Long-Term Project Workflow

264 points, Final Typeface Design (due exam day, Tues. Apr. 30 at 8am): making the letters, numbers, punctuation, and/or other glyphs, with 52 glyphs in all and vectorizing them in Illustrator (any/all type must be vectorized, even if you have made it with pen and ink or a brush); handlettering is also acceptable but must be digitized in some way; students will also create a spec sheet (all of the glyphs on a single format, showing every glyph they've made), a branding board that has the name of their font, and three capabilities with your design used in 3 ways (may be any or all of the following, print, digital, 3d, environment, etc.)

See the class calendar for critiques, deadlines, and milestones.

Required Reading, Playing:

• Type Shape Game
• Typographic Design chapters 2 & 4
• Know if a Font Sucks
• Bad Type by by Erik van Blokland
• The Process of Viktor Script
• The Process of Hobeaux Rococeaux
• Swatching, on Instagram
• Epic calligraphy, on Instagram
• Flourishing demo with pencil, on Instagram
• Ian Barnard, on Instagram, this guy’s always making

Create a total of 52 glyphs: Letters, Numbers, Punctuation, Symbols, Flourishes, Alternate Characters. Glyphs shall be delivered as vectorized character outlines, produced in Adobe Illustrator, saved as outlines in both Adobe Illustrator (AI) and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) formats. Letters may be drawn or painted first, scanned in for vectorization, and handed in as AI and PDF files. Letters may also begin in Illustrator, as pure vector files.

Character Options: students must create 52 characters in all, and can choose one of the following approaches

1. 26 uppercase, 26 lowercase
2. unicase - 26 uppercase, plus others* (see below for full list): numerals 0-9, punctuation, swashes, and/or other characters
3. unicase - 26 lowercase, plus others* (see below for full list): numerals 0-9, punctuation, swashes, and/or other characters
4. any option not listed above must be approved by the instructor

*the 26 others

1. items 2 and 3 below are required for the others, and students may choose from items 4-11 for their additional characters
2. digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
3. punctuation: periods, commas, open/closing quotes, apostrophes, colons, semicolons
4. alternate characters, such as various styles of one or more letters, see Amanda Moore's Tonic from last term as an example
5. swashes, such as stylized ampersands (&) or upper- and lower-case letters
6. fractions: ½, ⅓, ⅔, ¼, ¾
7. math symbols, multiplication, plus, divide
8. currency symbols, US, EU, Asia, UK currency marks
9. miscellaneous: copyright, registration, trademark, servicemark, diamonds, arrows, octothorp, pilcrow
10. crosses: Roman, Orthodox, Celtic
11. Latin accents: grave, acute, circumflex, tilde, diaeresis, ring, macron, breve, ogonek, caron, etc.

Final Deliverables. In addition to creating your font, students are expected to create the following to market their typeface and give it a personality. The model for the items below is the Lost Type Co-op, where they have name boards in their browse section. Note: all sizes below are in points, so size your layouts accordingly. You can build these in any program (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign), but note the file requirements asked for when turning in the work.

A. Multiple Spec Sheets: 842 pixels wide by 597 pixels high, 300dpi, RGB, TIFF—will include all 52 of your characters, can be color, should have your name, as the designer also listed in the layout, as well as the font's name too. This is noted as Multiple, as in many spec sheets because some students may need to show more than one spec sheet, especially those with layered typefaces. But these are the ones you are required to show:

• black text on white ground
• white text on black ground
• others (as needed) perhaps colored for layer effect

The following works in sections B and C shall be assessed and counted as a separate grade from your letter design work.

B. One Brand Board: 700 pixels wide by 300 pixels high, 300dpi, RGB, TIFF—this will have the name of your typeface on it, and use materials and color in order to promote a look and feel, the character if you will, of your font. Consider how a background image, faint or full, or texture, can add to that character. 

C. Three Capabilities Layouts: your typeface used in situation, and applied to a layout or other design application; the application should be appropriate, meaning it makes sense as it's applied; an example of an inappropriate application would be Comic Sans used on the resume of a banker, which would look rather dubious; format may be rectangular as portrait or landscape, may also be square in shape, but cannot be any smaller than 500 points in any one direction, must be 300dpi and RGB, TIFF; examples include but are not limited to: billboards, wordmarks and other brand identity, tabular layouts such as stock information, album covers, posters, bumper stickers, book covers, eight track cassette tapes, vinyl record labels, CD cases, railroad signage, trading post signage, stationery, envelopes, rock band poster, classical music posters, toy packaging, real estate advertisement and/or identity, cigarette packaging or advertisement, cigar packaging or advertisement, alcohol packaging or advertisement, etc., etc.

