Type Design Resources

This is a fantastic introduction to type design, regardless of what software you use.

by Jonathan Hoefler

most tutorials here would be useful to non-Glyphs users too!

Ongoing series of Instagram posts on how to construct certain glyphs.

Video class introduction to the classic editor

Series of articles teaching the basics of type design.

Video guide by Lynne Yun

by Chris Campe and Ulrike Rausch. A German edition is also available.

by Karen Cheng.

by Cristóbal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer, José Scaglione. Also available in a Spanish edition.

A 140-page PDF and print-on-demand book by Blaze Type Foundry.

by Hendrik Weber. Also available in German.

Book by Mary Dyson. Available online for free in English and Spanish.

discussion on TypeDrawers

discussion on typedrawers

workshops for learning Cyrillic type design

presents a variety of workshops and other events

Online workshops by Viktor Baltus for learning type design and typography.

presents a variety of workshops and other events

Typographic Society of Munich hosts a wide range of in-person workshops and courses on typography, including type design.

ILT academy exists to promote expert teaching of type design, font production, and typography. Courses cover various script systems and are taught in a number of languages.

A series of free courses for RoboFont users.

A two-part, 6 week + 18 week part-time program for learning type design.

A type design school in Barcelona, Spain. Currently teaching a 21-week part-time program with an emphasis on variable fonts.

Self-guided courses by Viktor Baltus for learning type design and typography.

An online school with a range of type design and typography courses.

A 6-week intensive type design programme held each summer in Paris (in English).

An on-demand video course by Arthur Reinders Folmer on creating variable fonts, and variable colour fonts.

at ENSAD (Nancy, France)

A two-year master’s degree program in Switzerland.

at Esad Amiens (Amiens, France)

at University of Reading (Reading, UK)

MA in Type Design at the KABK (The Hague, Netherlands)

at Letterform Archive (San Francisco, USA)

at Cooper Union (New York City, USA)

An application that generates Japanese or Latin fonts from Adobe Illustrator files.

A browser-based font editor that’s currently in open beta.

An all-in-one font editor for Mac and Windows – first released in 1992.

Plugins for Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop for creating fonts within Creative Suite. Also available as an iPad app.

A fully-featured, Mac-based font editor with an active community.

A paired down version of the full Glyphs app, meant for beginners. Limited to designing single-style fonts (no multiple masters or variable fonts).

A Windows-native font editor.

A Python-based font editor that puts an emphasis on scripting and extendability.

A simpler font editor for beginners, from the makers of FontLab.

A cross-platform, pay-what-you-want font editor written in the Vala programming language. Paid “Plus” version can export Color fonts, OpenType-CFF fonts, and single stroke fonts for CNC.

A cross-platform, FOSS font editor written in C. Can export many formats. First released in 1994.

A browser-based FOSS font editor that allows distributed teams to work on a font together. Currently unfinished and in development (2023). Developed by Black[Foundry] and Google Fonts.

FontStruct lets you quickly and easily create modular fonts constructed out of geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.

A FOSS font editor written in Rust. Currently unfinished and in development (2023).

A browser-based FOSS font editor.

A modular, Rust-based, FOSS font editor. Currently unfinished and in development (2023).

A FOSS font editor, also written in Rust. Currently unfinished and in development (2023).

A cross-platform FOSS font editor, written in Python. Now discontinued (2023).

A browser-based font editor by Evgeny Agasyants, currently in open beta.

Online event series of type critiques, by Alphabettes

an informal weekly Zoom meeting for type designers to chat and show their work, hosted on Friday afternoons by Mirko Velimirovic. Posting Zoom links publicly is probably asking for trouble, so I’d say just send Mirko a DM to join!

a free resource for type design students to meet 1–1 with experienced type designers for virtual critiques

a list of over 400 type foundries to follow on Twitter

discussion forum for type designers

A global type conference, hosted in a different country each year in September.

A conference on digital typography and technology, presented by Typographische Gesellschaft München (Typographic Society of Munich).

Annual typography conference organized by Fontstand, the typeface discovery and rental app.

Conference about the future of reading and typography. Hosted by FH Münster, Germany.

A five-day online conference showcasing presentations at the overlap of typography and technology.

Kerning is the first international conference in Italy dedicated solely to typography and web typography. Last event was in 2019, but the organizers are keen to host future events if sponsors come forward.

