Design notes: The capital R and K

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The last two letters to design are the ‘K’ and the ‘R’. The ‘K’ should be made first, since the tail of the ‘R’ inherits from it.

K

• The capital ‘K’, like its lowercase version, is built from a stem (‘I’) and the letter ‘X’. The lowercase ‘k’ itself can also be helpful for modeling the tail. ‘K’ is about the same width as the ‘X’, sometimes slightly thinner.
• Inner serifs, of course, are shortened, and the serif on the upper arm expanded, just like with the lowercase ‘k’.
• Often times the arm is extended back past the vertex, so that it connects to the stem (covered in the lowercase ‘k’ tutorial). Here, I made a disjointed ‘K’, where the arm and leg meet at a point.
• If you make a disjointed ‘K’, an optical correction may be in order to prevent the vertex from looking bent down. This involves adding a slight upturn to the vertex. Shown below is an uncorrected ‘K’ (left) and a corrected ‘K’ (right).

Design notes: miscellaneous capital letters ( U B S )

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At this point, I’ve covered almost all of the “hard” letter forms, and by now, you should be familiar with many of the subtle and mundane rules of type design. So it makes more sense now to just release a few design notes on each of the remaining letters pointing out some oft-overlooked features of their letterforms.

U

• This letter is about the same width as the ‘N’ and the ‘V’.
• Like the ‘M’ and ‘N’, the ‘U’ defies the typical calligraphic stress rules. While some typefaces such as Cambria follow the rules strictly, making ‘U’s with two thick stems, it is overwhelming convention to make the upstroke a hairline, just like in the ‘N’. In fact, the stems are often exactly identical.
• While this varies somewhat, usually the bowl of the ‘U’ is a hairline as well, with stress only appearing left of the letter’s minimum. In other words, as you trace the letter from left to right, the stress disappears at the minimum, just as you’d expect calligraphically, but when the curve comes back up to finish out the letter, the stress never reappears.
• The left stroke is usually identical to the top half of the ‘I’ glyph.
• Curve onset usually occurs about a two-thirds the way down the letter. The bowl usually occupies a rectangle with sides in a 2 : 1 ratio.

Glyph design: zigzag capitals ( M N )

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There are two letters in the capital alphabet composed of diagonal strokes contained between vertical stems—‘M’, and ‘N’. Because of the letters’ architecture, they violate the typical rules of stress. Strictly, the ‘M’ should go thick–thick–thin–thick (from left to right), and the ‘N’ should consist entirely of stressed strokes. But just like with the ‘z’ (which, strictly, would be entirely hairline), some strokes in the ‘M’ and ‘N’ are arbitrarily made thin so that the stress alternates with each stroke. Owing to the pointed-nib calligraphy pen, which stresses in part based on the direction the stroke is drawn in—up being thin and down being thick—the usual convention is to make the ascending leg of the ‘M’ and both stems of the ‘N’ into hairlines.

Sabon and Minion Pro have slanted stems, while Proforma has vertical stems on its ‘M’.

 The ‘M’ can be made either from the ‘W’, or from the ‘I’ and ‘V’. It depends on the slant of the outer stems. Some typefaces, like Sabon and Minion Pro (and a few sans serifs, like Futura) have slanted stems, others like Proforma have vertical stems. Floribunda will have an unslanted ‘M’, so this tutorial will use the ‘I’ and ‘V’ method. The two ‘I’ glyphs should overlap with the ‘V’ just enough so that their intersection points lie at roughly the same height as the lower edge of the ‘I’ brackets. The left ‘I’ should also be thinned to the hairline thickness.

Glyph design: letters with bowls, part one ( D P )

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The ‘D’ and ‘P’ are perhaps the most difficult letters of the uppercase alphabet to nail. They require you to blend straight letter forms, like the arms of the ‘E’,  into a round bowl, like the one on the ‘C’.

The ‘D’ can be made by taking the left side of the ‘E’, and attaching it to the bowl of a ‘C’, rotated 180 degrees (never reflected horizontally!).

