONCEPT (identity, lettering & type design) • Identity and Form, lettering as an answer to a brief • What kinds of things influence the forms of letters? (History, meaning, scale etc.) Design concepts in typeface design are particularly abstract things. In graphic design we use a combination of typeface choice, alignments, balance of negative space, color and form to create moods and identities. Typeface design is a black and white, figure/ground art. Although there are chromatic typefaces and— most delightfully—now software that supports the design and contiguous previewing of multi-color typefaces, these are still conceived as positive and negative relationships, with color applied as a preview of what might be, rather than a definitive or final state for the typeface. Typefaces change mood and tone of voice as we make use of them in different contexts, and so defining a personality or concept for a typeface can be more a game of strategy and abstract thinking than of defining a final outcome. It is the nature of typefaces to adapt, to flex to the nuance of the material they set, and, most importantly, to serve their users. Typefaces, as products of design processes, are perhaps unusually user-oriented as design products in their service to two kinds of users, the typographer, or manipulator or the text, and the reader, the participant in the reading process. For this reason, in defining a conceptual basis for a typeface design, it is useful to start with its potential uses, alongside its potential range of expression, and to do

the former in specific terms and the latter in abstract terms.We do not yet have a typology of the formal characteristics of typefaces, and what their micro combinations can evoke, and so deciding on how and what to imbue a flavor with within the parameters of the shape language of type, can seem daunting at best. However, we can look to precedents, assessing in each what it is in the shapes that define the typeface’s mood, atmosphere, flavor, personality or tone. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking round shapes equal soft and friendly faces, and that square shapes equal more sturdy, upright and strong forms, but this is a narrow and limiting approach that is almost guaranteed to fail. In any typeface, there are two levels of form at work: the micro and the macro. The micro has to do with things like the shape of the serifs, terminals and hooks, and the macro has to do with the roundness of the bowls, arches, counters and the large-scale proportional features like width, weight and rhythm. It is in the combination of shape elements that a personality is born, and more often it is the relationship between the sharp geometric forms and the curvilinear elements which defines the personality, and not one to the exclusion of the other, or one generalizing principle applied at both levels. For this reason it can be useful to choose historical or genre models to work with, for specific personality traits, and models for specific contexts or purposes, and carefully pull together a set of decisions that build to make a cumulative communicative effect. (Leslie Atzmon’s writings on the rhetorical content of typefaces seems relevant here). Since all typefaces rely on convention, and our conventions are built on the work of predecessors, historical models will always be a useful point of reference, and specific designs for specific sizes particularly so if you are making a revival typeface. Using

classifications or genres is also incredibly helpful in defining what general category your typeface will fit into, or bridge gaps between. For example, you could look at both Clarendons and Geometric sans-serifs, and each will give you cues to work with if you want to create a typeface that fuses the flavor, context or scale of one or the other or both. More and more type design is seeing a breaking down of the traditional classification models, and hybrids are becoming the norm, but this does not invalidate the need for these classificatory descriptions of the conventions our current typographic practice is based on, and researching the history of the genre(s) you seek to serve will only be helpful. 3. FROM LOGOTYPE to PROTOTYPE • What is the difference between lettering and type? The difference between a logotype and a typeface is similar to the difference between lettering and type. Lettering is a contextspecific set of letterforms designed to work in only one form and sequence and to form a particular word shape. Type is an industrial product. A mass-produced and mass-produceable set of components designed to work together and in combination in an endless variety of configurations. In the same vein, a logotype is something that exists in contextual perpetuity. It consists of a set of shapes designed to work harmoniously together, and in the same pattern. It’s requirement for legibility is at the level of the word, and so often liberties will be taken with the relationship between the forms, with some letters looping around others, creating ligatures, or similar letterforms conceived of with alternate structures to create interest and difference within the form of the word but importantly, without disrupting it. The letters in a logotype have a requirement to space well to their neighbors, and

