Italics, part three: the f branch and outliers

Italics

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If you haven’t, please read the introduction to italics: part one and part two. The tutorials on the preceding ‘n’ branch and the ‘a’ branch also helps.

Remaining on the italic tree are a handful of miscellaneous letters. Many of them share a type of curved horizontal stroke found on the letter ‘f ’ (the upper and lower strokes, not the cross stroke). Others like ‘t’ and ‘z’ are outlying letters that we will also finish in this post. There also exists one poorly-defined hybrid letter—‘y’ that will be dealt with in this post.

The letter f

The italic ‘f ’ is the only English letter that has both an ascender and a descender (other languages have letters that do this too—like þ, but those are obviously not English letters). Its stem is capped by two curved horizontal strokes (labeled 2 and 3 in the diagram) that are fairly common in the italic alphabet.

These strokes are very similar to the terminal on the ‘c’.

The ‘f ’ terminal is closely related to the ‘c’ terminal.

Italics, part two: the a branch

Italics

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If you haven’t, please read the introduction to italics: part one and part two. The tutorial on the preceding ‘n’ branch also helps.

Like the ‘n’ branch, the ‘a’ branch is a family of italic letters which all derive from a certain root (‘a’). The ‘a’ branch sprouts off of the side of the ‘n’ branch, and the ‘u’ and the ‘a’ form the junction between the two. In this way, the ‘a’ branch can be thought of as the second stage of italic design, though the design process is quite similar to that of the previous branch.

The letter a

Unlike the roman ‘a’, the italic ‘a’ has only a single bowl and stem, much like a ‘d’ without its ascender.

In terms of its architecture, ‘a’ is most directly descended from the italic ‘u’. The two letters share a bowl stroke; in the ‘a’, a second, horizontal stroke closes off the aperture, forming an eye-shaped counter. It is important to note that in italics, the stress is somewhat more diagonal, so the ‘a’s hairline is actually found near its upper-left corner.

Italics, part one: the n branch

Italics

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the a-branch
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outliers
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If you haven’t, please read the introduction to italics: part one and part two

The lowercase italic alphabet can actually be divided into three stages, represented by ‘n’, ‘a’, and ‘f’, plus a couple outliers. The ‘n’ branch, which this post will teach you how to design, is a vast swath of ten italic letters which all come quite naturally from each other. This is part of what makes italics so fun to design—the letters share so many characteristics that you can knock out large portions of the alphabet by nailing down just a few letterforms.

Typographical italics are descended from italic calligraphy, which contains only a few fundamental pen motions. That means that there is incredible congruence among different italic letters. The ‘h’, ‘m’, ‘n’, and ‘r’ are all letters with the “shoulder” or “hump” stroke, and the linear letters—‘i’, ‘j’, and ‘l’—are all degenerate forms of them. The ‘u’ is merely a rotated ‘n’, and the ‘v’ and ‘w’, are, at least sometimes, copies of ‘u’ strokes lacking the vertical stems.

At the center of this italic family is the letter ‘n’, from which all the other letters can be derived. Accordingly, it makes sense to spend more time on this letter and make sure that you get it right, since the shapes you draw in this letter will be reused at least nine more times.

Characteristics and parameters of the italic n

If you read my first post on italics, you should already be familiar with the form of the calligraphic ‘n’. This form actually resembles quite greatly the ‘n’s many people render in their handwriting, especially if they have cursive tendencies.

Many italic typefaces mix in traits of this form with those of the roman ‘n’, which is written with two strokes. The most obvious example of this is in the heights of the joins. Because the calligraphic ‘n’ is made up of a single stroke (at least visually; calligraphers are known for breaking up simple strokes into three or more components, especially when lettering at large sizes), the stem and shoulder meet at a vertex at the lower left corner of the letter.

It naturally follows that in italic type, the join of the ‘n’ is often dragged down the stem, much closer to the baseline. How far down the join is found varies. With numerous exceptions, older style typefaces generally have lower italic joins, while more modern (especially computer-claredon) typefaces have higher italic joins. This should make sense—computer-claredon type is, frankly, more closely related to sans serif type than “true” serif type, and following the sans tradition for oblique rather than italic type, these modern serifs tend to be close to visually slanted roman typefaces. Indeed, in many modern computer serifs, the joins hardly moves at all between the roman and italic styles.

Glyph design: the lowercase z

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Bringing up the end of the lowercase English alphabet, and the lowercase bloc of Floribunda, is the letter ‘z’. The ‘z’ is an incredibly rare letter, the rarest English letter in fact. On average, it only occurs once every 1,350 letters (‘q’ occurs once every thousand letters, and ‘x’ every seven hundred). But while ‘z’, like ‘x’, is rare, it is vastly important because it bridges the gap between the lowercase and uppercase alphabet.

