Where do you people learn all of this?

Design
1

I was a designer/art director for about thirty years. My days were spent designing and hiring innumeral illustrators and freelance help.

I live in Boston, USA. Not once did I ever come across anyone that created fonts. Not once. Not even vaguely. I’m not looking to create a local FontCreators GetTogether (cool name huh?). I’m just curious how the brethren and brethetts (are there any brethettes here on the forums?) learned about fonts and font creation.

Obviously, from the technical depth of some of the forums, several people are professionally involved in font creation. Not interested in becoming a professional, just wondering where this invisible (to me) society lives and how you learned the craft.

D

2

I’ve learned a lot from Typophile over the years.

3

Literature, lectures, discussions, calligraphy.
There are brethettes.

4

Conventions, the internet, classes, and a lot of books.

5

Robert Bringhurst The Elements of Typographic Style and www.briem.net got me started.

6

DTF,
Classes? Where? Are you in Europe, North America or elsewhere? Any good book references. My bibles are:
Designing Type by Karen Cheng
and
Learn FontLab Fast by Leslie Cabarga

rosaiani,
the briem.net reference was nice. I really liked the discussion of thorn and eth seeing as I’ve never seen either in the wild.

7

Classes? Where?

Manhattan, classes are available at SVA and Cooper Union.

8

Also: http://www.typeworkshop.com/index.php?id1=type-basics this is pretty good beggining info from Underware

9

dglen, this other link http://diacritics.typo.cz/ is also a very good reference for diacritics.

10

DTF:
Thanks for the tip. I go to NYC often and have a place to stay if needed. I’ll check the schedule of their classes. Assuming, of course, that they have open courses to the public.

rosaiani:
nice links. I liked the diacritics link but I wish their gallery examples weren’t so old school. It’s hard for me to really get a true handle on diacritic placement unless the examples are very tight. Tight as in a modern serif or sans. They do have some very nice examples on the initial page per diacritic but the associated gallery images left me a little wanting.

I’m a typical American. We don’t see diacritics much, if at all. Unless we go to a Café for Cofféé.

11

Hey dglen, http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/ProbsOfDiacDesignLowRes.pdf this might be more helpful!

12

Yes, that was a particularly good paper. Thanks rosaiani.

13

More links, anyone?
Microsoft Typography Latin 1 Design Standards
TypeEdu Lesson Material
blog post about The Mak­ing of Thorn, thorn, Eth, eth
Adam Twardoch’s Polish Diacritics How-to

14

mekkablue,

very nice links. I got caught up in the TypeEdu Lesson Material and it’s various links. There’s some very good stuff there.

There was an interesting observation of Learn FontLab Fast by Leslie Cabarga by one of the instructors. He kind of dismissed the book. As a counterpoint, I think that there should be more books like Leslie’s. FL can be intimidating to newbees as they are typically learning font design as well as a complex software app. It’s nice to have more, not less, levels of help with any app.