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Typeface design5/2/2023 ![]() Juan is the lead instructor of Type West Online where his curriculum brings together theory and practice, and emphasizes community and collaboration. Juan joined Monotype in 2016 where he contributes to library designs including Helvetica Now, Futura Now, and Walbaum and creates custom projects for global brands such as Google, Microsoft, Tencent, and Entertainment One. His heart is in both places and his work reflects both languages and cultures. He grew up in Lima, Peru and Clifton, New Jersey. There are so many gorgeous typefaces for you to choose from, and the next time you select a font to use in your project, don't take it for granted, think about all of the hard work and expertise that when into its creation and treat it with respect.Juan Villanueva is a typeface designer, letterer, and educator in New York City. There is a lot of fantastic typeface design going on out there in this new golden age of typography. If this inspires you enough to create your own typeface, I have included some resources in the exercise files for this course so you can take the next step. And here is Donald's type specimen page designed to show off Benda's qualities. Here is a full character set of Benda's Roman or upright text. If you squint, you can see that this is a beautifully balanced page of text. One of the hardest tasks for a text type designer is to create smooth consistent color on the page. A typeface is a system and its letters must all work together equally well, no matter how they are arranged. This is helpful at every stage of the process. Type designers begin using their fonts to set words and sentences as soon as enough characters have been resolved. In Fontlab, they can handle many other complex tasks, such as encoding, hinting, and kerning pairs. Using a program called Fontlab, type designers import their characters and can fine-tune them. By figuring out how to combine the various shapes, round, straight, and diagonal, the designer can move on to design the rest of the letters, testing along the way to make sure the weights and other design characteristics are in balance. From sketch form, letters are refined with a tighter rendering. The Roman, Bold, and Italic versions of the font begin to evolve in sketch form. He worked both with pencil and a broad-edged pen and ink. Here are some of Donald's initial sketches for the typeface Benda. There can be several stages of sketching where the rough sketches of letters are refined into tight sketches. Type designers start out the way most artists do by sketching. His goal was to create a font that was modular and systematic, while still respecting the source and keeping the personality of the letterforms. Donald was attracted to the unusual letterforms and the variation between the upper and lower case. Donald was inspired by two sources of unpublished alphabets designed by the influential Czech designer Jaroslav Benda. Let's take a look at the steps along the way to the finished typeface. My good friend Donald Partyka agreed to let me show the steps in his recent type design Benda. It takes a combination of vision and dedication and plenty of serious hard work to conceptualize, develop, and finalize a font.
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