Type Tricks: Your Personal Guide to Type Design

I have immersed myself in type design for the last 4 months as I developed my first professional typefamily for my senior project (currently sitting at 12 fonts, two families, 1,548 glyphs). I’ve looked up countless resources to make sure I create my typeface to professional standards.“Type Tricks: Your personal guide to type design” by Sofie Beier is an excellent little type design resource. It’s full of fun tips and tricks on how to take your type design to the next level. While this is a great resource that a beginner can learn a lot from, I wouldn’t recommend it as your only resource. It’s not really laid out in a manner for teaching the craft from scratch. It already assumes you have a baseline understanding on how to create a typeface. Its main goal is to elevate your existing understanding of the topic or as a reminder by showcasing fine details, you may not have considered or had forgotten.I also love the size of this book. It’s small enough to fit in pretty much any bag or a particularly spacious pocket. This makes it a great reference book to carry with you. The book is more illustrated then it is text which makes it feel very approachable to flip through if you aren’t the type for heavy reading.If you are looking for a single resource to learn type design from scratch, then I would start elsewhere. All the resources below I recommend as both an initial starting point and as a companion to this book.“Designing Type” by Karen Cheng is more suited for learning how to create a type family from scratch. It goes over all the terminology you should know and important behind the scenes details that most people don’t even consider. Where it truly shines is in how much depth it goes into for creating each letterform. It has a two page spread dedicated to the nuances and common variations for EACH glyph. All uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuation, and diacritic marks are covered in great detail. This book very much reads like a textbook. Its purpose is to be an educational reference first and foremost.“Making Fonts: a comprehensive guide to professional type design” by Chris Campe and Ulrike Rausch is another great book for learning type design from scratch. This book feels much more fun and approachable than “Designing Type” though it doesn’t go into nearly as much detail into the individual glyph construction. This book is a more wholistic approach to font design than a hyper fixation on the construction of the characters. It covers more of what to expect in the font design software, exporting a working font, a showcase of OpenType features, and publishing and selling your font.If you learn better by watching rather than reading then I highly recommend Charles Nix’s classes on type design on LinkedIn Learning. “Learning Type Design” and “Design an Italic Typeface” are two of the most comprehensive type design video lectures I have found. I also recommend watching “How to Space a Font. FontLab Studio 5 tutorial with Thomas Phinney” on YouTube which covers the art of spacing in great depth.

This is a perfect introduction to the type world. Easy to understand with a lot of details of typography and examples. I highly recommend this book if you're a student, a junior designer or a person who wants to have a complete guide to the type principles. Even you can have it like a refresh manual sometimes. Is well-designed, beautifully done. It's a pocket-size (almost) book. If you're searching something more deep like an essay or creative ways to improve your skills, maybe you need another kind of book (“detail in typography” by Jost Hochuli for example).

No just for Type Designers but also must-have for Graphic Designer, very specific and clear examples, many condensed concepts and details under the type design process but applicable for graphic design, definitely it will rice up your skills and knowledge.

Excellent book. She really knows about drawing type. Maybe a little small for my taste

Brilliant little book. Worth every penny. Informative, easy to read & easy to find the info you need.

Started referencing from this thanks to Matteo Bologna, and it’s been helpful! Recommend this for anyone getting into type design.

Useful. Visual aids as well as text on various types facts.

The information about type in the book is exactly what I was looking for—very useful. What I wasn't expecting is the poor choice of colors and type weights that take the joy out of using this book. When I pulled the book out of the package I was surprised at how difficult it was to read the cover—a cover on a book on typography.The main color on the cover is a dark, muted blue/purple. The subtitle and the author's name are set in thin black type. Even in the best light they are difficult to read because of the lack of contrast between the type of the color of the cover.The book's title is in a hot neon orange that vibrates against the color of the cover. It's extremely uncomfortable to read. This same poor combination of colors is continued through the entire book.Sometimes there are full pages flooded with the hot neon orange color, with thin white type laid over it—extremely poor contrast and hard to even look at let alone read. Sometimes the hot neon orange is used in the reverse, with thin orange type on a white page—the same issues with poor contrast.Sometimes there are examples of concepts in a particular typeface and, under those examples, the name of the typeface is given in extremely tiny neon type. I can barely read it. It's hard to understand how it happened coming from an author who wrote a book called "Reading Letters: designing for legibility".This book has 5-star content with 1-star presentation. It's like listening to a favorite audiobook where a poor narrator keeps you from fully enjoying the experience. I have no plans to return the book. I would buy it again because I want the information. But, it's painful to read.

Very useful

Habe es in der Schule das erste Mal gesehen und war sofort vom Design und Layout überzeugt. Der Inhalt ist ebenfalls sehr überzeugend, allerdings eher etwas für Nerds. Ich liebe es und schlage dort auch gerne Dinge nach.

C'est un vrai livre pour les type designers ou 'concepteurs de polices'. On y parle en long et en large de la forme de la lettre, de sa construction, des différentes règles optiques, de la lisibilité, de la connotation typographique, de l'attraction visuelle, du kerning, du spacing, etc. Bref... Pour un livre aussi petit (rentre dans ma sacoche) je trouve que le contenu est très pertinent et super dense. D'après moi il faut bien sûr enrichir ses connaissances 'typographiques' via d'autres sources et d'autres moyens que les livres et surtout ne pas toujours suivre les règles édictées pour pouvoir faire de belles rencontres avec les formes

Existen muchas opciones para iniciarse en el diseño tipográfico, pero sin dudas el libro de Sofie Beier es el que mejor condensa lo más relevante de este arte centenario y, además, lo presenta de una manera dinámica, muy visual y sencilla.

Muito bom o livro, recomendo! Recomdo a todos que queiram saber um pouco mais sobre Tipografía. Por que mostra de maneira simples os truques por trás do desenho de fontes.