For practice, experimentation, or fun?

Many of the best and most successful type designers, including Matthew Carter, have indicated the importance to them of the design ’brief’: the purpose and use of the planned font. Carter has said in a recent New Yorker article that if you asked him to design a font, without any further specification, the paper or screen would still be blank in another two weeks.

However, the brief need not be purely utilitarian. The goals can be aesthetic as well.

Once when I posted a font for the critique section here the most valuable question or comment was, “what is the type to be used for,” i.e., book text, display for books, book covers, poster display, whatever, and I didn’t have an answer. As William Berkson points out, in the case of Matthew Carter, or most likely many others as well, the design “brief” is obviously important. I didn’t have an answer, although I knew where the design came from, what motivated me to design the font in the first place. I think a very good source for information on the purposes of font design, that is, design with an end in mind, based as it were on a design brief, is Frederic Goudy’s “Goudy’s Type Designs.” He was very clear on what he was doing and why and he explains his ideas well.

This article might help you:
http://www.typographer.org/2005_11_01_digests.html