“Type hides its methods.” —Matthew Carter

This last weekend was a hurricane of research, math, pixel-pushing, and coffee.

As I wrote last week, I’ve never designed a typeface before. So I’m setting out to document the creation of my first typeface over the course of 40 days. The documentation will hopefully be a useful, Google-able guide to typography for beginners.

Let’s first talk about the font specimen that brought me here. I’ve spent a great deal of time this weekend trying to coax out its secrets and figure out what about it I’m drawn to.

If only permitted a two-second glance, I’d be enamored with this typeface because it feels so squarely mid-century to me. It has the vibe of Futura, even a touch of the authority of Gotham. But after the two-second mark—after I made like Sherlock Holmes and busted out the loupe tool, a few things jumped out.

The apertures—the openings of characters like the capital C, and lowercase e, are largely closed (far more so than Futura). And the double-storey lowercase a is super weird. After a lot of reading, it’s my understanding that typically modern, geometric sans serifs tend to use a single-storey lowercase a. It’s a much simpler shape, and far easier to mathematically generate.

My research lead me to believe that the double-storey a (and its sibling, g) were unusual for geometric sans serifs because there were a convention of the much older serif school of type design. They re-entered the type world as a part of sans serif typefaces when Humanist sans serifs became popular, which happened later in the 20th century. They have the utilitarian, industrial lines of sans serifs, but they take human readability into account instead of slavishly adhering to a tight mathematical system.

These are the specimen’s spiritual siblings.

This typeface I’ve become infatuated with has a pretty crappy lowercase a. I don’t know if it’s a printing error, a crumby scan job, or the typeface itself; but the aperture of the double-storey a is so small that it looks like a mistake, a smudge—like a lowercase e with a birth defect. Whether I adhere to the original specimen, or diverge toward something more readable here; let’s put the lowercase a on the back burner for now.

Diving into measuring the underlying geometry, I immediately validated a hunch: the ratio of x-height (the height from the baseline to the top of the lowercase x) to the cap height (the height of a capital B, for example) was almost exactly 1.618033988. Φ. The Golden Ratio.

At first I thought maybe it’s a typographic standard. It’s not. The rule, loosely, is that higher x-height relative to cap height may decrease readability, especially using lowercase letters. Decreasing x-height can improve contrast. There’s even some research showing a goldilocks zone, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable rendering something as subjective as typographic beauty to a quantitative study.

So my pet typeface uses golden ratio geometry. I’m in love even more.

The last thing I want to write for now is that in some sort of recursive way, the more I stare at letterforms, the less they make sense, like a word repeated too often. I’m starting to see where the weird parts are, shapes obeying and disobeying the vision in my mind. The way the capital K’s arm and leg meet, whether the tittle in i and j are squares or circles, where the bar on a cap H sits… all these things are starting to jump out at me as areas of tremendous challenge.

But there is only one way to eat this elephant, and I’m going to start the only way I know how: measuring.

let the x-height = 1

let the cap height = Φ

let the descender height = -0.7

stroke weight is = 0.15…

Who you callin’ chicken?

Up next: Toolset.