Typeface Design

Sample videos from the installation

Typeface Design

Don Adleta and students

2008-2012

The video installation shows Don instructing his students by hand painting letterforms in white and black flat paint, putting emphasis on their optical relationships.  His students then created their own letterforms by hand and built their vector outlines in Adobe Illustrator.  A few examples are printed and displayed under the video.

 

Two pencil method

 

Two pencils side by side can simulate the broad nib pen. It creates a thick and thin stroke found in the Carolingian Miniscule letter, the basis of our Roman letterforms.

 

Once the basic form is realized within the relationship of its height to width, the focus is on the design. Will it be an Old Style or a Modern style? Will the font be an italic? Could the full strokes be slightly concave? This is letterform design.

 

This methodology is for text-based typeface design. The philosophy is to achieve an even optical gray for readability, removing any interference causing the eye to be arrested.

 

The hand painting

 

The last phase of this process is to sculpt the form. My eye looks at the overall form, not the detail, resolving the height, width and weight of the letterform first. Then I evaluate the details. The serif to the full stroke? Are they longer on the right side? How thick do they need to be to work with the thin of the letter? Is the serif concave on the bottom? Is it bracketed? How does the crest of the inner arc interact and transition between thick to thin in relationship with the crest of the exterior arc. It is the letterform, as well as the space around the form, that needs to work together.

 

Letterforms are a complex visual algorithm of considerations. Constant comparative analysis of variations makes the optical conditions even. Exact physical dimensions are not as important as the optical to make the type harmonic and even.

 

Filmed by Nathan Davis. Dedicated to André Gürtler and Christian Mengelt.