Designing Type — book review
As a teacher of type design and typography I have always wished for a book which I could recommend to my students without hesitation, and so I was excited to receive Karen Cheng’s Designing Type. As the author remarks in her introduction, there are simply very few books that explain the type design process comprehensively.
As a teacher of type design and typography I have always wished to have a book, which I could recommend to my students without hesitation, and so I was excited to receive Karen Cheng’s Designing Type. As the author remarks in her introduction, there are simply very few books that comprehensively explain the type design process.
In the blurb, the 232 page book promises to focus on ‘processes and issues of designing type,’ but the design process is summarized in two pages, while the remaining 230 pages provide a detailed analysis of individual letters. Those isolated characters are measured, dissected and superimposed, creating a useful comparison of the possibilities of the Latin character set, but there is little discussion of how the individual letters relate to each other in combination. In fact, despite the fact that book is extensively illustrated, there are no illustrations of the complete character sets. Cheng focuses on terminology and the miniscule details of type but there is no suggestion of the fundamentals of type creation such as the difference between written and printed type, or more general principles of letter construction. Cursive (italic) construction of letters is entirely omitted, as are the influences of various generating tools. If Cheng’s book had been called A Micro-Analysis of Popular Latin Fonts, then I would have expected the useful educational reference book that it is. But if its ambition is to reveal principles of typeface construction, the book ought to present methodology for creating type, which it does not. In the meantime, I’ll keep hoping for a type design book to recommend to the students.
Other Articles By Peter Biľak
- Why Not Associates?2
- The Book of Probes
- Restart: New Systems in Graphic Design
- Maeda@media
- Contemporary Dutch graphic design: an insider/outsiders view
- Dutch type design
- Martin Majoor, type designer
- Irma Boom, book designer
- Designing Type Systems
- Karel Martens, graphic designer
- Letterror, designers and programmers
- Max Kisman, graphic designer
- In search of a comprehensive type design theory
- Experimental typography. Whatever that means.
- Martin Majoor feature
- History of a new font (notes on designing Fedra Serif)
- Sandberg, Designer and Director of Stedelijk
- En busca de una teoría completa del diseño tipográfico
- Historia de una fuente nueva
- Acerca de Fedra
- Falta de diseño, exceso de diseño y volver a diseñar
- Tipografía de los noventa. La demistificación y re-mistificación
- Graphic Design in the White Cube
- Kyoorius DesignYatra 2006, review of a design conference
- Ways of Seeing, book review
- À la recherche d’une théorie générale du dessin de caractères
- 화이트큐브의 그래픽디자인 / Graphic Design in the White Cube
- What is Typography?
- Family planning, or how type families work
- A View of Latin Typography in Relationship to the World
- Jan van Toorn, Critical Practice
- In the Name Of the Father (or the troubles with L-caron)
- The history of History
- Methods of Distribution: Digital Fonts and the Global Market
- Méthodes de distribution : les caractères numériques sur le marché mondial
- Font hinting
- Beauty and Ugliness in Type design
- Conceptual Type?
- We don’t need new fonts…
- Julien — the making of
- Type design competitions
- Una mirada a la relación de la tipografía de origen latino con el mundo
- Métodos de distribución: Tipos digitales en el mercado global
- Irma Boom interview
- Lava — Voice of a Magazine
- Caratteri concettuali?
- About Uni Grotesk, a Central European geometric Sans
- Related Type Families
- Verwandte Schriftfamilien
- Designing Hebrew Type
- Notes on Designing and Producing the Typeface Wind
- A Brief History of Sans Serif typefaces
- Brief History of Webfonts
- The Importance of Play
- About Nothing, really
- Size-Specific Spacing of Fonts
- Reclusive Designers — Redefining Success in the Internet Era
- Theory of Type Design, a book review
- Designers Reclusos – Redefinindo o Sucesso na Era da Internet
- Planejamento familiar, ou como as famílias tipográficas funcionam