It takes a long time to produce and design the shape of writing, and there are three different categories of writing, lettering, calligraphy, and typography.
Lettering
Drawing lettering. Craftsmanship. Industrial lettering. Digital lettering - instagram logo - hand drawn lettering digitalised. Digital is more more accurate.
Calligraphy
Penmanship - writing letters rather than drawing them. Manuscript letters.
Typography
Bringing lettering and calligraphy together. Johannes Guttenberg created the first movable type. This allowed books to be printed. For text - calligraphic look a like. Display type can be in more whacky, elaborate, flourished forms. Type as identity - London Underground. Type as a system - Univers. Global type - Dalton Maag involved in the production of typefaces for the global market, such as the Nokia typeface, produced in a variety of languages.
Dalton Maag...
Produces library fonts, which students can use for non commercial work for free. They also create Chinese fonts occasionally, as it is a massive undertaking with around 60,000 characters.
Produce logo refinements, such as for the English National Ballet, they creates a double story "g" and lessened the weighting. They also refined the Saxony Hotel in Miami.
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| Original on the left. Redesign on the right. |
Produces font modifications, which tend to be from their own font libraries. Examples of this are BT Vision, Samsung Galaxy, which a single story "g" was created along with punctuation for Samsung interface, and also Virgin Holidays, where new weights were created.
Produces custom fonts from scratch, which is the biggest part of their brand. Examples of this are Nokia, Intel, where a slight bevel on the letterforms was created, Rio 2016. Custom fonts range from taking 2 years, such as Nokia, to a few months, for Samsung/BT to produce, however it is an ongoing project.
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| Rio 2016 custom font. |
Workshop
The workshop task was to choose an example typeface, without knowing what it was called from a selection of Dalton Maag's fonts, and using the letterforms that were given, to create the word Hamburg, based on what category of sans serif the example letters are, which can be found out from analysing the example letterforms and comparing the characteristics to the category characteristics.
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| Typeface example that was chosen. |
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| The example letterforms were matched to a style of sans serif, neo-grotesque, which has characteristics of a large x-height, small variation of contrast, regulated/modern proportions, perpendicular terminals, with well defined counters. |
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| This is the initial sketch of the Hamburg letterforms, using the characteristics of neo-grotesque to determine other letterforms, and the given examples to helpe create new used, such as using the "n" to create the "m", and the "o" and "H" to create the "b". Stuart Brown, who delivered the session from Dalton Maag, came round each student individually and gave pointers on how to improve our letterforms. The general comments were to make the joints less weighted, the "r" wider, the first aperture in the "m" to me made smaller in width, and the terminal of the "a" to be cut off diagonally rather than horizontally. |
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| This is the improved Hamburg lettering, with modifications to the joints, making the first aperture in the "m" smaller, the terminal of the "a" diagonal and the bowl lower down, and also sharpening the corners of the descending part of the "g" and upper story part of the "a". |
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| Close up of the word, you can see there is a slight overshoot. |
The actual typeface which we found out afterwards was called Tondo, and it was useful to compare the typeface I had drawn to the actual typeface, to compare and contrast, and see where I had gone wrong and what aspects were accurate.
This workshop was really interesting to try something different, and it makes you think about the typeface a lot more when you're drawing it, and recognise all the tiny aspects you wouldn't if you were just looking at it on a screen.
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