Phinney on Fonts

Type Design & Font Making Resources

Cristoforo swash B in FontLab Studio.
Cristoforo swash B in FontLab Studio 5.
No, you wouldn’t show all these layers at once while drawing.

Here is my collection of links and resources on designing typefaces and making fonts, all in one place!  If you do not already have general typography background, read my post aimed at beginners and non-​designers interested in typography.

Although I used to keep this page up to date, these days the best resource page for things like this is this one, maintained by Justin Penner. I cannot claim to have vetted every resource he links to, but it looks very good!

Overview & Big Picture

Book Library

Books directly on type design, in vaguely descending order of how useful they are as practical guides to help make fonts. Note that three of these books (Henestrosa et al., Moye, Cheng) offer exceedingly similar advice on spacing, which they have all borrowed from Walter Tracy’s Letters of Credit, which appears further below (aside from the several pages of incredibly useful spacing advice, it is not directly a how-​to-​design-​fonts book).

  • Designing Type by Karen Cheng (2nd edition). Uniquely has a lengthy character-​by-​character analysis that takes up most of the book. Be sure not to get the first edition: the second edition massively expanded all the other content, becoming a much better general introduction to type design than the first edition, by adding a few dozen more pages. Restricting the Latin character set coverage to western Europe is understandable, but feels a bit dated.
  • How to create typefaces: from sketch to screen by Cristóbal Henestrosa,‎ Laura Meseguer and José Scaglione. Arguably the best practical how-​to book out there on type design, despite being rather brief. The unique approach of having multiple authors’ takes on the same issues is very informative. Currently only available from the St Bride Library in the UK.
  • Fontographer: Type by Design by Stephen Moye. Ancient and has crazy old pixelated screen shots, but still remarkably useful. Not just about Fontographer, but rather an invaluable general discussion of proper creation of letter outlines and point placement, as well as all sorts of tips. Out of print, but used copies are generally $8 to $16 now (including shipping!), down from a peak of $300 before Cheng’s book came out (at a time when there were no other practical books out there). Great complement to Henestrosa et al., or Cheng, or even as a first book if you are on a tight budget.
  • Type Tricks by Sofie Beier. This book covers a number of specific type design issues, collecting ideas and issues you either won’t find elsewhere at all, or at least all in one place. That said, it is not as strong a general-​purpose how-​to-​make-​fonts-​from-​beginning-​to-​end book. But it is a great choice for a second or third book on the topic, if you have at least one of the others, first.
  • Theory of Type Design by Gerard Unger. This is more about type design for people other than type designers, but the ideas can inform actual design. Available from Amazon.

Other interesting books worth considering:

  • The Stroke: theory of writing by Gerrit Noordzij. A fundamental theory about western letterforms that every type designer should know. Currently out of print in English, although you can still buy it at an inflated price via Amazon. Publisher’s site or Amazon.
  • Reading Letters: Designing for legibility by Sofie Beier (publisher’s site or Amazon). A comprehensive review of what we know about reading and legibility and how they relate to letterforms. I am a huge fan of this book and Sofie’s work.
  • Logo, Font & Lettering Bible by Leslie Cabarga

An aspiring type designer who aims to do traditional fonts should own at least one of these three books, perhaps more, that dissect and discuss the design and story behind a bunch of different typefaces:

Other highly useful book lists:

Community

  • Type Drawers — moderated community only on type design
  • FontLab forums — for FontLab questions (though you can also ask on other fora)

Training and Education

Wikipedia’s List of Institutions Offering Type Design Education: covers just about every school that offers any courses, in any language, including institutions offering a broader design curriculum with one or two type design courses available as part of the curriculum.

The following ongoing courses are English-​language instruction specifically in type design:

  • Crafting Type does mostly three-​day workshops, traveling to cities around the world. I often teach with this collective. We kind of stopped during the pandemic, and I did some workshops in 2022 (Dublin) and 2023 (Melbourne), but nothing more since.
  • University of Reading in the UK (about 30-​45 min west of London) 
    • one-​year full-​time Master of Arts in Typeface Design (MATD)
    • Master of Research in Typeface Design (MResTD), part-​time two-​year program for experienced type designers wanting academic credentials
    • Type Design Intensive (TDi) two-​week summer program
  • the Royal Academy (KABK) in the Hague, Netherlands 
    • one-​year full-​time Type & Media Master’s degree program
  • Cooper Union, Type@Cooper, New York City, USA 
    • “Extended” one-​year part-​time evening/​weekend certificate program
    • “Condensed” five-​week full-​time summer program (contains all the same core content as the year-​long program)
  • USA 
    • “Extended” one-​year part-​time evening/​weekend certificate program
  • Type@Paris, France (new in 2015) 
    • five-​week full-​time summer program, modeled on (but not affiliated with) the Cooper Union “Condensed” summer program.
  • Type as Language, New York City, USA at SVA
    • Four-​week summer program starting around the end of July
  • Expert class Type Design, in Antwerp, Belgium at the Plantin-​Moretus Museum 
    • Class comprises ten lessons over about nine months, for people with type design experience hoping to reach a higher level of skill

General Type Design Info

Interpolation & Multiple Masters

  • How to use Multiple Master technology in type design. My YouTube video for FontLab. See also “Power of Interpolation” below.
  • Power of Interpolation! Anybody wanting to design type families with more than two weights (or even two weights with real small caps or superscript/​subscript/​fractions) needs to know about and use interpolation technology and axis-​based design.
  • Luc[as] de Groot’s Interpolation Theory. Given a weight axis, and a desired number of weight steps (say you want six weights), how would you pick which values to use? Evenly spacing them does not produce desirable results. Lucas explains a theory and how to calculate good intervals.
  • Impallari’s Family Steps page. Pablo Impallari’s easy to use interpolation aid allows you to instantly calculate evenly-​spaced steps, Lucas-​style steps, or Impallari’s steps (which are in between).