there is no requirement for these letters to function in a repeating system. This concern begins only with the separation of the parts of the whole into discrete modules for reuse and recombination for use in a typeface. Typefaces are systems of shapes and behaviors of shapes—a sort of form language built out of smaller micro decisions. Each decision is woven into a pattern of behaviors for stroke endings, stem/bowl connections, weight distribution, angle of stress, counter size, proportions etc. to create the textura of the paragraph. Textura is the latin word for fabric, and the name of the first types. It denotes the aim for consistency and evenness of color in typography that is built out of a carefully maintained relationship between the parts of the letterforms, and the spaces between them. Scale, typographic range & context • Starting from an uppercase: What information do we have, what do we need to move forward? Taking MERCURY as the starting point, I decided to build out a lowercase. Because the starting point was a very light weight and very extended it fit squarely in the category of a display typeface. In typography there are two general levels of typographic expression. Text, Display and Agate. Text typefaces are designed for setting long-reading paragraph text, and are usually built in families that comprise weights and styles to help differentiate hierarchical content at the micro level of the paragraph for emphasis or differentiation to include italicization of titles, subheads and paragraph level headings. Usually typefaces designed for text will also work well at larger heading or titling sizes, but these can form their own distinct sub group too. A fascinating and insightful resources into the history of designing typefaces for

different scales and contexts is Tim Ahren’s Size-specific adjustments to Type Designs. Display typefaces are usually meant to be used at LARGE sizes. They are usually but not always more expressive, or more detailed, either in their complexity or in the contrast and refinement of their details, for example, a very high contrast typeface with chunky thick parts and hairline delicate thins, or particularly fat faces where the counters are works of pure abstract art, and would never function for readability at smaller scales. Typefaces designed for this scale tend to be more tightly spaced and kerned and more limited in their uses. It is usually possible to use a text typeface at a large size and have it be readable, even if not particularly successful, but it is rarely possible to use a display typeface at a smaller scale. Agate typefaces are those typefaces designed for the level below paragraph setting, usually for things like phonebooks, captions, dictionaries or stock listings. A great example of an agate typeface is Bell Centennial, or a later and related model, Retina. These typefaces tend to be more loosely spaced, lower contrast, wider apertures and with more disambiguation between similar letterforms for easy differentiation at smaller sizes. Features are often exaggerated at this size to ensure they will survive the print or screen conditions they will be fighting in conjunction with their minimal scale. Dwiggin’s m-formula is a theory that has been used to great effect in typefaces of this ilk. Dwiggin’s formula explicated the idea that he garnered from marionette making, where he noticed that the facial features of the marionettes needed exaggeration from far away and that sharp angles underscoring curves would have the counterintuitive effect of amplifying their curved nature from a distance. He named this the m-formula for the marionettes that

prompted it. It is on show in typefaces like Freight Micro, where the letterforms feel sharp and angular at larger sizes but at small sizes have a flow and softness and most importantly, a clarity to them that is created with this optical trick. Starting with a logotype in this way also dictated the nature of the typeface that would be offsprung. The large, light capitals were not weighty enough or narrow enough for anything but display type, and so I set myself a task of building a primarily display typeface that might later develop into a family that would support longreading text-setting. By building Biorhyme Extended as a display typeface, I gave myself a little more room for expression and idiosyncrasy in the shapes, which I would later tone down in the narrower width. Because I wanted Biorhyme to feel fresh, I didn’t want to rely on a model for the development of the lowercase, and wanted to set myself the challenge of creating a matching lowercase based on the abstract cues found in the uppercase forms. In actual fact, there were few typefaces that fit the exact kind of look and feel I was aiming for, and so this also gave me a bit of free reign. Working in a very narrowly defined genre does create limits for the designer, as their work will be assessed with respect to other types in the same design space, and so they need to adhere to precedent a little more than in the design of something a little more off the beaten track. So, in order to build a description of the shape language I wanted to make, I looked at the slow generous bubbly curve of the C and the playful kick of the R and the similarity in widths that I had established between the uppercase letters, and decided to see where I could go with that. 4. BUILDING BLOCKS FOR A TYPEFACE: DEFINING D.N.A. • How do we build a system out of an instance or

• • •

context-specific set of shapes? What decisions can we generalize as part of any typeface, and how can we make a method for building? Defining DNA, maintaining and managing personality Character set considerations, what next?