The Leipziger Typotage is an annual event on type design and typography organised by the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Druckkunst Leipzig e.V. since 1995 hosted at Museum für Druckkunst Leipzig, Germany.

Online conference on writing and typography for native languages from Latin America. Hosted by the Type Directors Club.

A one-day conference (in English) held in Paris each year by TypeParis.

Triennial conference on font software & technology. Hosted in-person in The Hague, Netherlands.

A two-day hybrid conference organized by Granshan, an organization that celebrates non-Latin typefaces and typography.

Annual conference presented by S{o}TA. Hosted in-person in Portland, Oregon.

An online-only type conference

Annually in June at The Cooper Union in New York City. Typographics hosts in-person and streaming events, plus workshops, a book fair, and TypeLab, an informal, multi-day, global typographic hackathon.

A new online event series, featuring lightning talks from designers, which may or may not be related to fonts.

Letterform Archive in San Francisco hosts many lectures and events, both online and in-person.

St. Bride Foundation in London hosts many lectures and events on printing, design, and typography.

Type Electives hosts lectures and events that go beyond traditional type design topics.

A global organization representing type designers and foundries. Holds an annual conference, hosted in a different country each year in September.

An organization that promotes and celebrates non-Latin type design and typography. Holds an annual or biannual type design competition, followed by a conference and exhibition.

“An open community dedicated to supporting and advancing the typographic arts and design education.” Organizer of TypeCon.

Type Directors Club is an international organization promoting typography and type design. Since 1946 they’ve hosted events, conferences, and competitions in New York City and around the world. Each year they produce Typography Annual, recognizing the year’s best typographers and type designers.

by Monotype — Bill Connolly interviews type designers and other creative characters

conversations with designers and other creative folks, including several type designers

James Edmondson chats with up-and-coming and well-established type designers

“A weekly briefing and discussion of type, design, and creativity.” by Proof&Co.

Glenn Fleishman talks with type designers, calligraphers, letterpress printers, historians, and more. RSS link

from The League of Moveable Type

the oldest and most beloved podcast for type designers – interviews at conferences from 2005–2020

An academic mini journal publishing texts that are about design for reading and reading-related research

Deep-dive reviews of fonts, by Bethany Heck.

A print-only periodical dedicated to type design.

Print and online magazine on type and typography.

News and articles from the world of type design. Online and print.

Typeface reviews, articles on type design and typography.

An academic journal published by the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading and the Hyphen Press. Free PDFs available.

A series of articles and tutorials by Viktor Baltus on type design.

Discussing type with Adobe’s foundry partners.

An analysis of languages that use Latin diacritics and the frequencies of letters and letter pairs with diacritics.

by Aleksandra Samuļenkova, thread listing many resources concerning diacritics and special characters of the Latin script

by Filip Blažek

A guide to drawing the German capital eszett (ẞ) by Ralf Herrmann.

A guide to drawing the German capital eszett (ẞ) by Christian Thalmann.

Guidelines and best practises for drawing the Latin alphabet, as well as figures, diacritics, punctuation and symbols.

A general introduction to the design of diacritics by David Březina

Central European diacritics

by Donny Trương, comprehensive resource typographic features and diacritics in Vietnamese

On-demand course by Charles Nix for LinkedIn Learning. You might be able to access LinkedIn Learning for free via your local library.

A thesis stemming from a five-year study by Victor Gaultney.

Glyphs tutorial by Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer.

A discussion on TypeDrawers.

A discussion on TypeDrawers.

A presentation at ATypI 2017 by Victor Gaultney.

A presentation at ATypI 2020 by Victor Gaultney.

A discussion on TypeDrawers.

by Maria Doreuli

by Krista Radoeva

a collection of links to many online Cyrillic type samples and inspirations, by Vika and Vita

workshops for learning Cyrillic type design

by Thomas Phinney

An article by Igor Petrovic on localizing your glyphs for Serbian and Macedonian Cyrillic.

a lengthy GitHub issues discussion on Cyrillic glyphs in Catharsis Fonts’ open-source typeface Cormorant

by Alexandra Korolkova

by Gerry Leonidas

by Irene Vlachou

MA dissertation by Adi Stern

A well-researched and invaluable look at the process behind designing a Canadian Syllabics typeface, which includes many special features to support a wide range of local preferences for languages that use this script.

from Microsoft’s Character design standards

discussion on TypeDrawers

discussion on TypeDrawers

Script for generating box drawing characters and block elements

by Just van Rossum

by David Jonathan Ross (workshop recording)

tutorial by Andy Clymer

3-part tutorial series by Stephen Nixon

tutorial series by Roberto Arista

Type@Cooper course with David Jonathan Ross

documentation

by Rainer Scheichelbauer (aka mekkablue) of the Glyphs team. This repo contains many useful tools and code examples to help you write your own scripts.