Glyph design: V-derived letters ( X W Y A )

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Just as three letters can be made from the ‘O’, two from the ‘I’, and four from the ‘H’ and ‘Z’, three letters—‘W’, ‘Y’, and ‘A’—can be made from the ‘V’. The capital ‘X’ will also be included since it has many things in common with the ‘V’.

The ‘X’ is constructed just like the ‘V’—take a lowercase ‘x’ and extend its arms and diagonals to the capital line and the baseline. The strokes should intersect at the height of the ‘H’s median. The letterform is very slightly narrower than a proportionally scaled lowercase ‘x’ though. When we embolden the ‘X’, the extra weight on the diagonal goes on the inside, reducing its slope slightly. On the arms, it goes on the outside, increasing the skew between the two arms slightly (else the arms look misaligned).

The ‘W’ is constructed just like its lowercase counterpart—Start with two ‘V’s, overlap them, reduce (or even remove) the middle serif, and compress the letterform slightly.

Glyph design: box capital letters ( E L F T )

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The box group of capital letters—‘E’, ‘L’, ‘F’, and ‘T’—all have a vertical stem derived from the capital ‘I’ and horizontal arms derived from the ‘Z’. Some—‘E’ and ‘F’—are also divided by a median aligned with the crossbar on the ‘H’. Three of the letters—‘L’, ‘F’, and ‘T’ are degenerate versions of the fourth—the ‘E’. So designing the ‘E’ means we get the other three relatively easily. However ‘E’ is very complex to design, so it helps to draw the ‘L’ first and make the ‘E’ from that.

The ‘L’ takes its stem from the ‘I’, and its arm from the ‘Z’. Experiment with different letter widths to find the best proportions. The joint between the two strokes also benefits from some bracketing on the inside.

Glyph design: I-derived letters ( H J )

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The ‘I’ gives direct rise to two letters—the ‘H’ and the ‘J’. Both these letters are incredibly straightforward to design.

The ‘H’ is just two capital ‘I’s connected by a crossbar the width of one of the arms on the ‘Z’. The letter, not including serifs, should be about as wide as the ‘Z’ as well, and the crossbar should be located slightly above the letter’s median. As usual, the interior serifs on the letter’s two stems should be shortened slightly.

Glyph design: O-derived letters ( C G Q )

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From the ‘O’ comes the ‘C’, ‘G’, and ‘Q’. The capital ‘C’ and ‘O’ differ from their lowercase counterparts in that their bowls are virtually identical, while the ‘c’ and ‘o’ have marked differences in curvature and stress. The ‘C’ is produced by taking half an ‘O’ and extending the ends to meet up with beak serifs from the ‘Z’. The bowl is extended to meet those serifs, which depresses the upper and lower left corners of the letter slightly (marked with pink arrows).

It is very common to leave the ‘C’ like that, with two serifs on both ends of its bowl. A minority of typefaces (such as Le Monde Journal) however remove the bottom serif, tapering out the bowl into a finial.

Glyph design: drawing the first capital letters ( I O V Z )

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So we’re finally up to the capital letters! Luckily, capital letters are much easier to design than their lowercase counterparts. You can get functioning glyphs for a third of the uppercase alphabet with just a day’s work. This is because uppercase letters are much more square and geometric than their lowercase counterparts. There are fewer curves to worry about and the curves that do exist are much easier to handle. Many uppercase letters also look very similar and recycle parts (at least optically), so a few parent letters can give rise to very large swaths of the alphabet.

The most fundamental unit of the capital letters is the vertical stem. That means that the first letter you should design should be the ‘I’.

It makes sense to design capital letters where they would most commonly be used—at the beginning of a word, so that’s typically my approach to designing capitals.

The ‘I’ can be constructed by taking a lowercase ‘i’ and duplicating its bilateral serif. The ‘I’, unlike the ‘i’, is perfectly symmetrical, so make sure the right side of the serif isn’t still shorter than the left side.