[mpatane]

Uh! This is a good question. I studied Graphic design & Visual communication, and I wanted to work on film titles for my final dissertation, a topic that I’m particularly fond of. Of course, typography is one of the key ingredients of a film title, so I’ve started to study type and typography, and I basically never stopped. After several books, I pivoted and focused exclusively on typefaces. My final dissertation became designing a typeface for film subtitles (still hanging around cinema but from another perspective : ).

I guess today I’m still doing this for three primary reasons:

– It allows me to discover and learn new things daily. Letters are everywhere and with so many forms and functions that I won’t get never bored and as society and culture develops, so design does, including type design.

– It gives me full control of the design and production processes; I can make a typeface from the first sketches to the final delivery with no need of a print-shop, or a factory, or anything else. This also means that I’m fully responsible of all the problems you will see in my typefaces. But it’s ok, I like to be accountable for what I do : )

– It is a sort of monastic, iper-focused specialty that requires a lot of attention and discipline, and somehow fits pretty well with my designer persona. I find it to be a pretty zen activity.

[httpsterio]

What are the tools and how did you get started? I'm a typography enthusiast and digital designer myself, but the intricacies of creating fonts has always eluded me.

[mpatane]

Started with FontLab around 2003. Nowadays, my primary tool for development is Glyphs. It’s very easy to use, it’s pretty quick to learn how to use it, and it has quite an active forum/community open to help. Also, you can find plenty of tutorial around. Production wise, apart Glyphs, I use OTMaster quite a lot, fontmake and fonttools (these two are command line tools). VTT (Visual TrueType) for hinting.

My first experiments with fonts were pure trash, bad under many respects. Either super modular and stiff, or completely unaware of letterform construction (how the weight distribution works, proportions, etc.). Most useful thing for myself is to have a brief in mind and to give a sense to the shapes I draw.

I would study letterform, trying to reverse-engineer the design, looking at patterns within each letter but also among the whole alphabet. For example, how the shape of the curves is implemented across the glyph set (if you go for squarish curves, you would expect to get a similar personality wherever you have a curve).Feel free to drop me a line if you need more advice. There are also few good books that can help to focus on the important bits of letterforms construction.