The ‘z’ is unlike any other lowercase letter. It defies the rules of calligraphy—based on the stroke angle, all parts of the ‘z’ should be hairline. But since you can’t have a letter made completely out of hairlines, it’s become a convention to embolden the diagonal (the convention is reversed in italic type). The letter’s two horizontal arms are the most important parts of the letter. No other lowercase letter contains straight horizontal strokes (besides unserifed crossbars like in ‘t’)—the miniscule alphabet always converts such shapes to bowls or arches like in ‘f’ or ‘p’. But these strokes are common in the uppercase alphabet, making ‘z’ a useful base to start constructing letters like ‘E’ or ‘L’. They will also be extremely handy in constructing lowercase cyrillic letters, if we ever get to that.

Components of a lowercase ‘z’

The ‘z’ is not hard to construct. You can get the diagonal of the ‘z’ by reflecting the ‘x’ horizontally. Normally you should never ever reflect a letter in a single axis as it reverses the stroke stress, but we can get away with it with the ‘z’ since its diagonal is already a stress violation anyway. The diagonal is the same length and width as the one in the ‘x’—but the ‘z’ is slightly narrower because it lacks the serifs that come off the diagonals.

Glyph design: the trick to drawing the letter s

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The letter ‘s’ is considered one of the hardest letters in the alphabet to design. It is utterly unrelated to any other letter we have designed so far. Most people can’t handwrite this letter and produce a passable print rendition.

If you are learning the latin script and are struggling with handwriting this letter, do not despair—most of us don’t have a firm grasp on its construction either. Most neat writers (mostly teenage girls) handprint the letter something like a number ‘2’ reflected vertically and rounded slightly. Some people overexaggerate the hooks of the ‘s’ to the point where it approaches a figure ‘8’, others render the letter like a mirrored ‘z’.

Some common handwritten forms of the letter ‘s’.

 Even worse is when people try and make bubble letter ‘s’s. Except by experienced bubble letterers, one of two results is almost invariably produced.

I won’t dwell on better techniques for bubbling the letter ‘s’. My point is, that most people utterly fail in drawing this letter because they try to freehand it. You can’t blame them—the ‘s’ contains no straight lines and it has no visible geometric basis. But we type designers must be better than that. Here, I’ll show you an easy, relatively painless method for drawing this letter that relies on its hidden geometric structure.

Glyph design: how to draw the looptail g

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The lowercase looptail ‘g’ is perhaps the most poorly understood letter of the alphabet. Its serif form has an extremely intricate architecture that virtually nobody knows how to write these days.

Just like with the ‘a’, there are two accepted ways to write the letter ‘g’. On the left below is the “proper” form, called the looptail or double story ‘g’. The script form (right) is much less common, and is generally only found in sans serif and decorative typefaces (and even then only occasionally). But since it is much easier to draw than the looptail ‘g’, most people handwrite the script ‘ɡ’. In proper serif type, this ‘ɡ’ is exceedingly rare. In fact, the only place this construction is found is as a phonetic glyph, and very few fonts include IPA support.

Linux Libertine is one of the few fonts (commercial or free) that contain the phonetic ‘ɡ’ along with the alphabetic ‘g’

Glyph design: the lowercase k

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The letter ‘k’ is made up of a single ascending stem, and a diagonal arm and leg protruding to the right.

Components of a lowercase letter ‘k’

The left side of this letter is essentially identical to the lowercase ‘l’. Considerable variation exists in the right half of the letter, especially where the arm and leg meet, called the join of the letter. Sometimes, particularly in older style typefaces, the join is an extension of the arm and the leg offshoots from it, other times, the arm and leg are disconnected from the stem and the two parts meet at an invisible point.

Glyph design: the lowercase x

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The lowercase ‘x’ is one of those letters that isn’t hard to make, just tedious. The ‘x’, while seemingly simple, requires numerous (but well documented) optical corrections. You also have to consider the negative space in the letter, something you usually only have to think about with round letters like ‘p’ or ‘e’.

The superficial structure of the letter isn’t complicated. It has a single thick diagonal, crossed optically by two arms, collectively called the letter’s hairline, since it is supposed to represent the hairline thickness of the font.

The ‘x’ isn’t a very common letter. The most abundant English letter, ‘e’, is eighty-five times as common. In a typical page of English text, ‘x’ only occurs once every seven hundred letters, on average. Only ‘q’ and ‘z’ are rarer. But the letter is of great interest to typographers, since it stores a a lot of a typeface’s measurements. The height of the letter determines the optical size of the lowercase letters and sets the mean line of the typeface. This is why font size is sometimes expressed in terms of “x-height”, especially when point size is unreliable. The letter’s four corners (including serifs) roughly form a square in a normal style typeface—if it’s wider than it is tall, the font is extended, if it’s significantly narrower, the font is considered condensed. The width of its arms sets a typeface’s hairline thickness, and its hairline compared to the thickness of its diagonal can be used to measure the stroke contrast.

