Practical Font Design, Third Edition [Paperback]

David Bergsland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2011

Practical Font Design The Revised and Expanded Third Edition A rewritten, expanded 3rd edition including the second edition of part one and part two (on building book font families) plus new materials giving a practical walk through the process of designing a font and families. This is not about artistic considerations, but the practicalities of putting a font together. On the other hand, the design approach is fine art. David's training is as a fine art printmaker: etchings & stone lithography. The basic procedure we use for font design is found in this book. It is a step by step following of new font designs with tips and comments along the way. A book to help graphic designers design fonts Here at the foundry we use FontLab 5 in the production of our fonts. Over the years we have developed over a hundred fonts. In the process we have picked up a lot of experience in the process of designing a font efficiently. This is not a book for programmers and scripters. This is a book for graphic designers and typographers who love type and want to make their own fonts—either for themselves or to sell. In the process of writing this book several things were developed that you might find useful in your design process. In general these are pieces of copy or FontLab files that will save you the time required to make your own. There are lists of composite glyphs to generate, and OpenType features file, and a text file to use when generating metrics and kerning tables. You can find them on this page. Here's a condensed table of contents for you to see what is in the book Why a 3rd edition? xv Because I’ve learned so much since I wrote the first two xv This is a small one-person low budget operation xvi Welcome! To the 3rd edition of practical font design 1 Defining typography 2 A Practical Approach To Classifying Fonts 9 Type drawing tools 33 The creation of a font 47 A step by step procedure 47 A new unilateral serif font 49 Begin with a new or base font 50 Scan & trace 67 Letterspacing 109 Some definitions 109 The decisions needed for good letter fit 110 Basic methodology 110 FontLab’s Metrics panel 111 Typical adjustments to spacing 115 Display or Text? 118 For Practical Font Design: Part Two I went much more traditional 118 Generating fonts for testing 123 Making composite glyphs 127 Generating the basic characters 127 Adding OpenType Features 133 What is an OpenType feature? 133 Writing an OpenType feature 134 How a feature works 135 Using classes 136 Adding features to our new font 138 Ligatures 146 Kerning your new font 151 The Metrics window 151 The need for a kerning text document 152 The kerning process 154 what to kern & by how much? 156 Using real words 159 Classes 160 Tracing drawings & artwork 163 Placing into Illustrator 164 Make sure the scan is clean 164 Live Trace in Illustrator 166 Designing font families 171 Let’s start traditional 171 Book font family characteristics 175 Text versus display 175 The need for text and display versions 180 The need for a sans version 180 Kerning & Assembling the family 237 Generating the fonts 241

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

It started in the late 1960s when I was hand lettering psychedelic posters for my acid-rock group on the West Bank of Minneapolis. I started getting my fine art degree in printmaking in the Fall of 1969 after flailing about for a few years as a flower child (those people who were later called hippies). When I graduated with my BFA degree in Printmaking & Drawing, I almost immediately became involved with publishing. In the late 1970s, when I was hired (in west Virginia) as a graphic artist under Pik, an art director from the last class at the University of Michigan to still be required to learn hand lettering. Many of the projects I did for him required hand-lettered headlines. If they weren’t hand lettered, they were heavily modified photostats begun as presstype. During the 1980s, my main skill was modified type built off presstype from Letraset. They were the only company selling designs that impressed me. In starting the research for my new booklet series on Type Design I have discovered that a major influence on my design taste is Colin Brignall, who was the Type Director of Letraset—the major supplier of presstype and new font designs in the 1980s. I started putting in alphabets from fonts I love and the first three I thought of were designed by Colin. What really opened things up for me was FreeHand during the 1990s. Being able to tear type apart and play with the paths became my main source of creative fun. The direct control of paths that FreeHand had was amazing. The thing that finally moved me over the edge was the inclusion of Fontographer with the Graphic Studio Suite and FreeHand 7. I was forced into FontLab in the early years of the new millennium. At first I hated it. But I have come to rely on its path editing tools. They are far superior to FreeHand which in turn was far better than Illustrator What led you to pursue designing fonts? It was fun—simply entertainment. I was driven by the need for fonts that had characteristics that were not being sold for text fonts. Caslon had the expert sets and that was it. For example, I wanted true small caps and oldstyle figures in all my fonts and that was not possible or readily available in text fonts limited to 256 characters. I needed display fonts that had caps, lowercase, and small caps. I wanted ligatures. I needed the open ballot box. So I added them to all my fonts. I often had to make several version of each style to simply hold the various characters I used all the time in my designs.

Product Details

• Paperback: 286 pages
• Publisher: CreateSpace; 3 Rev Exp edition (April 7, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1460979583
• ISBN-13: 978-1460979587
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #179,196 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in New York, raised in Stillwater, Minnesota, enlisted in the Air Force (1963) became B&W photographer, was graduated with a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Minnesota in 1971, worked as a graphic designer from 1967, an art director from 1983, a printing instructor from 1991, a font designer from 1994, and an author from 1995. Wrote several textbooks on digital publishing, graphic design, and typography. Has written a couple Christian political thrillers. Is now writing scripture teachings. His current best seller is "Practical Font Design".
It's been a real joy to be working on my own. I can finally express my convictions, responsible only to you, my readers, and my God.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Unique and Valuable Book, December 4, 2011

By 

Richard Fink - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Practical Font Design, Third Edition (Paperback)

Even though I write about fonts and typography on the web, I first ran across Practical Font Design by complete accident while looking for other books on Amazon. I was amazed I didn't know about it.

I bought it, I've written about it on my blog, Readable Web, a couple of times. The book has greatly improved with the Third Edition. It's the only book I know of that deals with the specifics of putting a font together.

As one thing led to another, I ended up contributing some material for David Bergsland's new book on Fontographer 5.1 Fontographer: Practical Font Design for Graphic Designers

Thumbs up. And thanks to David Bergsland for making font technology more accessible to everybody.