Customer Reviews

Designing Typefaces

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I was tempted by the online excerpt from the book, so you can imagine my disappointment that what i had read was pretty much it - no depth, no probing, no analysis. If you wish that Parade magazine had a type column then this is your dream come true. Peppy short bio-interviews drawing a few pithy comments and then on to a spashy but mostly pointless sprinkle of images.
Not a serious read or look. Save your money.

The book consists of 7-10 interviews with some prominent typeface designers, a few pages of examples for each, and a tutorial for creating your own typefaces.

The interviews are of satisfying length, but don't probe too deeply into their subjects. Nevertheless I found them to be interesting and they made me think about typography in different ways. The content is varied, some dealing with design theory and some with technique.

The examples are sporadic; for some designers, I wanted to see more, especially when there would be some "revolutionary" font described in the text that wasn't shown. For the most part it is good stuff, however, including multiple revisions of some fonts on their way to the finished product and posters showing the fonts in context.

The tutorial would be better renamed "A Few Things to Consider Before Designing a Typeface." It is merely a cursory glance at the process, offering very little guidance.

Overall, this would be a good book to check out from a library (you could easily read it in a day) but there would be little point in owning it.

This isn't a "How you can do it" book, but rather a "How they do it" book, or perhaps even more precisely, "Why they do it".

This book profiles 12 contemporary type designers and shows on a personal level, why each typographer chose to do what he/she does and how they approach their work. Earls does what few other have in giving us personal insight (though be it brief) into the lives, minds and personal influences of well-known, and not-so-well-known, contemporary typographers--like Zuzanna Licko, Matthew Carter and Johnathan Hoefler.

A few people missing that I would like to have seen included are: Neville Brody, Sumner Stone, Elliot Earls and the group at House Industries.

If you're interested in learning something behind the surface of today's typography design, this book does have something to offer with a decent selection of typographers and (very brief) samples of their work.