Although the decisions taken in the design of Biorhyme are specific to the shape-language it is defined by, most of the steps are generalisable to type design in general. In the uppercase, global considerations that need establishing early in the process include making decisions about relative width (in respect of both uppercase cohesion as a set, as well as with regard to the lowercase proportions), height (in respect of the lowercase), crossbar optical heights, and weight. Conceiving of both the upper and the lowercase as a set of elements combining to make related forms is a reliable starting point. There is a long history of building typefaces in this ‘elemental’ way. I have written about this here, and you can also read WA Dwiggin’s letter to RR, and investigate parametric and modular approaches to type design to note that this is a pervasive practice in typeface design projects. What this means is to construe of the letters as discrete shape elements and behaviors. Beginning with this as a starting point, we can build the macrostructure of the typeface. Once you have established your widths, and rough proportions, you can begin to systematize the forms. Working with an upright stroke, a full height curve, a semi-height curve, full height diagonal stroke, and semi-height diagonal stroke you can make all the letterforms in the uppercase alphabet. Similarly, in the lowercase, you can break the letterforms down into an upright x-height stroke, an ascender height upright stroke,

a descender height upright stroke, a bowl form, and an arch form. These help you to establish the general movement, rhythm and contrast of the typefaces and once these general template elements are created, you can build rough drafts of the letterforms fairly quickly by working through a process of building groups of similar shapes together. In researching approaches to the structure of syllabi for teaching typeface design, I saw this approach repeated in a few different ways, but most notably, in that of Cyrus Highsmith’s syllabus, where the semester-long class is oriented around the letter groups themselves, and the learning stages structured around the optical adjustments and idiosyncrasies of the particular shapes in each group. Because of the systematicity of typefaces, it is therefore possible to work on just a small test set of the letterforms in the upper and lowercase sets in order to get a pretty good picture of what the typeface will look like quite quickly. Different foundries have different starting points, but I like to use the letters HODBS for the uppercase, and the word adhesion for the lowercase. Gerry Leonidas explains the function of adhesion here, and it is worth noting the tool Miguel Sousa developed for generating test copy for this limited character set in adhesiontext.com. You can see my old bosses talking about using the letters HOD as a starting point for the uppercase in this lovely documentary about the work of Hoefler & (at that time) FrereJones, and I would also refer you to the documentary Teaching to See for Druckrey’s take on this. This is a solid starting point, and as I said, this provides a ‘quick-and-dirty’ prototype of your typeface. Quick-and-dirty, because no well-functioning typeface is complete without optical adjustments to these coarse grained component combinations. The eye needs regularity, and this method achieves that, but it also requires disambiguation of the letters, or, in other words, the ability to discern differences in

structure easily in order that the letters be quickly recognized. Pure modularity will not afford much in the way of idiosyncrasy and differentiation for the eye, and so it is necessary to fine-tune these combinations to work as harmonious forms in their own right as well as in respect of the other letterforms. Fine-tuning can affect the weight of the connections, for example in the lowercase a, the bowl here is smaller than that in the p, and simply scaling the bowl of the p will result in a much too narrow bowl, with too light a weight, and very thin connections. It is important to ensure that the entire typeface looks like it was made of the same material, or tool, and this is usually achieved through optical trickery. Tobias Frere-Jones’ blog has some great explanations of Type Mechanics along these lines, and is guaranteed to continue to deliver on this score, so for now, I will just show some optical corrections below to demonstrate this point. These fine-tuning aspects also run in tandem with the microaspects of the letterforms, things like the shapes of the terminals, serifs, and swashes. It is also a good time to develop the shapes and scale of the punctuation, which again will vary depending on the context and scale of the typeface brief. Typefaces for smaller setting will usually need larger punctuation, counter-intuitively, than display typefaces, simply because they have to work harder to be seen at this size. Punctuation can again be broken into categories or shape groups, and it is useful to think of the basic set in terms of points, slashes, dashes, and enclosures to start, and once the alphabet and this basic set are up and running the currency symbols and mathematical symbols can be developed alongside the numerals and fractions. One reason for this is that the numerals and currency symbols both need to work alongside the entirety of the upper- and lower-cases, and the mathematical

