OUGD603 - Brief 07 - Gender Disparity - Designing a typeface

As a starting point I wanted to choose a designer to base my own font on. Three women that stood out to me were Carol Twombly, who influenced the whole of Adobe’s typeface development; Susan Kare, the original designer for the Apple Macintosh’s display fonts and Margaret Calvert, designer of the British roadway network systems. I chose Carol Twombly as in her time at Adobe she proved herself to be one of the greatest female pioneers of type design, producing an impressive amount of typefaces.

The font I have chosen to base my typeface on is Carol Twombly's font Nueva Std regular. I will study the typeface and take features from it to create my own take on it, paying my dues to it's creator and increasing their recognition in the history books. 

The font I chose to base my own on was Neuva Std Extra bold, designed by Twombly in 1994. A font with a very high stroke contratst with round, bouncy counterforms and stroke shapes, particularly in the wider instances. The low connecting joins of the arches on h, m, n, r, b, d, p and q are characteristic of some calligraphic designs, and this combined with rounded bowls and tapering stems makes Nueva unique among roman typefaces.

The process began by sketching out Twombly’s font which allowed me to properly study it’s anatomy and pick up on any subtle details to apply to my own font. I wanted to keep it as similar as possible in order to honour Twombly’s work whilst transforming it at the same time. All of the fonts I had studied such as Troisemille were sans-serif fonts therefore I decided to make the new font also sans serif to give it a more modern appearance, moving out of the Roman typeface category.

Keeping the x height, cap height and type size the same allowed it to stay true to the original font, Neuva. After creating a new version of the font both upper and lower case and punctuation I then transferred it onto the baseline grid shown above to ensure every letter form would work when positioned as a whole.

Once the initial design of the font was complete it was transferred into glyphs mini to adjust the kerning and kerning pairs for every letter to ensure it woud function as a whole. In the early twentieth century, ‘Office Girls’ in the Monotype workshop were given the task of transferring the ‘type directors’ designs into fully functioning typefaces, a process similar to this one. By creating my own single font it allowed me to witness first- hand the patience, skill and accuracy it takes to design a typeface.