With webfonts becoming an ever bigger topic (and market), I have been thinking a bit about strategies for designing for the screen from the ground up lately.
Aside from obviously different testing procedures throughout the design process, one design strategy I've remembered* seems very interesting.
The process starts with very rough pixel bitmap designs (7x7 or similar). This grid is refined twice or three times, and only after this stage, a vector version is designed. This allows for a typeface – in its core – to be based on the coarse screen grid. But then again, this might also lead to very boring, repetitive design patterns.
What are your experiences, best practices, interesting strategies to design typefaces worthy of being called webfonts? Is there good research out there on this, even thesis papers? I am mainly interested in body copy type design that works across various sizes, not bitmap typefaces of display screen typefaces.
*I've first read about this in "ECAL: Typography (We make fonts)" (2006), where someone used this process for a type design workshop with ECAL (University of art and design Lausanne, Switzerland) students.
