Type Development: Which Tool Will It Be?

The tools reviewed, we take an hard look at what we have, and make our choice.

In the previous two articles in this series, we’ve reviewed two rather remarkable offereings from FontLab Ltd that, in theory, allow any wired designer an opportunity to design their very own usable digital fonts. The contenders: TypeTool 2, at $99, and FontLab Studio 5, at $649.

Two capable applications, two feature sets that promise usable type–but only one which can produce OpenType, and one which has an eye-glazing amount of features.

This article ends the first phase of our exploration with a decision of which tool we’ll be using to do our primary design work.

Weighing the Pluses and the Minuses

To restate the obvious, the two actually do have a great deal in common; they have similar interfaces and work in broadly similar ways. The operation of both–the working in a ‘glyph window’ for composition, with bezier paths for defning the glyphs, are all but identical. In terms of output, both have certain crucial things in common; they both produce Mac and Win TT and Type1 fonts.

If all one wanted to do was produce those sorts of fonts, then TypeTool would be the only tool one needed; it does that job thoroughly and provides access to the things the designer ought to care about (kerning and font metrics) in an approachable way.

We have our eye set a little bit higher here. We are enticed by the ability of FontLab Studio to edit and produce OpenType (though one can only create a 6400 glyphs, they can edit all 64 K of any extant OpenType font, and what typographer isn’t excited by the design possiblilites of OpenType? FontLab Studio will let us go as far as we care to in our designing.

The chief minus of FontLab Studio, at least from the beginning-user’s standpoint, is the huge amount of features–allowing the designer to specify just about anything they want to specify in a rather advanced way. Though it must be said that this only seems to be a minus going in: as we saw in the FontLab Studio review, the program can largely be used as a more advanced version of TypeTool, including a notably similar functionality in the font metrics window.

A concern too is the price, with FontLab Studio costing almost seven times the price of TypeTool. We must hasten to point out, though, that for the higher price you get a killer program, so FontLab has a solid handle on giving you value for money: a little FontLab Studio will get you an awful long way.

The Envelope, Please

The comparatively brief conclusions arrived at above have been gleaned after a few weeks of serious play with the two programs. We here at Designorati:Typography learned a great deal about not only basic digital type design but use of tools that we didn’t expect to.

We are interested in not only designing a font that will fly commerically (if even at a low altitude) but also have our eye on trends; one cannot deny that OpenType seems to be the wave of the future, and we feel it would be a good idea to get our feet wet playing in that pool as well.

With that in mind, then we are pleased to decide that Designorati:Typography will continue on into the design phase of our series using FontLab Studio 5 as our primary design tool.

But if you were hoping to get a look at how we’d use TypeTool 2 to get the job done, don’t fret; where appropriate, we’ll apply what we learned about FontLab Studio backwards into TypeTool for whatever ‘how-to’ concepts we can explore between both programs.

And Now, Phase 2

In Phase 2 of our series we’ll get down to the nuts and bolts of type design. We’ll close down our application and get out the pencils, pens, and paper and get down and dirty actually concepting on paper. Before that, however, we’ll go out into the world and get ideas from that world on what sort of type we’d like to create. Join us again in two weeks’ time, 19 October 2006, to see what we’re thinking about.