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Project 2: Font Design
Typeface chosen

Grids showing same squared-rounds and horizontal finials.

Online reference (Source: http://cargocollective.com/fontsareyourfriends/Helvetica)

Alphabet A-S, Capital Letters.

Alphabet a-s, Small Letters.

Final Outcome

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Feedback:

30/5/2017 Week 9

Mr. Vinod told me digitize it and also to research on Phil Baines because my font design has some similarities with Baines's font. The choice of font is good. 

6/6/2017 Week 10

Small letters 'n' and 'm' were too condensed. Small letter 'a' should be thicker. 'W' looks a bit weird and should be joint instead of separating the strokes. The rest are fine.

13/6/2017 Week 11

The "w" strokes are not all the same, so make amendments to that. Make the last stroke thinner so that it would optically look balanced. Other than that, the rest are good and well-balanced.

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Reflection: 
Experience
At the start of this project, I started by listing out a few fonts from Adobe Font Folio. I started researching about the few chosen fonts, which are Myriad, Maven Pro, Frutiger and Helvetica. After understanding some basic classification of the four fonts, I decided to go with Helvetica because it's one of the most popular sans serif typeface. Not everyone likes it because it is everywhere you look, in shops signs, clothing label, corporate logo and many other more.

From my research, many fonts are based and derived from Helvetica for different purpose and have clearly different designs. Everyone was modifying Helvetica with funky curls, mixed-case and effects. To understand more about this iconic font, I've decided to choose this typeface.

Helvetica has slipped into the role of "default typeface" for so many printers and signmakers because the nature of the font is clean, meticulous and grid-centric which increases legibility. For this particular reason, it has, sort of, inspired me to design a font proving that we don't need a complete letterform for a letter to be legible.

Second step is sketching, I started by drawing lines and grids on graph paper. We were told to sketch out crucial alphabets like capitals, small letters or example, "o" or "A". We should explore uppercase, lowercase and punctuation. After Mr. Vinod's approval, I started digitizing the font by scanning my sketch into Adobe Illustrator. I dragged grids to indicate the ascender height, cap height, median, baseline and descender height before tracing.

After completing the tracing,  I went ahead and transferred it to FontLab Studio. I adjusted the kernings and letterspacing then showed Mr. Vinod for final amendments before generating the font. The whole process of designing a font was not easy at all, from researching about the font to generating the font.

My experience was fairly good and it really taught me the conventions of designing our own typeface. Not to mention, with the help of books from the library and online research that adds on to my knowledge of designing fonts. The hardest obstacle I faced is consistency, because of the nature of my font, it is very geometric so I had to make sure each letter are symmetrical and balanced.

Observation
After this project, I realized that there are so many details to comply with. The gridded construction of Helvetica makes it feel incredibly balanced and even. But Helvetica can't do everything, it can be really weak in small sizes. Shapes like "C" and "S" curls back to themselves, leaving tight apertures.

Like many neo-grotesque designs, Helvetica has narrow apertures, which limit its legibility onscreen and at small print sizes. It also has no visible difference between upper-case 'i' and lower-case 'L', although the number 1 is quite identifiable with its flag at top left.

Findings
During the whole process of this assignment, I did lots of research specifically on the classification of Helvetica. Here are a list of it:

• Tall x-height, which makes it easier to read in smaller sizes and at distance
• quite tight spacing between letters
• An oblique rather than italic style, a common feature of almost all grotesque and neo-grotesque typefaces.
• Narrow t and f.
• Square-looking s.
• Bracketed top flag of 1.
• Rounded off square tail of R.
• Concave curved stem of 7
• Two-storied a (with curves of bowl and of stem), a standard neo-grotesque feature

The most common typeface that’s easy to confuse with Helvetica is Arial. It’s not tough to spot the difference between the two however, Arial doesn’t maintain the horizontal and vertical emphasis that Helvetica does. There is a documentary film on Helvetica including a brief history of the font through the testimonies of several professional graphic designers like, Rick Poynor and Massimo Vignelli, which I did a research on awhile ago. 

My font has a x-height of 500pt, ascender height of 695pt, descender height of -164pt and with a cap height of 619 pt. The x-height of my font is specially taller than ascender height and descender height following the original classification of Helvetica. There is an overshoot of the bowl at the baseline and the t and f are relatively narrower then the other letters also following the original classification of Helvetica. I did modification to Helvetica by cutting out parts of counters (from close to open), arms, crossbar and stems. Only small letters a and e have closed counter, the rest are open counter. 

Mr. Vinod said my fonts have slight similarity to one of Phil Baines's work and asked the class to research about him. Baines is an author, designer and a lecturer. He is a frequent contributor to the quarterly graphic design magazine Eye. The font is called "FF you can read me", it is a 1995 version of “F Can You (read me)?,” which he designed in 1991 for FUSE 1. According to Baines, “at college in 1983, I had drawn an alphabet based on earlier research by Brian Coe into how much – or how little – of each letter is needed for legibility. My font is strongly inspired by this font created by Baines.

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Further references:
Online reading materials

1) Helvetica: still pulling its weights
http://www.thisbloglife.com/2017/02/helvetica-still-pulling-its-weights/

2) Helvetica
http://cargocollective.com/fontsareyourfriends/Helvetica

3) Helvetica 1956
http://www.appstate.edu/~shugar/helvetica/Helvetica.html

4) FF you can read me
https://www.fontfont.com/fonts/you-can-read-me

5) Helvetica Documentary Film 2007
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0847817/

6) Reputations: Phil Baines
http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-phil-baines

7) How to design a typeface: A step-by-step guide
http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/features/typography/how-design-typeface-step-by-step-guide/

8) Designing a Typeface, With Illustrator and FontLab, from Start to Finish - Part 3
https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/designing-a-typeface-with-illustrator-and-fontlab-from-start-to-finish-part-3--vector-3460

9) Myriad Pro
https://www.fonts.com/font/adobe/myriad/story

10) Myriad (typeface)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad_(typeface)

11) Maven Pro
http://www.losttype.com/font/?name=maven

12) Frutiger (typeface)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_(typeface)

13) Frutiger
http://www.identifont.com/similar?LY


Video materials

1)



Books read throughout the assignment:

1)
I couldn't find books with information of Helvetica in the library but I stumbled across this book. In this book, it teaches how to:

• use grids, frames, symetry, patterns, margins, and textures to create effective layouts
• find the golden ratio and use it to create eye-pleasing patterns and compositions
• establish visual hierarchy in our designs through proper framing, composition, color, spacing, and type
• navigate the color wheel to create and use custom palettes in your designs
• ensure that what we see is really what we get when we print our work

2)
This book covers many aspects including score of new visual examples on how to effectively communicate with type, how to look at type, work with type and many more. It shows how typeface is used in things or places like airports or newspapers. Favourite chapter: 

• Type with a purpose. This particular chapter teaches how to match an appropriate typeface with the right task. 
• Putting it to work. This chapter teaches simple rules of placement to create practical page layouts and also considering where type is going to live and work will determine its effectiveness.

3)

• Designed in 1798 by Giambattista Bodoni 
• the serif font Bodoni drew inspiration from elements of the English typeface Baskerville and the French typeface Didot. 
• Bodoni has been used in everything from 18th century Italian books to 1960s periodicals, and early versions of the typeface are still used for fine book printing.