Components of a lowercase ‘x’

The diagonal of the letter can be made from the diagonals of two ‘v’s. It is important that the serifs of the ‘v’s align exactly to the baseline and the meanline of typeface, or else you will create an ‘x’ that is too tall or too short, which will be very hard to correct later on. The diagonal should be sheared over so that it spans slightly less than the width of the ‘v’.

Glyph design: the lowercase j

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The letter ‘j’ can be built straight from the ‘i’—in fact, long ago the two letters were one. The only difference is that the ‘j’ has a slightly curved tail descending below the baseline.

Components of a lowercase ‘j’

The top half of the letter is exactly identical to the ‘i’. The bottom half can be made from the hook of an ‘f’, though in most serif type, the two arcs of stem appear very different (in sans serif type, it is common for the ‘j’ to simply be a rotated ‘f’ with a tittle and no crossbar).

Glyph design: the lowercase w and y

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Just like how you can easily derive ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’ from the ‘b’, and ‘h’, ‘m’, and ‘u’ from the ‘n’, ‘w’ and ‘y’ can be quickly made from the lowercase ‘v’ glyph. Both letters contain the ‘v’ in them, only slightly modified.

Components of a lowercase ‘w’. The ‘w’ is essentially a ligature of two ‘v’s.

The letter ‘w’ can really be thought of as a ligature of two ‘v’s. In fact, in many languages, the name of the letter is “double-v” (English calls the letter “double-u” since when it was invented, ‘u’ and ‘v’ were still the same letter). Because of that, many typefaces render the letter as two slightly overlapping ‘v’s. Like the ‘m’ which is typographically composed of two ‘n’s, the ‘w’ is very slightly compressed (though not to any noticeable extent).

Garamond (left), Sabon (center), and Hoefler (right) all have ‘w’s composed from two ‘v’s.

A few typefaces omit the serif between the ‘v’s, like Minion and Bodoni. Warnock appears to be intermediate. This form generally has much more compression than the ‘vv’ form, usually applied to the outer strokes of the letter.

Glyph design: the lowercase c

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The letter ‘c’ is deceptively simple. It is a single open curve, and much of the design work on this letter is purely visual so there are few pointers I can give you.

The bottom half of the ‘c’ is almost identical to that of the letter ‘e’. But instead of closing off into a loop, the top of the curve finishes off in a terminal, usually with blobbing. The top left of the letter is often flattened slightly.

Glyph design: the lowercase t

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The letter ‘t’ seems visually tricky to design, though it is actually one of the easier letters to make. In many sans serif and a few didone typefaces, the entire letter can be derived from the ‘f’ with minimal modification. This is generally not true in transitional and “older” type, though the cross stroke can still be inherited from the ‘f’, and the letter’s finial is easy enough to draw, making the ‘t’ a rather low hanging fruit in terms of type design.

Components of a lowercase ‘t’

The ‘t’ is not a complex letter. It consists of a single vertical stem that terminates in a curved finial extending about as far as its cross stroke does. The finial is almost always somewhat right-skewed (meaning it’s sharpest part lies to the left of the middle of the letter) and except in decorative typefaces, it never has a blob or serif. The shape is often reminiscient of the shoulder of the ‘n’ or ‘u’. The stem of the ‘t’ is crossed by a cross stroke—it is almost always identical to the one found on the ‘f’, though rarely, it lies a fraction of a hairline higher than the cross stroke on the ‘f ’ does. The most interesting part of the ‘t’ is the relation between the cutoff of the stem and the left side of the cross stroke.

Glyph design: the lowercase r

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At the most basic level, ‘r’ can be grouped with ‘h’, ‘m’, and ‘u’ as letters that share characteristics with the letter ‘n’. Indeed, in many sans serif typefaces, the ‘r’ is almost made by literally slicing off the right side of an ‘n’. However, particularly in serif type, the ‘r’ is distinct enough from its siblings that it warrants separate treatment.

Components of a lowercase ‘r’.

The stem of the letter is taken straight from the left side of the ‘n’, with little modification. However, the terminal of the ‘r’ (sometimes called an ear, though the term is usually reserved for the thing on the serif ‘g’) is much heavier, and the shoulder much steeper than the corresponding parts of the letter ‘n’. On top of that, finding an attractive shape for the ball terminal on the letter can be a challenge in itself, given the lack of space from the narrow shape of the letter.

