A Practical Guide to Typeface Design.

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“If it looks right, it is right.”

— Matthew Carter?

“This desire to design a style of one’s own is inherent in most beginners, and, for the time being, should be suppressed. From lack of knowledge such designs are seldom, if ever, successful. A new style demands all the knowledge and experience of an expert not only in the shaping of the individual letter but in the making of each letter to marry successfully with any and every other letter in the alphabet.”

— Russell Laker, Anatomy of Lettering, pp11.

“Spacing is balance, not distance.”

— Ibid, pp52.

“After labouring for several months Crusoe discovers that his boat is too heavy to drag down to the water, testifying to ’the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it’.”

— The Real Thing, pp148.

“When my first draft of a novel is done, I put it away, warts and all, to mellow. Some period of time later – six months, a year, two years, it doesn’t really matter – I can come back to it with a cooler (but still loving) eye, and begin the task of revising.”

— Stephen King, Foreword to The Dark Tower.

“The ecstasy of perfect recognition”

— The Dark Tower, The Wolves of Calla, Stephen King.

“She supposed there was no surprise there; all you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more that a disguised version of what you already knew.”

— The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah, Stephen King.

“The good, old legible types formerly used in print are being scorned in these days (on account of the new ones being cut every day). And yet, however many new faces may be cut, when they have been forgotten and no more new ones can be imagined, the old ones will once more be produced under the pretence that they are new, as is the case with other things.”

— Wolfgang Fugger in 1553 (translated), from Vincent Figgins Type Specimens 1801 & 1815 (Facsimile), 1967.

“But my general conclusion is that whatever the tool, whatever the process of reproducing type, 80 to 90% of what a type designer does is the same regardless of the technology. There is a term in English, “techno-determinist”, meaning a person who believes that tools define what is made with them. And many people consider this true of type. But my own personal view is that the tool has a minimum of influence on the design of Latin types-although I’m probably in the minority.”

— Matthew Carter, PP 194, On the Shoulders of Giants, idea document, 2015.

“If I get interested in a historical typeface it’s because I think perhaps I can make a contemporary version that will be useful. I don’t make historical revivals because I feel any sort of debt to history, I make them for practical purposes.’ ibid, pp 197.

“What I try to do is capture the spirit of the original and be respectful to the original designer without feeling obliged to be absolutely faithful.”

— Ibid., PP 198

“In general, I find our former ambition to want to design a neutral, timeless typeface was misguided. I believe that it is not possible to develop a neutral typeface at all. If a typeface like, say, Helvetica seems natural to us today, it is because its qualities no longer strike us, no longer surprise us. A typeface can thus lose its qualities over time, but it is impossible to design it without qualities”.

— Ibid., Manual Krebs, pp 302.

“I think that the greatest achievement of the designer would be to disappear entirely into anonymity.”

— Issey Miyake, Making Things quoted from Singular Forms pp 46.

“In other contexts, authenticity is measured by the degree to which the physical remains of an object have survived, no matter how decayed they have become. Along with patina, holy relics acquire a sense of sanctity over time.”

— Deyan Sudjic, B is for Bauhaus, PP 3.

“An authentic design might be understood as a design which is more than merely not a fake. It is also an object which is unselfconscious, one which is not shaped by a desire to please or seduce… The very involvement of a designer mitigates against this kind of authenticity.”

— Ibid., PP 11.

’Objects made in this way existed in the mind of the maker before they took on physical shape. They were based on inherited forms and skills. A craftsman could make a chair working from a combination of memory and intuition.’ ibid pp140

“When craft skills lose their practical underpinnings and become the preserve of the self-conscious craftsman, or maker as they now call themselves, rather than the traditional artisan, the urge for self expression pushes once functional objects into baroque excess.”

— Ibid., PP 144.

“William Caslon used Dutch oldstyles as his models in cutting his roman type (the Caslon Old Face). William Martin took his cue from Baskerville on the one had and, possibly at Bulmer’s instigation, certainly with his complete support and approval, from the Didot-Bodoni “modern” form of letter on the other. Similarly, in our own time, Bruce Rogers (as he has told) made letter-by-letter tracings from photographic enlargements of Nicolas Jenson’s roman and used them as the starting point for his Centaur type. And it was from detailed study of the various forms of Scotch Roman, including the now forgotten Wayside, that Dwiggins (as he also has told, with illustrations) evolved his Caledonia. Who is to say, with men like these, were imitation stops and creation and artistry begin?”

— PP 13, Laurence B. Sigfried, William Bulmer and the Shakspeare Press, 1957.

“A style comprises many characteristics, some essential, some not.”

— http://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2015/03/philosophies-of-form-in-seriffed-typefaces-of-adrian-frutiger.html

“I saw her there and said “why don’t you come in?”. And she said, “nah, I only came to hear which direction the instruments took you tonight.” And it suddenly made me realise they choose, they choose. And the choice they make is inevitably correct for the audience that is there.”

— Richard Nunns, Voices of the Land.

”The dish will never be greater than the ingredients.”

— Magnus, Chef’s Table, Ep. 6.

“What is obvious but seldom dwelt upon is that we also have to learn that these arbitrary shapes come in lots of different styles – typefaces. There is no one correct version of each letter that all other variations are derived from, just variations of an arbitrary, socially agreed symbol. What kind of e are people thinking of when they think of an e?”

“’He was concerned,’ Denis Tegetmeier has said, ’only to unearth, so to speak, what constitutes the A-ness of the a, the B-ness of the B and so, for us here and now.’”

— PP 31 The Letterforms and Type Designs of Eric Gill.

“Kenny G might be the Olive Garden of music, presenting us with takes on classic dishes that, because they are derived from the same underachieving set of ingredients, never really touch on the essence of the subject matter.”

— http://thetalkhouse.com/music/talks/daniel-lopatin-oneohtrix-point-never-talks-kenny-gs-brazilian-nights/

“New songs, yes; but never new kinds of music, for these may destroy our whole civilisation.”

— PP 90, No Such Thing as Silence, Coomaraswamy quote echoing Plato.

“I’d come to an instinctive realisation that the way you design letters is to change the ones you don’t like. Really it’s an iterative process.”

— WMC, PP36 26, Afga issue 1.

“People expect a type designer to have a mandarin mentality, to say that everything done with a computer is bad, that you can’t design type without knowing the whole history of typography, readability, legibility, blah blah blah. Screw that.”

— Ibid.

“There’s something awfully literal about letters. If the larger computer culture, when and if it happens, allows letters to connote more without denoting less, then it will have transformed type. I don’t see a true digital style in type; the question is will there be a silicon style?”

— Ibid.

“Reviving old faces is not a soft option; there’s no saying that because a face was once successful there is necessarily new life in it. The revivals I’ve done have absolutely nothing to do with nostalgia—I have no interest in that whatever—but with the opposite: looking for qualities that are undateable and have no period associations.”

— MC, PP37 26, Afga issue 1.

“In general, self-conciously a avant-garde type, like self-conciously avant-garde food, is detestable. And we all know that the recent history of type design is littered with the equivalents of those beastly little green discs of kiwi-fruit bearing one quail’s liver in a deglacement of blueberry vinegar that used to infest New York restaurants a few years ago. Postmodern guck. I am not against experiment but I loathe mannerism, and so, I suspect, do most readers who actually read. And I think that what saves new type design from mannerism is an honest sense of its own roots.”

— PP 101, Afga issue 1.