Sometimes I’ll discover that a particular letter isn’t working as well as it could be, and in those cases I prefer to re-draw the letter within the font editor.” Walk us through your testing process a bit. Broad adjustments are made once I can see how the letters are working alongside one another on-screen.

“Once all of the characters have been drawn, they are scanned and vectorized directly (if I want the edges of the letters to have a rough texture) or outlined by hand in FontLab or Glyphs (if I’d like for the edges of each letter to consist of smooth Bezier curves). From there, the artist provides analog sketches of each character. Then the artist lets loose with a series of pangrams, testing that hand across a variety of words and sentence lengths, so that we can map out the construction of the font as well as the types of OpenType features it should contain. “When I’m collaborating with another artist at Rare Bird Font Foundry, we work together as a team to determine the “hand”-the look and feel-of the final font. Generally, I try to focus on the design of individual characters while I’m concepting and sketching-marking out those letters that don’t seem consistent, and starring the letters that I feel best represent what I’m trying to convey in the final font.

“When I’m starting with my own lettering at Magpie Paper Works, I sketch and then draw each character by hand on onion skin paper.

I’m usually working on a mix of two to three retail projects and custom typefaces at the same time.” How do you know when a font is ready to transition from concept to formal design? If you do start on paper, how do you make the transition from paper to screen? Calligraphy scripts average 6 months to a year, depending on their complexity. “Hand-lettered serif or sans-serif fonts generally require four months from concept to release. Roughly how long does it take to bring a font from concept to release?

Handwriting into font fontlab studio