Dalton Maag Talk and Workshop

A guy came in from Dalton Maag, a well-established London-based type foundry, to give us a short talk and to do a workshop with us. Whilst speaking to the guy during the workshop I realised the delicacies of type design, and the sheer scale of how many glyphs need to be designed for a modern font, much more so than I realised in Design Principles last year. It has written off "type designer" from my list of future job titles indefinitely.

Key Points From The Talk

"Type is the glue of visual communication"

"It takes, ages to make, no-one wants to pay for it, everyone complains all the time"

Fonts now need to be developed in different languages

Optical alignment is the process of making the tips of the triangular shapes stick up above the x-height or cap height to make it look like everything look like it's horizontally aligned. This is also the reason why circular shapes overshoot the lines as well.

You can use shape groups as shortcuts, like using the "n" as a base for the "h" and "u", but in most cases the counters will need adjusting.

After taking some shortcuts, some letters may require "balancing". For example, if you cut the "n" in half to make the "r" you may need to adjust the curves in the "r".

The Workshop

The task we were set was to create letterforms for the word "Hamburg" from two starting points that we could choose from. These were my initial efforts.

I was pleased with this and thought I'd done a good job. But after speaking to the guy he pointed out some areas for improvement, these were:

• The curve on the top of the a
• The thickness of the a
• The bottom left of the u wasn't as square as it could be
• The g was a very top-heavy

It was this conversation I had with him that made me realise just how much of a perfectionist you have to be to be a type designer, and I definitely don't have the patience for it.

I made some changes, and noticed a clear improvement.