Font Rendering on Screen

Character Sets, Language Support & Diacritics (Accents)

Note: To install .enc files in FontLab Studio, TypeTool and other FontLab apps, quit your FontLab product, find the “Encoding” folder in the shared “FontLab” folder, and drop the files in there. Restart FontLab and these will be available as encodings.

Unicode

  • Encoding Master — Free Mac and Windows app for converting text (including HTML and XML) files between different encodings, including Unicode normalizations such as NFC.
  • Unicode Character Inspector — Paste text into a web page and have it show you info on every Unicode character involved (including UTF-​8 and UTF-​16LE representations). Great for figuring out odd text strings.
  • What Unicode character is this? — Paste text into a web page and have it show you character name and optionally the Unicode for each character involved. A more basic equivalent of the previous tool.

Character sets

Latin Diacritics (Accents)

Cyrillic

Cyrillic (along with Greek) is one of the writing systems most similar to Latin, hence often supported in a single typeface that also does Latin.

Testing & Proofing

  • Impallari Testing Tools Drag and drop your font onto the web page to instantly see it in action! Plus more tools, all from Pablo Impallari.
  • Adhesion Text by Miguel Sousa will generate a huge set of test words using whatever limited set of particular characters you have supported in your font in development. You can then paste this text into your own test document.
  • Autopsy by Yanone is a FontLab Studio add-​on for analyzing design consistency across multiple fonts.

Tools & Add-ons

  • FontLab makes three font editors: FontLab, Fontographer, and TypeTool, for professional, graphic designers and mid-​range, and student/​casual users respectively. (Disclaimer: I was once CEO of FontLab.) 
    • TransType from FontLab is a font format conversion tool, also useful for dealing with font family relationships. TransType Pro online — Online version of TransType
    • FontLab 7 is the next-​gen app, very powerful, but with a bit of a learning curve—possibly overkill for the casual user
  • Other font editors include RoboFont, Glyphs, and DTL FontMaster.
  • Kerning Assistance is a scripting tool to allow interoperability between DTL KernMaster (part of FontMaster) and FontLab Studio.
  • Font Remix Tools (RMX Tools) by Tim Ahrens, plug-​ins for FontLab Studio.
  • TTX/​FontTools by Just van Rossum and Behdad Esfahbod allows you to decompile fonts to a plain text XML format, edit that plain text and recompile. It can be handy when you have a minor change to make and don’t want to affect anything else, or for doing the same thing to a large number of fonts. (Also discussed below under “Automating via Scripting.”)
  • TTFautohint is an impressive tool for automatically hinting TrueType fonts. Remarkable for its very compact hinting code. But be sure to use the “windows compatibility” switch!
  • DTL OTMaster is a tool for more directly viewing, proofing and editing OpenType tables, including increasingly powerful glyph editing capabilities. Like TTX (above), it offers a good way of making minor changes to an already-​existing font while changing as little as possible.
  • Visual TrueType (VTT) from Microsoft — The most powerful publicly available tool for manually adding “hinting” information (instructions, really) to TrueType fonts, to optimize their appearance onscreen. However, it takes time to learn and master, and manually hint each font.
  • VOLT (Visual OpenType Layout Tool) from Microsoft — Standalone visual editor for adding OpenType layout features to fonts. Especially useful for complex writing systems needing glyph positioning (GPOS) features.
  • Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (FDK) — For the hard core, a command-​line toolset for compiling and proofing OpenType fonts (but you still need a font editor for outlines). Now an open source project!

Automating via Scripting

The world of fonts relies primarily on the Python language for scripting and automation. It isn’t that you can’t use something else, but there is a rich variety of tools already using Python, and at least three font editors provide extensive support for Python scripting (FontLab Studio, Glyphs, and RoboFont—the last is even written in Python).

  • How to install scripting-​related tools for FontLab Studio 5.1.x Mac (OS X 10.7—10.9)—covers RoboFab, TTX/​FontTools, DialogKit. NOTE: use latest RoboFab (currently 599) instead of the one on the instructions page.
  • TTX/​FontTools includes the TTX converter that can decompile fonts to XML and recompile them from the XML format. Very handy for investigating and potentially modifying fonts. 
    • If you don’t install them as part of the RoboFab, you can install them separately.
    • Latest version from Behdad Esfahbod (originally developed by Just van Rossum)
  • Running Windows command-​line as administrator (necessary for installing Python and associated stuff)
  • Some FontLab Studio scripts I wrote, with info on how they work.

Thanks

Thanks to my students at the one-​day web font workshop at WebVisions Portland 2014 for sparking me to create this page!

Thanks also to my colleagues and co-​teachers from Crafting Type, whose resource lists I have borrowed from and suggestions I have included.