Briem: how to draw a bold (without ruining the regular)
A bold weight is not a thicker version of the regular. It is a different design that has to share a family with the regular and pretend they were drawn together. Briem’s bold tutorial — adapted lightly here — is the cleanest argument for why the obvious approach doesn’t work.
The wrong way¶
Take the regular, scale every contour outward by 30 units, ship it as Bold. The result is recognizable. It is also wrong in three specific ways:
- Counters close up. The white space inside
o,e,a,ncollapses. By the time you can read the bold at small sizes, the letters look choked. - Round letters get fat. Curved sides take the offset on both edges; the visual weight of
obecomes heavier than the visual weight ofn. - Joins thicken non-linearly. Where two strokes meet —
n’s top-right join,a’s spine — the offset overlaps and produces a darker spot than the rest of the letter.
What to do instead¶
Keep counters open. The widths of n, o, H, O should grow when you go bold. Letters get wider, not just darker. Briem’s rule of thumb: a bold weight is roughly 5–10% wider than the regular at the same point size.
Distribute weight asymmetrically on curves. Round letters take more weight on the inside than the outside. The contrast axis (the angle along which the thick parts of the letter sit) usually stays the same as the regular, which means the inside of o is darker than the outside.
Resolve joins manually. At every place where two strokes meet, look at the corner and decide what should happen. Sometimes you trim. Sometimes you ink-trap. Sometimes you let the join darken because the letter needs that darkness. What you do not do is leave it alone.
The masters question¶
If the regular and bold are two masters of a variable font, all of the above has to be designed so that intermediate weights interpolate cleanly. That is one more reason to draw the bold deliberately rather than offset-and-pray — bad bold geometry produces ugly intermediate weights all the way down the axis.
Practical exercise¶
Draw a regular n. Then draw a bold n from scratch — same height, same x-height — without scaling the regular. Compare. The differences you find on n are the differences you will need to apply across the rest of the lowercase.