characters are dependent on the numerals for their cohesion, one falls in line behind the other in this method, taking their cues from the previous set. Typefaces are systems of shapes and behaviors, and the process of type design is a similarly interrelated process full of dependencies and variables. 5. FROM UPPER- to LOWER- CASE • Translating to lowercase: What questions need to be answered to relate the two? • Relative proportions of upper and lower-cases • General Uppercase proportions, relationship to geometry, all-caps setting, versus setting with lowercase • New shape systems • General lowercase structures and proportions, relationship to the manual model • What changes/plays out/amplifies? • Defining some starting points: a d h e s i o n There is a conundrum in the Latin alphabet, and that is that the forms of our upper and lower cases are derived from different historical precedents. Never originally conceived to work together, all typefaces with both cases aim to harmonize and blend two different models of proportion and manual tradition. Our lowercase letters are derived from the bookhands of the monasteries—the scribes and the calligraphers—from the broad nibbed pen, and later influenced by the pointed, pressure-sensitive pens of the Italian renaissance calligraphers. Our uppercase letters on the other hand are derived from inscription models, where letters based on a square and circle, were painted and then incised into stone, theoretically providing us with our first serifs (Catich). From this basis in inscription and geometry, two approaches to the

proportion of these letters have evolved. First is a classical set of proportions, based on the aforementioned square capitals of the roman period, and later, a more uniform width evoking the mecaniques typefaces of the early 19th century. These aim for a uniformity in width of the uppercase, compromising the ratios of the classical models into a more industrial ‘regularized’ approach. In the creation of the logotype for Mercury Mercury, I ended up creating a set of very similar width capitals, in the pursuit of creating an even and balanced word shape. The E was not as narrow as an E would be in classical proportions in comparison to the M, and the R also approached the width of the U, a relationship much more closely aligned with a mechanical, rational design language. Proportions and personality: Influences • Alternates / Where to put the personality? • How should the typeface behave? • What is its purpose? • Established widths, proportions, weight, spacing rhythm, fit. Having established that this was part of the identity of the parent logotype, and one I wanted to keep in the related typeface family, I decided to carry the mono-width tendency further, and attempt to imbue the lowercase letters with this same character. However, it was important to me that I didn’t want this typeface to feel mechanical, so I looked to the warmest mono-width sources I could for inspiration. I looked to the typewriter. I wanted to evoke something of its archaic sweetness, it’s hybrid office-use and personal letter-writing, and combine it with a more edgy, clean and crisp finish. I played with the bowls of the bdpq to make round but

tense curves, to continue those in the uppercase, and aimed for generous arches to match the width of the bowls. A particular nod to the typewriter genre can be seen in the lowercase ‘m’ which is much narrower than a proportionally adjusted ‘m’ would usually be. (Usually the m arches are marginally narrower than those of the ’n’ to optically cheat the relationship between the m and the n so that the m does not become sprawling, but sits comfortably, optically, alongside the proportions of the n. I wanted it to feel squat like the uppercase, and so I gave it short extenders, so that its body would feel a little exaggerated and larger than life. In the end Biorhyme is quite small on the body overall, but its proportions have a large x-height relative to its extenders. There are some distinctive features in the lowercase, that get carried through to the other styles and weights later developed, but which were established in this stage of the project. The lowercase ‘k’ ‘x’ ‘z’ ’t’ and the terminals of the ‘a’ ‘d’ and ‘u’ letterforms were all developed with more and less expressive versions. I kept the expressive k e and z as the defaults, but relegated the other options to either alternate status or removed them completely in the long run. These quirkier shapes were intended to continue the playful quality of the uppercase R from the logotype, and also further a relationship between round and straight that I established with the bdpq. Here, there is a tension between the curve and the rigidity of the serif and uprights. I wanted to keep this in the z, for example, so the slow curve in the spine meets tension points where the horizontals curve into the spine and taper substantially to create a point of connection. Some problem characters in this typeface have been the s, w, R, Q and S. I really struggled to make a decision on the behavior of each