Worth 264 points total, with category points as follows:

• 20 craft
• 124 composition of glyphs, including legibility and overall unity of 52 in the set
• 20 research and development
• 40 presentation and professionalism
• 60 capabilities designs, collateral's quality, composition, rendering
• detailed assessment criteria will be shared in-class

Long-Term Project

The long-term project, a.k.a. LTP, a.k.a. Project 5, a.k.a. Final Typeface, is worth 330 points for the term, a large percentage of the term's overall grade. The long-term project has three components.

Wednesday Feb. 6 worth 36 points, Final Typeface Research: presenting a variety of type designs that you are interested in exploring for the final project, with a discussion about the work you're interested in pursuing; you will pitch no less than 3 typeface designs that you could pursue for the semester as your long-term project; they may be of any classification (sans serif, serif, slab serif, script, decorative, etc.) and used for one or more applications (print, digital, environmental, etc.) for display and large formatting or for long-form, focused and intensive reading. You may draw your own original lettering or type. You may also revise or revive a typeface.

• 3 points craft of presentation and its imagery
• 15 points no less than 3 typeface designs (5 points per example) for possible pursuit shown as found type that you've photographed or drawings you've made on your own
• 15 points specifying where each of your typefaces could be used appropriately in print and/or digital and/or environmental applications
• 3 points presentation, professionalism, following directions
• presented as a 11-inch wide by 8.5-inch high multi-page PDF in class at the Windows workstation, and also copied to our Turnstile_2 folder

Wednesday Feb. 13 worth 30 points, Final Typeface Proposal: presenting your narrowed-down direction and identifying the glyphs you will make, be they uppercase, lowercase, numbers, punctuation, math symbols, symbols, graphics, icons, etc.; you will need to have a total of 52 glyphs for the Final Typeface Design; examples of 52 glyphs include 26 uppercase plus 26 lowercase, or 26 uppercase plus 10 numerals and 16 punctuation, or 26 uppercase plus 26 alternate characters, or make a layered typeface with 26 uppercase and 26 uppercase fills and/or outlines to transform the uppercase, etc., layered examples include Sullivan, as well as fonts by Terrance Weinzierl such as Pizza Press

• 10 points at least 1 typeface design you will pursue for the remainder of the semester, showing at least 10 glyphs that serve as an example: example glyphs you show must include ZHORL or zhorl; if you'll only do uppers or only do lowers, then show ZHORL (or zhorl), and 5 other glyphs, be they numbers or punctuation, or symbols (show 10 sample glyphs in all, at 1 point for each glyph) may be drawn by hand or drawn using Adobe Illustrator
• 10 points specifying what complete glyph set you will make in total (see the examples above about the 52 combination examples), you may type your glyph set for this presentation using any typeface; in other words, you don't have to design your typeface's 52 glyphs for this proposal
• 5 points specifying 5 places/applications where your typeface could be appropriately used in print and/or digital and/or environmental and/or signage/wayfinding areas, among others, show examples as photograph, design prototypes, or other visuals
• 5 points presentation, professionalism, following directions
• recommended presentation: 11-inch wide by 8.5-inch high multi-page PDF shown in class at the Windows workstation, and also copied to our Turnstile_2 folder

264 points, Final Typeface Design: making the letters, numbers, punctuation, and/or other glyphs, and vectorizing them in Illustrator (any/all type must be vectorized, even if you have made it with pen and ink or a brush); students will also create a spec sheet (all of the glyphs on a single format, showing every glyph they've made), a branding board that has the name of their font, and three capabilities with your design used in 3 ways (may be any or all of the following, print, digital, 3d, environment, etc.)

This post will be updated with more information as the semester progresses, and we will discuss the Research, Proposal, and Design components in class as we near the first of the above deadlines.

Examples from prior semesters will be placed in Turnstile_2’s VCOM 358 folder for your reference.