This essay is adapted from a process book summarizing my year as a student in the Type@CooperWest Extended program. It’s a collection of thoughts, projects, and sketches. I’ve learned a lot of lessons, both big and small, over three terms of studio and history classes, guest lectures, and workshops.

In no particular order, here are twelve things I’ve learned about the practice of type design, the world of type, and the creative process.

[ 1 ] My love for type

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved type. As a kid, I’d beg my parents to buy fonts for me that I could load up onto my Mac Plus computer, Aldus PageMaker, and print out on my ImageWriter. In high school, I had a subscription to Font & Function magazine.

My interest in typography continued in school and work. At the MIT Media Lab, I experimented with writing code to draw letterforms that could be animated in 3D. Working in motion graphics, and later in product design, I’ve always been interested in how to use type to communicate and express ideas.

But when I was considering applying for the Type@Cooper West program, I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy actually designing type. Isn’t it just a lot of adjusting vector points around on the screen? I thought it might be too tiring and ruin what I liked about type. But I had nothing to worry about. I’ve been surprised this year by just how much I love working on type. Sure, vectors and béziers can get frustrating at times, but when you get in the zone, it’s meditative and addictive.

I learned a lot about drawing bézier curves themselves. When you’re tracing a drawing in Robofont, you want to add the extreme points first with straight segments first, then “pull out” the curves that connect them, then make them tangent or continuous points as needed. In general, when you have connecting curve points, you want the slope on either side of the curve to be as close as possible to create a smooth transition.

It feels a little like a hack, but the Speedpunk Robofont extension by Yanone can be super helpful in guiding your eye on where your curves are stuck.

I love that when you’re working on letterforms, you’re in a zoomed-in 1000 by 1000 pixel grid. You don’t have floating point numbers (as far as I know), which makes drawing straight, 90-degree segments a lot simpler and lets you have, say, uniform overshoots across your character set. If you had to worry about decimals when drawing, it could make you batty.

We learned a few tips and techniques for drawing letters. Curved glyphs like s and 8 benefit from drawing them backwards and upside down.

In the first few weeks we also learned about the translation and expansion contrast models. It was so interesting to learn that the rules that define type design, whether cast in metal or vectorized on screen, derive so much from two different types of tools for writing: the pointed and broad nib pens.

[ 2 ] Positive and negative space

Type design is about both the positive and negative spaces — spaces between letters and inside of them. In a regular weight, a word like minimum should have evenly spaced vertical stems, and the white spaces between them should have the same width. A best practice is to space your characters as you go. You want to spend time in Space Center, deciding the left and right side bearings between straight and curved control characters. In a typeface, usually n and o should be the same width visually.

[ 3 ] Digital revivals

A lot of type from history hasn’t been made digital (yet). You make a lot of decisions when digitizing a typeface. Even if a typeface already exists in a digital version, you might be able to revive it better — updated for the present day, or truer to the original. In a lecture at the SF Public Library in February, Loïc Sander introduced us to his Didot-inspired Trianon family, a lovely reimagining of the Didot family style.

In the fall term, my project involved digitizing Farmer Old Style №7, a typeface from A. D. Farmer & Son Type Founding Co., which we found in a printed type specimen from 1899. I called my revival typeface Farsevo.

[ 4 ] Italic slant angles

These days modern text italic styles have a slant of about 8 to 10 degrees. But in earlier times, they were sometimes more extreme. In the break between our first two terms, I worked on reviving the italic of Farmer Old Style №7. I dialed the extreme angle back a bit, but I think it could still come back a few more degrees.

[ 5 ] Lettering

I came into this program not knowing much about lettering, and not even realizing that it’s a thing: a practice and artform with its own interesting history. These days calligraphy and sign painting have their fans and are probably still gaining in popularity. You can watch videos of masters showing off their lettering practice on Instagram. My classmate Kel Troughton is big into lettering and researching historical sources, and his interest inspired me to learn more.