of these, and particularly in the case of the S and s, these shapes are paramount in defining the overall form and flavor of a typeface by virtue of how many other glyphs relate to these, and how frequently they appear in common Western typesetting. I tried a version without serifs, a narrower version, a squarer version, a rounder version, longer serifs, shorter serifs, and so on and so forth (see image). In the w, I tried criss-crossing the strokes, breaking at a certain point in the weight increase, I tried narrower, wider, heavier, lighter, more and less contrast, and eventually even removed the internal serif in the narrower widths. In each attempt, some feature found in another letterform in the typeface is being exploited to try to get the character to step into line with the others and play nice. Spacing Caveat • Spacing, building a rhythm Spacing this extreme width and extreme weight was tricky, and so I will save the discussion of spacing for the post about the regular width bold master, as this will be more easily translated into practical advice. For here, it should be sufficient to note that the reason it is difficult to space a wide, light typeface is exactly the reason why it is important to space at all. When there is any weight in a letterform, there is an opposition immediately created between the foreground and the background of the shape, and between that shape and the ones before and after it. Balancing this distribution of black and white, is what makes or breaks the legibility and color of a typeface. There is a rule of thumb in typeface design that says that you can make a poorly drawn typeface work well with good spacing, but you can never make a beautifully drawn but poorly spaced set of letters function as a

typeface. It is of paramount importance to get this rhythm right, because of how our eye perceives pattern. We need enough similarity between the forms for rhythm, and enough differentiation between them for recognition. Similarly, we need enough space between the letters to separate them from each other, and enough proximity to make them behave as words. With an extra light extra wide typeface it is hard to discern both the proper rhythm of stems, since they are so light, and the space between them, since the internal space is difficult to define with the subtle limits imposed by the stroke weight on the counter. I *think* I managed it here, but only after developing the bold weight and then interpolating the bold extended which was easier to space, and allowed me to cross check the decisions I made in the original lighter weight. 6. SPACING (Generally) With spacing, you need to start with a set of standardizing characters. This is usually the ‘n’ and the ‘o’ in the lowercase, and the ‘H’ and the ‘O’ in the uppercase. These characters are the usual suspects because they are the closest thing to symmetrical you can get in the letters of the Latin alphabet, and in the case of the ‘n’ also have an aspect of their structure repeated substantially in other letters in the Latin alphabet, and is a frequent letter in language use patterns, as evidenced by loren ipsum text, which you will notice has a predominance of round and arched letterforms. Because of the impact of this arch on the lowercase rhythm, a word that is often used in conjunction with these spacing standards, is ‘minimum’ and to the best of my knowledge, historically, this ‘minim’ also appeared in manuscript traditions, and was used to set the cadence of the forms, as with the minim in music. So, with our standards, we want to establish this minim. Taking the n and

o, we begin to make spacing strings. First, space the n and o to themselves and to each other. What this means is that you want to create a good balance between the space inside the letter and the space around it. The edges of the letters side by side should not appear to darken, or the inner spaces to seem to expand. There is no rule to this, it is optical, but a rule of thumb is to use about half the inner space on the outside of the form. This should be thought of more as a fluid area being balanced out, much like you pour liquid into a glass and the same amount of liquid can take different shapes in different vessels. So, too, does the amount of space inside and outside of the letterform. IT can be helpful to turn your proofs sideways when spacing at this point, to make sure that even abstractly, the rhythm you are creating allows each letter its breathing room, while not separating from its neighbor. You also want to be spacing these letters at the same time and in tandem, so that the rhythm they each create in a string is the same no matter the letterform. This is to ensure that when you space the other characters between these standards, that you are working to the same base rhythm. Ed Benguiat once said ‘rhythm is type’ and this is important to remember. Frederic Goudy also once said ‘with 26 soldiers of lead, we will conquer the world’ (??) And it is a nice image to keep in mind when spacing, thinking of a steady march that is not so loose that the eye finds itself faltering and getting ahead of the sentence it is trying to read, and not so tight that it is difficult to discern the individual letterforms, thus undermining the readability. Once you have each letter working in a rhythm that works in step, it is time to space each standard to the others. Space the n between two os, and the o between strings of ns, and then look at a string of nonono to make sure that the rhythm feels consistent throughout. Space the H between the Os and the O between Hs. Once you are happy these standards are working well,