There are many more repos of Glyphs scripts by type designers and developers:

A workshop by Peter Nowell for type designers working in Glyphs or RoboFont with little to no coding experience.

official tutorials from Glyphs

A workshop by Peter Nowell for type designers working in Glyphs or RoboFont with little to no coding experience.

Extension manager for RoboFont

Spreadsheet by Ryan Bugden of useful extensions not in Mechanic.

by Frank Grießhammer

A set of scripts for generating PDF proofs from a fonts or UFOs, by Frank Grießhammer.

by Just van Rossum, a macOS desktop font viewer for testing fonts, specifically text shaping and variation behavior.

A commercial app for proofing fonts, by Peter Nowell. Integrates with Glyphs and RoboFont, allowing you to re-generate proofs anytime with a single click.

A playground for testing variable fonts. Made by Laurence Penney.

by Adam Jagosz

by Simon Cozens

A tool for proofing and animating variable fonts.

Proof large design space variable fonts by animating through instance locations as keyframes on ‘stages’. Made by Font Bureau, to develop Roboto Delta and the full Amstelvar Roman and Italic avar 2 fonts, since 2023.

Proof large design space variable fonts by animating through instance locations as keyframes. Made by Font Bureau, to develop Roboto Flex and the full Amstelvar Roman and Italic avar1 fonts, 2019-2022; deprecated by TypeRoof.

by Viktor and Clemens Nübel

by Samarskaya & Partners

by Pablo Impallari

A modified version, by Mota Italic, of Pablo Impallari’s Font Testing Page. See also the Devanagari and Hebrew versions.

by Laurence Penney

Stack & Justify is a tool to help create type specimens by finding words or phrases of the same width. Inspired by Mass-Driver’s Waterfall tool.

A set of layout tools for experimenting with variable fonts in various ways. Made by Font Bureau, when it was part of Type Network, to develop the first Decovar and Amstelvar variable fonts in 2016; deprecated by VideoProof and then TypeRoof.

by Underware

by Roel Nieskens

A tool by Mass-Driver that generates words of equal length after you drop in a font. Great for proofing in early stages of a font, when you’re still seeing how the forms interact with each other.

by Miguel Sousa

by Jonathan Hoefler

by Tim Ahrens

discussion on TypeDrawers

Handy tool for finding words that contain certain letter combinations, to help you build proofing texts for kerning and ligatures.

An overview of Alphabet Type’s font engineering workflow, including links to more resources on each topic.

by Tom Rickner

Discussion on TypeDrawers

A course from ILT Academy that will introduce you to font engineering.

A presentation by Rosalie Wagner for ATypI 2022 Tech Talks

A free book about font design, Unicode and the computer processing of complex text, by Simon Cozens.

A presentation on font engineering by Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer of Glyphs, at ATypI Tech Talks 2022.

A course from Tipastype

An essay on the problems of rendering text on-screen, with a focus on hinting. Updated several times since it was originally presented in 1997, this essay is considered required reading by many accomplished type designers.

A dedicated app for font engineering that allows you to perform a wide range of proof tests, QA checks, and edits to your font files.

A collection of font engineering utilities by Simon Cozens

A quality-assurance tool for fonts, developed by Google but used by many foundries. Primarily a command-line tool, a web interface was recently added.

A web-based tool for viewing and editing the internal tables of a binary font file. Runs entirely in your browser, without uploading your font files to any server. By Olli Meier.

A simple app to view and compare the OpenType tables inside of your font files.

An indispensible toolkit for editing fonts via Python. Also includes ttx, a command line tool that quickly converts binary font files to human-readable XML, which can also be edited and converted back to binary.

A collection of resources for font engineering, including the OpenType specification, and various other articles and tools.

