Typos & errors

On a site like mine, where everything is self-proofed, there are always going to be typos and errors.

I just spent dozens of hours cleaning up the mess and caught many of them, but I'm sure there are more. If you find any, please email me.

New Font of the Month page!

New! Font of the Month page: Released 12/15/2009

Our Website has been completely revamped, and we are beginning a new Font of the Month deal. For the first month, we are offering our all-time best-selling humanist sans family, Brinar. All six fonts are only $7.00 each or a discount of nearly 72%. Yes, that’s $42 for the entire 6-font family.

Available only on the Hackberry Website, for a limited time (usually one month)!

http://www.hackberry-fonts.com/font_of_the_month.html
It’s not a download. We’ll email your fonts to you.

There'll be a new font every month for $7.00

A new line of typographic gifts

Type geeks are difficult to buy gifts for. They are weird people.

I've started producing some gifts for type geeks. I like'em but then I are one.

http://www.hackberry-fonts.com/gifts.html

Or you can go straight to the Zazzle store.

What makes a font beautiful?

This is the copy from a little page I just added to my site. If you want to see the graphics go there. Blogger does not do graphics well or easily.

There has been a disturbing trend lately of incredibly gorgeous fonts that make bad typography.

How can that be?

To understand that, we need to look at what good typography is. I often tell my students and apprentices:

Good typography is not noticed!

If you notice the typography or font, you are missing the purpose of your design. Here's an example of a new font design that is touted as wonderful, that is absolutely useless. I wouldn't call it gorgeous, but it makes a strong example to start with.

Mommie by Jocham

Like most scripts, it is very hard to read. But, beyond that, the "beauty" of the font is very distracting. (I must confess that I do not find it good-looking at all, personally). I have never seen this font where I actually read the copy. I was always struck by the font design. That is not a good thing.

Let's look at an undeniably gorgeous font family

Carmel by Leuschke

This one is by a lettering artist named Rob Leuschke and it is exquisite: modern, graceful, beautiful, any of hundreds of other adjectives. Like all scripts, there are severe readability issues.

However, the real issue again is it's very beauty. It gets in the way of actual use because it is almost impossible to use this font without people reacting to the font design instead of the content it is expressing.

This is not limited to scripts alone

Increasingly, we are seeing serif and sans serif families that have the same issues. As independent font designers continue to increase, we are seeing ever more personal expressions of typographic beauty. Many of these are very hard to use because the design is so intrusive.

Be careful of the fonts you use!

Lackadaisical Christmas greetings!

I've finally finished the bedroom remodel and now it's on to Christmas decorating. After that I'll get back into the more normal swing of things.

I've got two fonts nearing completion and a ton of questions for you, my readers.

How do you see Hackberry developing? It occurs to me that my customers are not that interested in my focus which is book fonts.

The comments I get are all about the beauty of my fonts. Do you see it this way?

How would you market them?

You'll hear more from me in 2010. Let me know what your needs are. I'll do my best to meet your needs.

Merry Christmas! & may 2010 be better for us all...

Does this describe you?

I found this quote today in an article in InDesign magazine. The quote is from Thomas Phinney, who worked for Adobe Type for many years, now with Extensis (think Suitcase, Font Reserve, & Fusion):

“If you go to a restaurant with a bunch of type designers and typographers, you sit down to dinner at a restaurant and start looking at the menu. Sooner or later you’ll have to insist that they read what’s on the darn menu, because otherwise you may never get around to ordering! We typographers can analyze and critique the typography and typeface selection of the menu for a really long time.”

I can really relate to that—how about you?

When my wife and I watch a movie, it always starts with a discussion of the fonts used in the credits.

By the way, I found Tom's quote in a good article on how to choose an appropriate font. If you are still having trouble with that, you should read the article.

Generating glyphs automatically

This one is pretty basic, but some of you will find it helpful.

As I've mentioned elsewhere (can't remember where), I learned a lot writing the 1st edition of Practical Font Design. One of the biggest things was really very simple.

I tend to start my fonts now with modified versions of fonts I've already designed. I have well over a hundred to work from now. Over the years I've learned many things that really help lessen the huge amount of hours spent designing fonts.

When I first started, I commonly spent 400 to 500 hours for each style of a font family. Now I spend less than 50 hours for the first style and closer to 20 hours for derivative styles like light, bold and so on—with far better quality.

Some of the saving techniques are obvious.

• Make all of your composite characters with components: like éåøöñ and so on—the accented characters needed for languages other than English that make up close to half of the standard 256 characters in the legacy formats like truetype and type 1. Components work like symbols in Illustrator. You actually import a link to the original. If you edit the original, the components are automatically updated.

However, building composites by importing components is not as simple as it appears. There are several issues:

1. You need to bring in the letter component first as this sets the widths and sidebearings.
2. Adding a component to a glyph window that already contains a path dies not adjust the width or sidebearings.
3. Adding the accents by hand forces you to hand align every composite.

Here's the current procedure

1. Pick the font with which I am going to start. Often this is simply making a bold, light, condensed, or black version.
2. Save as under the new name
3. Delete all the composite characters
4. Design the caps, lowercase, and figures
5. Open metrics and set the width and sidebearing for these characters in #4. Editing the components will not fix bad metrics in the composites.
6. Design all the accents and the dotlessi
7. Use generate glyphs to add all the composite characters. There is a list of these on the Website in the right sidebar that you simply have to copy/paste into the Generate Glyphs dialog.
8. The resulting composites will need very little work except for ligatures like ae oslash and so on. But the components will be in place for those also. All you have to do is decompose the components and merge the contours.