Once your letterforms are drawn, the work shifts to spacing, quality control, and — if you’re ambitious — building a family. This post distills Dave Lawrence’s chapters on fitting and spacing, building italic variants, and planning a type family in FontLab 8.
Bananas is a casual brush face that is mostly an excuse to grin while you set it. Ronaldson Pro is a 19th-century revival that took years to draw and exists because Patrick Griffin would not let the original die. Both are Canada Type. Both came out of FontLab.
If you are still drawing every accented letter by hand, this is the episode that retires that habit. Anchors plus components mean you draw a and acute once, and FontLab assembles aacute, acircumflex, agrave, and the other 700-odd accented forms for you.
Spacing is what separates a font that exists from a font that reads. The FontLab TV spacing episode is the one to watch first — before kerning, before OpenType, before anything else that can mask bad sidebearings.
Most readers never notice when typography is right. They only notice when reading feels like work. The features that decide which side of that line a font lands on are mostly the unglamorous ones — kerning, standard ligatures, contextual alternates — the parts that handle the friction the user never sees.
You can spend six months refining the curvature of a lowercase ‘s’, and then your font gets rendered onto a generous grid of pixels on someone’s second monitor at 1366 × 768. Translating a smooth Bézier into that grid is one of the more delicate handovers in typography, and the people who built the tools that handle it have been wonderfully inventive about it.
Bodoni Casale is not a Bodoni revival in the careful, museum-conservator sense. It’s three Bodoni revivals — Casale, Ferrara, Terracina — each a different printed source, each digitised at the level of detail that only matters when somebody looks at the page from six inches away. That’s the California Type Foundry house style, and Dave Lawrence does it in FontLab.
Type design is an art form. Font production is a factory job. Once the aesthetic decisions are settled on the core alphabet, you face the unglamorous reality of propagating those decisions across hundreds — sometimes thousands — of glyphs. Doing that by hand is a recipe for repetitive strain injury and existential dread.
Dave Lawrence of California Type Foundry wrote a comprehensive set of tutorials for FontLab 8, from installation to finished font. This post distills the first two chapters: getting your environment set up, and the fundamentals of drawing in FontLab’s glyph-oriented workflow.
YFF Becha looks like a poster you’d find tacked behind a bar in Lviv — heavy, slightly off, deliberately so. It’s the kind of display face that does not pretend to be neutral, and it’s drawn by Alexander Kapusta at his one-person foundry, Your Font Fetish.
Drawing letters for a living turns out to be mostly an exercise in being perpetually disappointed by optical illusions. A geometric circle next to a geometric square at the same height looks smaller than the square. The fix is to draw the circle slightly larger so that it merely looks the same size. Type design is a profession built on quietly lying to the eye so the eye perceives the truth.
The standard method for digitising a font is to draw the outline. You map the exterior boundary of the shape with Bezier curves, and you push and pull nodes until the silhouette behaves. This works fine for rigid sans-serifs. For a script font, it feels like sculpting in oven mitts.
Letterforms are made of black shapes, but type is judged by the white around and inside them.
You inherit a folder of old PostScript Type 1 fonts. Or a client sends a family with broken names, duplicate glyphs, and kerning that only works in one app. You need web fonts that load fast and look right everywhere.
Since the FontLab 8.2 release in August 2023, two major free updates have shipped: 8.3 in December 2023 and 8.4 in June 2024. Together they add over 200 new features and improvements. Here is the short version.
Three chapters from Gunnlaugur SE Briem’s notes on type design cover the work that comes after the roman is drawn: making a bold weight, designing the italic, and spacing the result. All three are harder than they look and more forgiving than they seem.
Digital formats rarely retire on their own. New ones arrive, the world picks them up, and the older format is gradually sunsetted by the companies that built it. PostScript Type 1 followed exactly that arc, and TransType 4 has been the friendly moving van ever since — keeping the typefaces inside those old files alive on modern systems.
FontLab 8 supports every current color OpenType format and ships with Python 3.11 scripting and the TypeRig library. This post covers the color workflow and scripting capabilities from the “Color” and “Scripts & extensions” chapters of the What’s New documentation.
The hardest part of designing a typeface isn’t drawing — it’s deciding. Which letterforms? How wide? How much contrast? Gunnlaugur SE Briem’s notes on decisions and modules offer two complementary approaches: systematic variation and comparison, and learning from masterpieces.
FontLab 8.2 lands with around 250 changes on top of 8.0 — a consolidation release that touches every corner of the app, from the Sketchboard to the export dialog. Drawing tools get smoother handles and snappier strokes; kerning learns to read right-to-left; the COLR format reaches v1; Python moves to 3.11; and a quietly redesigned UI makes large fonts feel lighter to work with. Free for FontLab 8 owners.
Variable fonts pack an entire type family into one file, letting users slide continuously between weights, widths, and other axes rather than jumping between predetermined styles. FontLab 8 treats variable font creation as a first-class workflow, not a post-production step. Here’s what the “Families & variation” chapter of the What’s New documentation covers.
Gunnlaugur SE Briem taught type design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1996. His notes from that course — precise, practical, free of mystification — have been republished with permission on the FontLab documentation site. Here is a distillation of his opening chapters on why you’d make a font and what the basics actually require.
Two years into FontLab 7, users had a clear message: the drawing engine is excellent, the variable font support is solid, now make the rest of the application match. FontLab 8, shipping today, is our answer.
Apple’s macOS 12.3 Monterey update broke all previous versions of FontLab 7 by removing the system Python 2.7 that FontLab depended on. FontLab 7.2.0.7644 is a free patch that restores compatibility — macOS 12.3 users need to install a bundled Python 2.7 package alongside the app. A buggy intermediate build (7650) that made glyph fills transparent was withdrawn; 7644 does not have that problem.
PostScript Type 1 fonts are on their way out. Adobe is ending Type 1 support in Creative Cloud applications in early 2023, and Apple has signalled the same direction in macOS. If you have a library of Type 1 fonts — and many working designers do — now is the time to convert them to OpenType.
This 19-minute presentation by Adam Twardoch, delivered at ATypI Tech Talks 2021, goes beyond building variable fonts to the harder question: making them good. It covers quality assurance, interpolation checking, and the tools in FontLab 7 and related applications that help catch problems before a variable font ships.
FontLab 7 launched in December 2019 with over 250 new features. Twelve months later, it has rather more than that. Here is what the 2020 update cycle actually delivered — not counting FontLab 7.2, which has its own post.
Spacing is the invisible work that determines whether a font feels effortless or labored to read. This five-minute tutorial from Dave Lawrence’s FontLab 7 series strips the topic down to its essentials: what sidebearings are, how to set them in the metrics window, and how to evaluate spacing visually as you work.
Most type designers don’t draw directly in the font editor — they sketch in pencil, refine in Illustrator or Affinity Designer, then need to get that artwork into FontLab cleanly. This eight-minute video from Dave Lawrence’s FontLab 7 series shows exactly how.
FontLab 7.2 is a free update with 120 new or improved features. The headline: interpolation now runs 30× faster. New tools include Rotate, Scale, and Slant; an adaptive freeform grid with Suggest Distance; variable and attached components; visual OpenType feature proofing; and Microsoft VOLT integration. Existing FontLab 7 users get it free; FontLab VI users can upgrade for $99.