Glyph design: lowercase letters with legs (h m u)

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The letters ‘h’, ‘m’, and ‘u’ mean something slightly different to type designers than they do to most people. These letters can be grouped together because they can all be very easily derived from the lowercase ‘n’. You could also include ‘r’, but the ‘r’ is slightly trickier to make, so that will be in another post.

Components of a lowercase ‘h’ and ‘m’.

Components of a lowercase ‘u’

As with the ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’, passable versions of ‘h’ and ‘m’ can be made just by copying and extending parts from the letter ‘n’. The ‘h’ is largely an ‘n’ with a raised ascender, and the ‘m’ can be built by fusing two ‘n’s together.

And just like with the ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’, there are small changes that will make these letters better. The shoulder of the ‘h’ is often rounder and less steep than that of the ‘n’ (though I made the ‘n’s shoulder rounder too). The ‘h’ is also very slightly wider than the ‘n’. The ‘m’ really is in many ways just an ‘n’ with an extra arc and stem, though the letter is usually slightly compressed so that it isn't literally a ligature of two ‘n’s. Key word—slightly—many designers overdo it on the compression and make ‘m’s that are too dense. The ‘m’ compression is very subtle—often just a small fraction (one fifth?) of the stem width. Remember that serifs on the inside of a letter are slightly shorter than on the outside.

Glyph design: lowercase letters with bowls (d p q)

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The letters ‘d’, ‘p’, and ‘q’ all possess bowls that are incredibly similar to that of the ‘b’. Although the bowls are not exactly identical, they can all be very easily derived from the ‘b’.

All four letters can be related to each other. The letter ‘p’ is traditionally thought of as a letter ‘b’ with its ascender depressed, and given a descender. The ‘d’ in turn is made by rotating the ‘p’ 180 degrees, and replacing its bilateral serif with an angled head serif. The ‘q’ is then made by removing the ascender from the ‘d’ and adding a descender, much like making the ‘p’ from the ‘b’. The descenders are almost always the same length as the ascenders. It's also possible to derive all the letters from one of the four letters—the ‘b’-centric method is shown below.

The lowercase ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’, related to the ‘b’

A passable ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’ can be made by just reflecting the ‘b’ and sliding the stem up and down. In fact, quite a few commercial designers just leave these letters like that.

A quality typeface will, however, have a few tweaks for each letter. The bowl–stem joins of the ‘p’ and ‘d’ are usually steeper, and their bowls are more diagonally elongated. Out of the four letters, ‘q’ and ‘b’ resemble each other the most, with ‘q’ in most ways being a ‘b’ rotated 180 degrees. Most old style ‘q’s ,however, have a small spur on their upper right corner. Also keep in mind that when you have a bilateral serif (like in ‘p’ and ‘q’), the half on the side the letter would “fall over” on should be slightly longer than the other half of the serif.

If you are following along with your own typeface, at this point you should have twelve letters in your font. Congratulations—you are almost halfway through the lowercase alphabet!

Glyph design: the lowercase e

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The ‘e’ is probably the last character you should design before stepping back and taking a good look at how your glyphs look together. Oh you could go and make the ‘x’ too, but I like to draw the line at ‘e’.

The ‘e’ is one of the hardest letters to draw and design—probably third only to ‘s’ and ‘g’. While commonly thought of as an ‘o’ with a crossbar and a gap cut out of its lower right, the ‘e’ is really more of a spiral that ends abruptly with a crossbar.

      While the letter shares little else in common, like the ‘b’, the ‘e’ is elongated diagonally and can be thought of as having two axes—an axis that the counter (or what would be the counter if the letter was closed and had no crossbar) is aligned to (pink), and another “outer axis” (gold) that the outer contour is aligned with.

Left to right: Minion Pro, Garamond, Sorts Mill Goudy

Glyph design: the lowercase f

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     Oh, my favorite letter—'f' ! The 'f' is a rather straightforward letter to design; the main difficulties lie in the proportions. It is very easy to make an 'f' that looks unstable, and designers are also prone to making 'f's that are stubby or inelegant.

     Except for the tricky arc of stem (called a hook, in the 'f'), 'f' is basically an 'i' or 'l' with a cross stroke. The cross stroke is an important part of the 'f' since it's one of the most distinctive parts of the letter, and also because it will be reused in 't' and many special characters.

Components of a lowercase 'f'

     The hook of the 'f' cannot be derived from any letters we have drawn so far. You can't use the arc of stem of the 'a', since that arc goes in the opposite direction (and you should only reflect a glyph over one axis with great caution). The shoulder of the 'n' is also unsuitably round and wide. So we have to start from a blank constructed from an 'i' and a 'b', and design the letter from that.