5/29/2023 0 Comments Fontlab clothingIt’s an open question, but thus far it’s not clear that the market is really big enough to sustain type design tools that are completely different sets of tools that meet completely different needs. The fundamental issue is bridging that gap, allowing people who are more creative and design-oriented to succeed in making these little design tools essentially.And so the fundamental issue is bridging that gap, allowing people who are more creative and design-oriented to succeed in making these little design tools essentially, that have a lot of technical aspects, and then the additional complication is for the most design-oriented people, you want to not have them forced to deal with the technical stuff and for the more technical people you want to allow them to have access to those knobs, dials, tools, to get into the technical underpinnings and that’s a tough dichotomy. And most of the people who are at least initially interested in type design are more artistic and not necessarily very technical. I think the biggest problem is really a fundamental one, which is that fonts are essentially a very specialized kind of software themselves, and there’s a lot of technical aspects to it. Where are there problems? What gives them trouble in our software? What things about the design process in general are difficult for them? What exactly are the difficult parts of creating type design software? And I feel like with teaching gigs and as an educator in type design, it puts me in a good position to have a good sense of what users need and what the challenges that the people using the software are facing. I’ve been using FontLab software for twenty years before I joined the company so it was a really interesting opportunity to help develop and manage the company that was using stuff that I had used extensively as a type designer and as a person who’s teaching someone intro type design. There’s also some strategic direction questions and I’m, probably unsurprisingly given my background, on software and product management side of things. There’s a lot of business stuff that needs managing. Josh Shi: You’ve had a long past in typography and type design, including an 11-year career on the font team at Adobe as product manager for fonts and global typography. ![]() The responses given in this interview have been edited for length and clarity. I got the chance to talk to Thomas Phinney, a type designer and educator and president of FontLab, about FontLab VI, the challenges of creating type design software, and the future of typography. ![]() There are a variety of font editors out there, including open source projects like FontForge and Birdfont, as well as companies out there dedicated to font software, like Fontlab, which is currently in the process of a complete rewrite of their flagship product, Fontlab VI, now in public preview. These programs can be as bare-bones as just a pen tool and can be extended to create beautiful letterforms. Type designers today craft type on font editors, which are basically specialized vector drawing programs. The practice of type design has just as much nuance. While his system of categorization isn’t perfect, it does frame type in a context that people without a deep background in typography should be more familiar with.īut study is only one side of the coin. This is more or less what Robert Bringhurst talks about in his book, The Elements of Typographic Style, where he brings an historical context to the design and study of typefaces. That, along with the huge glossary of terms type designers use to describe the smallest parts of letterforms, can make the field seem hostile to beginners who have only had a cursory experience with type.īut there’s another way to approach learning about type, which is to treat each font less like an anatomy figure and more like a work of art, something that provides a snapshot to the culture and time in which it was designed. Type is a very nuanced field to get into-there’s a lot of history to a practice that’s been going on since Gutenberg mechanized the printing press, and because of that it can seem daunting to a lot of people (it was to me, at least) who want to start learning about it but have no idea where to begin. Only within the past school year, however, have I started getting into type design and studying typefaces. ![]() ![]() It’s where I got my start learning the basics of design, layout, typography, and it’s what became the foundation for all my other design-related ventures. I’ve been involved in print design since my high school days of working on the school newsmagazine.
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