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Modules
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Modules
on a grid
Home
page
TYPE
DESIGN
Design
notes
Basics
Decisions
Modules
Grid
Curve
Diagonal
Easy
caps
Pesky
caps
Numerals
Polish
Spacing
Squeeze
Bold
Italic
Scans
Spacing
Elbow
grease
Glossary
How to
make a typeface in a day
Here’s a design that my students at the Royal Academy
and I assembled as our first exercise. It was the start of
the BriemAkademi
typeface family.
This
character set is made of capitals, lower case and basic
punctuation, both in normal width and
condensed.
Most of
it is put together from three building blocks.
The first
building block is a rectangle.
The
second building block is a curve.
The third
building block is a diagonal.
Two
stages
The first is simple assemblywork, roughing out the
characters. In the second stage, they are changed a little
where the modules don’t look quite right on their
own.
Some
sculptors say they “chop away anything that
doesn’t look like a statue.” A similar approach
will take you a long way with lettershapes; we’ll get
to that later.
Modules
are one way of making a start. First of all, we’ll make
a grid.
