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Information about Type Design

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Type design is the art of designing typefaces. Although the technology of printing text using movable type was invented in China, and despite the esteem which calligraphy held in that civilization, the vast number of Chinese characters meant that few distinctive, complete fonts could be afforded by Chinese printers. The applied art of designing pieces of type thus became primarily a Western practice whose market increased with the coming of mass advertisement and steam-powered printing in the nineteenth century. With the advent of desktop publishing (and internet web pages, which use different technologies), the marketplace has demanded ever more varied typefaces merely for the purposes of variety to get the customers' attention. Finally, the ease of this new technology has resulted in the hobby or money-saving option of amateur type design.

Type foundry design procedure

For many centuries, creating type started with cutting punches, which acted as the masters. The material that was cut formed a prototype of the character from which type was cast by various means from an alloy usually containing lead. Type design accounted for the limitations of the printing process, such as the splashing properties of ink or the wear on the type itself. In many countries, though not the United States of America, type design could be copyrighted typeface by typeface. The USA offered (and offers) design patents as an option for typeface design protection.

For the American Type Founders Corporation, and a few others using their technology, each character was drawn in a very large size, over a foot (~30 cm) high. The outline was then traced by a Benton pantograph-based engraving machine with a pointer at the hand-held vertex and a cutting tool at the opposite vertex down to a size usually less than a quarter-inch (~6 mm). The pantographic engraver was first used to cut punches, and later to directly create matrices.

Computerized design process

With the coming of computers, especially those on artists' desktops, type design eventually became a subdivision of computer graphics, employing a drafting program of some sort. Each character design can be traced by a stylus on a digitizing board, or modified from a scanned drawing of somewhat smaller size than that once used for the pantograph, or composed entirely within the computer graphics program itself. Each character is then made into a digitized form to be reconstructed within the graphics display program of a display screen or printer. The copyrights were extended to this method, but have developed the caveat that a given digitization of a typeface can all too easily be modified by another type designer so as not to pay for the use of the typeface. Hence the copyright of the original typeface now includes all incidental alterations.

Principles of type design

Regardless of the method used to specify type design, characters of different sizes have slightly different shapes for improved clarity and, above all, artistic consistency. There are many subtleties of shape so that no character looks too small or large.

As a profession

Type design is performed by a type designer. Although recently there have been many amateur typefaces available on CDs in batches of hundreds, type design remains an artistic profession of applied art comparable with architecture.

Type design as an industrial art

In fact, with architecture, type design is one of the arts which the concept of postmodernism best figures. The "modern" period of type design was the mid-twentieth century, during which sans-serif typefaces were supposed to be superior to all others due to their stark rationality. But later, scientific study revealed that people could read serif typefaces faster and with greater accuracy. Suddenly, in the 1960s, professional typefaces started to appear that were not intended to be supremely readable, just in a style that was fashionable. The best example is Aldo Novarese's 1971 typeface named Stop, which was used in various science fiction movies in the 1970s.

External links

  • Typophile
  • Typographica - A typography news blog.
  • Fontforge - free type design software
  • SOTA - The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA).
  • TDC - Type Directors Club: An international organization for those devoted to excellence in typography.
  • ATypI - the international typographic association (Association Typographique Internationale, ATypI: An international organization devoted to type design and typographic excellence.


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Typography terminology
PagePagination Recto Verso Margin Column Canons of page construction
Enlarge picture
Lowercase 'a' in Adobe Caslon
ParagraphWidows and orphans Leading River Baseline Median Alignment Justification
CharacterLigature Letter-spacing Kerning Majuscule Minuscule Initial x-height Ascender Descender Diacritics Counter Subscript Superscript
StyleSerif Italic Slab serif Sans-serif Blackletter Script Dingbat
PunctuationHanging punctuation Hyphenation Curly quotes En dash Em dash
TypesettingType design Type foundry Movable type Calligraphy Phototypesetting Letterpress Typeface Font Computer font Point Pica Cicero Em En Lorem ipsum Hamburgefonts Punchcutting
Character encoding Rasterization Hinting
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Calligraphy (from Greek κάλλος kallos "beauty" + γραφή graphẽ
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The foot is a biological structure found in many animals that is used for locomotion. In many animals with feet, the foot is a separate organ at the terminal part of the leg made up of one or more segments or bones, generally including claws or nails.
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This page is about the duplication instrument.
For devices on trains, see: Pantograph (rail).
For the knife, see: Pantographic knife.

