Introduction to italics, part one

At this point, we’ve completed the entire ASCII block (save for the at sign (@) ).

Now, we could go on to do one of four things. We could add more glyphs to the font—fill out the Latin Supplement block with accented letters like ‘ å ’ and a few moderately common symbols like ‘ ¢ ’ and ‘ ° ’. We could go back and actually kern the letters we’ve already made to make the spacing look nicer. We could also derive the bold weight, or we could create the italic version of the font.

I recommend doing italics first. That is because between these four projects, creating italics will add the most value to your font. A functional font family includes a regular, or roman style, and an italic style. In many cases, italics are mandatory, for setting names of works of art, for example. They are also the best way to emphasize words in text. What about deriving the bold weight, you may ask? Well, bold is much, much less commonly used than italics. A font family does not need a bold weight to be functional, though it can be a selling point. Bold is usually used in contexts where it would also be appropriate to use a completely different typeface (headings, for example). The bold weight is also much more straightforward though tedious to design. It is also much easier to embolden both a roman and an italic typeface to create the bold and the bold italic than to italicize both a regular and a bold font to make the italic and bold italic. That is why I like designing italics before bold.

What are italics?

Italics are much more different from the regular style than the bold style is. In serif type, it is possible to machine-produce a passable, though ugly, bold font given a regular font, since emboldening is a relatively straightforward and mechanical operation. Indeed, dozens of weights can be automatically interpolated (with quite good results) from just three base fonts (extra-light, regular, and black). However it is impossible for a computer to automatically produce the italic style of a serif font (something the opposite is true in sans serif type, where the “italic” is very close to a machine slanted version of the original, and the different weights are given much more consideration). That is because the serif italic letterforms themselves are drastically different from the roman letterforms. Italic letterforms are much closer to calligraphy than roman letterforms are. In fact, the italic hand is one of the most natural styles of calligraphy. This is evident in the strokes of the italic letterforms, which are more cursive than those of roman letterforms.

(Somewhat messy) italic calligraphy of some lyrics from How You Get The Girl, in Taylor Swift’s 1989. While handwritten, this calligraphy is essentially the same as italic type. Compare this with the Proforma Italic sample below.

For comparison, here is a sample of the italics from the Proforma font (grouped by letter shape):

The letterforms are much more free-flowing and give a completely different texture than the roman style does. Here are some important differences.

The calligraphic roots of serif type

If you’re new to serif type design, you might be wondering what’s going on with all that thick–thin stroke stuff. For example, why are the sides of an ‘o’ thicker than the top and bottom? The reason serif type has all that stroke contrast is because serif type evolved from broad-nibbed calligraphy, which produces such contrasting lines.

A long time ago, before ballpoint pens, people wrote with what were essentially sticks dipped in ink. But these writing instruments couldn’t be too pointy—or else they would break. So the nibs (writing points) were made wider to give them more strength. This became what is now known as the broad-nibbed calligraphy pen. Though they’ve since been eclipsed by the ballpoint pen, they are still somewhat common and there are many places you can buy them.