Managing vertical metrics is one of the most common font engineering problems. This set of Python tools includes a command line tool which generates a PDF to preview the vertical metrics of a font.

by Paul Shaw

by Letterform Archive

Twitter thread by Hoefler&Co, a list of books

A directory by Typographica of type foundry catalogs available online

The O.G. of open-source foundries

Anyone with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription can use your fonts, and you get paid based on usage.

A marketplace for all types of creative assets, including fonts. Seems to be geared more toward hobbyists and freelancers rather than companies. Royalty rate 50%.

Formerly known as the world’s largest independent font marketplace, Fontspring is now owned by Creative Market, and has since reduced royalty rates from 70% to 50%.

Font rentals distributor. 50% royalty rate.

A new distributor with a large roster of some of the best indie type foundries.

Sell your fonts through MyFonts, FontShop, Linotype.com, Fonts.com, etc. Royalty rate 50%.

A network that distributes for many of the world’s best type designers.

Opened in 2001, it’s one of the longest-running marketplaces for fonts and stock assets.

by Alex John Lucas

by Alex John Lucas

Thomas Jockin interviews Joyce Ketterer for TypeThursday

ATypI presentation by Joyce Ketterer, Font Licensing Expert

ATypI presentation by Joyce Ketterer, Font Licensing Expert

A collection of documents (EULA and business documents) from XYZ Type, provided under Creative Commons CC0 license.

Blog post by web developer Manuel Moreale. It’s a good summary of how some web developers feel about web font licenses, but far more interesting is the comments thread on HackerNews.

Comments on HackerNews

by Alina Sava

by Frank Adebiaye

probably one of the first to do this?

Crawls the web to help you find and correct authorized and unauthorized usage of your fonts.

Statistics, facts and data from 2022 in the world of independent type foundries, by Proof&Co.

A Quora post with answers from several well-known type designers and foundry owners.

A podcast hosted by James Edmondson, where he chats with type designers and often discusses what it’s like to run a foundry.

A presentation at ATypI 2016 by Jean-Baptiste Levée.

Ulrik Hogrebe (TypeThursday) talks with Jesse Ragan and Ben Kiel about starting their new type foundry.

by Stephen Coles for Typographica.

Presentation by James Edmondson of OHno Type Co at Adobe Max 2022.

A 2013 census and report on the state of type foundries, published by Typographica.

Dinamo talks with 15 type foundry owners in 2022.

by Christian Schwartz

by Matthew Smith (also available as a spreadsheet)

TypeDrawers

Developed by Tom Conroy and currently used by many type foundries.

Developed by Guido Ferreyra and is currently used by foundries like Blackletra Type Foundry, Blaze Type, and Undercase Type.

A large e-commerce platform for creatives to sell digital products. Used by Delve Fonts, Cinetype, Justin Penner, Nuform.

Developed by Filip Paldia and currently used by foundries like DizajnDesign and Setup Type.

Used by DJR, Positype, TypeMates

Used by Velvetyne

by Zach Leatherman

by Laurence Penney

by Paravel

by Bram Stein

by Pablo Impallari

by Nick Sherman and Chris Lewis

by Brian McAllister

by Lasse Fister

A JavaScript tool by Mu-Tsun Tsai for freezing OpenType features into a font file. Runs entirely in the user’s browser without uploading font files to a server. This is accomplished by running fontTools in the user’s browser via Pyodide, a Python distribution built in WebAssembly.

A JavaScript library by Devon Govett for parsing fonts. Supports a wide range of font formats and OpenType features. Does not support variable fonts.

A JavaScript library by Pomax for inspecting fonts. Supports a wide range of font formats.

A JavaScript library by Bram Stein for parsing fonts.

A popular JavaScript library by Frederik De Bleser for parsing glyph outlines from font binaries. Note that it does not support the complete range of OpenType tables and formats that its name would suggest.

by Chris Lewis

by Johannes Neumeier

by Quinn Keaveney

by Jon Young

by Frank Rausch

Clients include Sudtipos, Nova Type.

Clients include I Love Typography, DJR, Positype, Laura Worthington.

Clients include Frere-Jones Type, Kilotype

Clients include CoType Foundry.

The complexity-loving, beautiful minds behind Dinamo’s website.

Clients include I Love Typography, Alanna Munro.

Clients include I Love Typography, A2-Type.

Clients include TypeMates, HvD Fonts.