and not likely to change, you can space the other characters in the typeface. There is does not have to be a set order to this, but it can be useful to start with those characters that have the same structure and basic skeleton on one side or another to your standards. So, in the case of the Latin alphabet, the left side of the n can usually be directly appropriated for the r, m, and i, and often the right side of the u also. (This is where ‘minimum’ can come in handy to test the spacing of this non-symmetrical shape and test its rhythm. Depending on whether it is a serif or a sans, sometimes these values can also be good starting points or even directly mapped on to the h, l, k etc. on the left side. Similarly, the right side can be mapped onto the m and h, and often serves as a starting point for another arched shape: the a. The o can be used as a starting point for most of the bowl shapes in the lowercase, although often the c and e have a slightly different balance of weight and curvature from the o, so while it is a useful starting point, it is important to remember once again that all of these values are governed by the requirements of optics. In the uppercase the same approach works well, H mapping onto EFLMN on the left and O onto the curved bowl shapes as starting points. Walter Tracy of Monotype penned a simple formula for deriving the spacing from these standards for most Latin typefaces in his ‘Letters of Credit’ which is a fantastic read, and a must-read for any budding type designer. The image here shows a mapping of related shapes onto specific spacing values. Glyphs makes this quite easy, as it allows you to simply type in a related letter into the space -value field for each side of your letter and the software automatically updates the glyph that should be linked to the standard for spacing. It also makes global changes to the spacing more seamless, as if you need to make a spacing change later in the game (which happens despite best laid plans!) you can just change

the parent glyph, and selecting all the glyphs in the family, run ‘update metrics’ and all related glyphs will have their metrics updated per the parent glyph. Glyphs also allows you to set up a spacing string and put a placeholder glyph between standards, so that you can just arrow through all the glyphs in the typeface, making that process much faster than having to manually place your cursor or type the letterforms. It seems marginal, but as with everything in type design, it is a repetitive process, so these small mercies add up! 7. FAMILY PLANNING • Planning the family? What is the design space? • How can we plan for interpolation? • What role does each member play? Having gotten the wide light master up and running, the next step was to develop the other masters. I decided to focus on developing a narrower width and a heavier weight and use these three masters to interpolate. My plan in doing these three masters had been to allow myself enough scope in the design project to document and discuss the factors that contribute to the development of a narrower weight, adding weight to a skeleton to create a bold and the use of interpolation as a design tool. The intention was to create three discrete masters, Wide Light, Regular-width Light, and Regular-width Bold, and from these interpolate a Regular-width text-setting Regular weight. You can see this original interpolation schema below. The intention was always to expand the family to more weights than these four, but for efficiency, and under time pressure, I limited it to just these four to start off with. As I moved my way through the development of the three masters, I set up instances for other weights and widths, and did some tests to look

at how an obliqued roman might function as the basis for a true italic later down the line. This helped me to figure out the role of the different weights and widths in the personality and behavior of the typeface, and also kept my drawing consistent across the masters. At the outset, however, I needed to make some coarsegrained decisions and outline the scope before starting. I decided to choose a reference point for the narrower width, this would help me to fill a gap in the GWF library, and also serve as a guide for some of the shape decisions. In this case, I chose a display typeface from the ATF catalogue ‘Boston Breton’ which had a similar monoline slab serif quality to it, but was both much heavier and more mechanical feeling. I decided I wanted to evoke the bold chunkiness of Boston Breton and it’s proportions in the regular width bold, but using the soft tense curves and the typewriter vibe I had started in the wider width. In developing this narrower Bold width, the narrower Light width and the interpolating regular weight/width, I looked to Clarendons, Archer, Century Schoolbook and in some cases Rockwell, for cues. I wanted it to sit in this category of warm slabby seriffed fonts, but have it’s own flavor that is both a combination of these all, and it’s own thing entirely. I hope I achieved it!