Type Design: Where To Start?

In Which The Budding Type Designer Finds Himself At A Sort of Impasse

Two weeks ago, when we made a decision to go with FontLab Studio as our tool of choice, we’d thought the hard part was over.

Were we ever wrong.

With examples of typography in the world, out and about, and an eager eye to view them all, it turns out that, far from having an easy choice there is, rather, something of a paralyzing embarrasment of riches. There is, if anything, too much inspiration out there.

Not long ago, we went into the field with gun and camera (sans gun, naturally) to collect interesting things that we saw. The photos accompanying this article are from that very trip. The view will notice an interesting array of type styles just from the two illustrations included herein.

The Old Advertising Poster

The first graphic (above) depicts some old advertising posters from the side of a local building which once housed a popular applicance and furniture concern. They, in the few different examples, show different intents all within a certain class–display type. There’s the friendly informality of the word “Tom”, which seems almost hand-drawn; the words “SUPER SERVICE”, filled with a certain gradient-type pattern, for extra-added punch that actually sort of transcends whatever the letterform shapes might be (does it really matter if they’re sans-serif or not?); and the bespoke type of the logos.

Each type does its job, each has message and weight and thier own sort of dignity.

At The Produce Market

Directly subsequent to this our intrepid crew proceeded just down the road to a local fresh-produce store. Once in there, our eyes glazed over at the delightful and fun hand-done produce signs, each done uniquely, and seemingly uniquely relating to, inspired by, or informed by the produce it was describing. Not only could one base an entire font off one of these fun drawings, one could take the mere impression that each left and create a font based on that as well.

By the Book?

Perhaps simply gathering inspireation isn’t quite the way to go about it here. We think we’ll try a more methodical approach. In our next chapter, we’ll start actually by assaying something we’ve been wanting to get to for some time–type classifications. Then, we’ll gather our thoughts about just what sort of job we want our type to do, and how it can do it: the classifications should provide a useful guide. Then, we’ll take the information we’ve gathered there and fold it all together and come up with a single direction for our baby font.