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1 inch =
SI units
010−3 m 0 mm
US customary / Imperial units
010−3 ft 010−3 yd


An inch (plural: inches; symbol or abbreviation: in or, sometimes,  
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Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism.
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Aldo Novarese (born 1920 in Pontestura Monferrato - died 1995 in Turin) was an Italian type designer who lived and worked mostly in Turin. He worked in the Nebiolo type foundry and produced an impressive number of unique designs.
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1940s  1950s  1960s  - 1970s -  1980s  1990s  2000s
1968 1969 1970 - 1971 - 1972 1973 1974

Year 1971 (MCMLXXI
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Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques.
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page is one side of a leaf of paper. It can be used as a measurement of documenting or recording quantity ("that topic covers twelve pages").

The page in typography


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Pagination is the system by which the information on a newspaper, bookpage, manuscript, or otherwise handwritten or printed document are laid out.

In a strict sense of the word, it can mean the consecutive numbering to indicate the proper order of the pages, which was rarely
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recto is the right-hand page and the verso the left-hand page ("verso" can also mean to turn over in the mind) of a folded sheet or bound item, such as a book, broadsheet, or pamphlet.
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recto is the right-hand page and the verso the left-hand page ("verso" can also mean to turn over in the mind) of a folded sheet or bound item, such as a book, broadsheet, or pamphlet.
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In typography, a margin is the white space that surrounds the content of a page. The margin helps to define where a line of text begins and ends. When a page is justified the text is spread out to be flush with the left and right margins.
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column is one or more vertical blocks of text positioned on a page, separated by margins and/or rules. Columns are most commonly used to break up large bodies of text that cannot fit in a single block of text on a page.
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canons of page construction have been described by them to represent the ways in which these books may have been designed.

The notion of canons, or laws of form, of book page construction was popularized by Jan Tschichold in the mid to late twentieth century, based on the
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A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea, or the words of an author. The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line and ending without running to the next passage.
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In typesetting, widow refers to the final line of a paragraph that falls at the top the following page of text, separated from the remainder of the paragraph on the previous page. The term can also be used to refer simply to an uncomfortably short (e.g.
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leading (IPA [ˈlɛdɪŋ], rhymes with heading) refers to the amount of added vertical spacing between lines of type.
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In typography, rivers, or rivers of white, are visually unattractive gaps appearing to run down a paragraph of text. They often result from full text justification, although they can occur in any text justification.
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baseline is the line upon which most letters "sit" and under which descenders extend.

In the example to the right, the letter 'p' has a descender; the other letters sit on the (red) baseline.
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In typography, the mean line is the line that determines where non-ascending lowercase letters terminate in a typeface. The distance between the baseline and the mean line is called the x-height.
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In typesetting and page layout, alignment or range, is the setting of text flow or image placement relative to a page, column (measure), table cell or tab. The type alignment setting is sometimes referred to as text alignment, text justification or
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In typesetting, justification (can also be referred to as 'full justification') is the typographic alignment setting of text or images within a column or "measure" to align along both the left and right margin. Text set this way is said to be "justified".
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glyph is the shape given in a particular typeface to a specific grapheme or symbol.

The term for the abstract entity represented by a glyph is character: a typographical character may be a grapheme (an element of a writing system), but also a numeral, a punctuation
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ligature occurs where two or more letter-forms are joined as a single glyph. Ligatures usually replace two sequential characters sharing common components, and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on
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letter-spacing, also called tracking, refers to the amount of space between a group of letters to affect density in a line or block of text. Since the advent of personal computers the term tracking is frequently used.
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kerning, or less commonly, mortising (referring to the process of physically removing material from the cast character), is the process of adjusting letter spacing in a proportional font.
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