Typophile

What's your workflow?

bobdigi

I'd like to start building a simple, solid family, with 3 weights + italics.

The problem is I 'm usually stuck on my first font — the moment I start adding anchors for diacritics, I decide to rework a letter here or there. And then I have to redo kerning pairs. There's such a heckload of phases that I'm not sure if I'm doing it right.

I know everyone has their own way of doing things but what's "normal"?
What order do these phases usually come in your workflow?

  1. Basic Characters, Numerals
  2. Punctuation, Symbols, ligatures
  3. Alternate characters/Opentype features
  4. Drawing extreme bold weights
  5. Drawing Italics
  6. Autogenerating Diacritics
  7. Kerning pairs
  8. Hinting (? haven't even attempted yet)
  9. Interpolation of middle weights
Hrant H Papazian

The first thing you have to do? Resign yourself to the fact that (good) type design is highly iterative! And it's worth going very slow at the concept stage, making sure things like "n" and "o" are just right.

That said, when you consider that nothing can be perfect, there comes a point where you don't want to keep going back to change things, and you can start going very fast.

Kerning: Don't actually do any until your spacing is optimal; optimal spacing however does take into account that kerning is there to help.

BTW, four weights are more than 4/3 better than three weights. :-)

hhp

bobdigi

So seeing all the professional superfamilies out there, I wonder do designers actually do kerning on the interpolated weights, or is that automated, too?

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