Want to get into font design but feel confused by the craft? French type design foundry has put together a straightforward guide to demystify typography and make the practice accessible to everyone.
Packed with practical advice from the founder and type director of Blaze Type, Matthieu Salvaggio, How to Design Fonts contains over ten years’ worth of his hard-won learning and practice. Covering everything from how fonts are designed through to the practicalities of the industry, this book claims to be the most straightforward way to get a handle on all things letter related.
Split into nine chapters and with 132 different entries, How to Design Fonts guides readers through how to design fonts, draw glyphs properly, produce, test, export, and license your work, plus much more. “Basically, everything about font design you could ever want to know, and everything you need to kickstart a font designer career,” says Matthieu.
For Matthieu, How to Design Fonts is a realisation of the sort of book he always wanted. “I learnt type design by looking at fonts and reading any material I could find,” he tells Creative Boom. “It took me a rather long time before I could design something I was happy with. Things got easier with experience, though. My goal with this book was to write something super simple so people could dive right into type design.”
This simplicity was at the heart of the book, as Matthieu felt other type design titles were tough to digest. “There’s often lots of theory and complex wording, which is difficult for people not already initiated with font design,” he explains. “Our goal with How to Design Fonts is to impart knowledge in the easiest way possible and to make type design accessible.
“I think this is what separates the book from other font design guides. It gives you super simple directions to follow and shows readers what fonts, glyphs and so on should look like.”
Aimed at both beginners and people already familiar with the world of fonts, the book easily walks readers through the nuances of the design process thanks to its crisp layout and clear, methodical explanations. “We have our own way of processing and designing fonts here at Blaze Type, so we have a pretty unique way of covering everything,” adds Matthieu. “Anyone curious about fonts and glyphs can benefit from it.”
To get its message across, the book was specially designed so that the text and visual aids could live independently. “There are three ways to read the book: the text, the images and text, or the images alone,” Matthieu explains. “We decided to go with fonts we love to work with and are expressive enough to make people easily grasp what we want to show.”
So if you’ve always wanted to learn about type anatomy, how to create shapes, draw properly in font software, and what to do when it comes to pricing your work, How to Design Fonts could be precisely the book you’re looking for. “It contains pretty much all you need to become a professional font designer!”
Order your copy of How to Design Fonts at .
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