Type Design Resources
Last updated September 26, 2024.
A quick note: Each section of resources is listed in ascending order, from most to least useful. Since we have different needs and personal taste is a factor, I encourage you to find what is best for you.
Don’t have time to look through a long list? Here are four essential tools I use the most: Hyperglot Language Checker, Impallari’s Font Testing Page, Wakamai Fondue, and Dinamo Font Gauntlet.
Table of Contents
Tools
Getting Started
Alphabet’s Character Set Builder | Build and export a custom character set based on writing systems, unicode blocks, and standardized character sets.
Type Cooker | A tool that generates parameters for you. Great when you’re unsure what to make or want a challenge.
Type Cooker Indic | Same concept as above, but made for Devanagari and other Indic scripts.
GlyphCollector | A desktop application for typeface revival projects that assists with the collection and research of scanned documents.
Vertical Metrics Tool | Upload an image and find vertical metrics measurements. Great for early font development stages such as sketching.
Language Support and Diacritics
Hyperglot Language Checker | A direct link to the font upload page on Hyperglot that gives you an information report about your font; very handy for language support.
Words in [language] that contain [letter] | Enter a letter and a language to generate a list of words that contain it.
Google Fonts’ Glyph Sets | A GitHub repository of the Google Fonts standardized glyph set source files.
Unicode Character Search | Allows you to find Unicode glyphs that might be difficult to locate (example: type H to find all accented Hs).
Decode Unicode | A non-profit project that lists information of all encoded Unicode characters. You can check which language a character appears in, which script it belongs to, and view its design.
Spacing, Kerning, and Typesetting
Impallari’s Font Testing Page | Upload a font and test your kerning against dozens of useful word and letter lists simultaneously in Latin, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Hebrew, Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu scripts. Also features a plethora of useful tools. [Here are backup links for the site above because it’s just that good: Cyreal and LocalFonts.]
Mota Italic’s Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Devanagari Tester | Upload a font to view it set in various words and paragraphs. Also great for spacing, kerning, hinting, and diacritic collision testing.
Word Lists for Testing Typefaces | Extensively curated lists of testing words to use during various stages of the design process.
JAF Text Generator | Generate text in multiple languages and scripts with the ability to modify letter frequency
MassDriver Waterfall Maker | Find words with the same visual length in your font. Great for designing sexy specimens. [See tool below too!]
Stack and Justify | Find words or phrases of the same width with options for specific languages. Inspired by the MassDriver Waterfall Maker.
Universal Specimen by Rosetta Stone | Preview and compare the appearance of up to 361 languages before you start typesetting them.
OpenType Features
Wakamai Fondue | Upload a font and answer the question, “what can my font do?”
MassDriver’s Font Overview | Summarizes font metrics and metadata, such as copyright, file size, and OpenType features.
FontGoggles | A free open source font viewer available as a desktop application for macOS.
FontDrop! | A similar font overview tool with some additional typesetting options.
FontDrop! Compare | Upload two fonts and view differences between the glyph sets.
OpenType Feature Freezer | Allows you to “freeze” some OpenType features into a font so they are on by default. Useful for apps with limited support for OpenType features.
Variable Fonts
Dinamo Font Gauntlet | A tool for proofing, generating, and animating fonts. This is a favourite among type designers.
VF Slant Test | A test page to help determine whether browsers meet the CSS Spec for font-style.
Preparing to Publish
Font Name Checker | A name check tool that uses information from various sources to validate if a given typeface name is (maybe) already taken.
FontBakery | A tool for checking the technical quality of font files (and Adobe Fonts’ tool of choice before accepting submissions).
Alphabet’s Character Set Checker | Tests an uploaded font against a set of predefined parameters.
Underware Latin Plus Validator | Upload your font and see which Latin languages are supported based on the Underware standards. [Note that their glyphset contains depreciated characters and the fake fallback language Onĕipŏt.]
ttfautohint | A tool if you choose to hint your font outside the type design software. It supports Latin, Greek, Arabic, Devanagari, Hebrew, Khmer, Myanmar, Thai, and more.
Other
DJR Colour Font Customizer | Upload a font, change the colors, and download a new version with a customized default colour palette.
CopyChar | A simple tool that allows you to find and copy special characters to your clipboard.
Education & Learning
Global Language Support
Hyperglot | An open source web app that systematizes the basic characters needed to write over 775 languages.
List of Pangrams | A list of pangrams in Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Devanagari, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Tibetan, Burmese, Malayalam, Cherokee, and Javanese languages.
Global newspapers and news sites | Links to news sites for finding text in various scripts or languages. Very handy for typesetting and testing localized letterforms.
TypeTogether’s Primarium | Documentation of educational handwriting models taught to primary school students around the world.
Omniglot | An encyclopedia of writing systems and languages.
Diacritics Project | Lots of information on diacritics and their usage. The accented kerning section is especially helpful.
Alphabettes’ List of resources on designing diacritics | A list similar to this one, featuring some of the same resources too.
Manual: Quotation Marks | A fantastic article on the use and design of quotation marks, with an equal emphasis on Latin and Cyrillic examples.
Latin Script Support
Notes on type design by Gunnlaugur SE Briem | An important reference for students of type design on type design in the Latin script.
Designing Italics | A thesis containing the results of a five-year study into the design process of Latin secondary italic text typefaces, resulting in a brilliant PDF.
GT Academy | A series of wonderful Instagram posts breaking down type design details into understandable bites. [Seems to be currently unavailable.]
Polish Diacritics: how to? | Everything you need to know about designing Polish letters. This website has been up longer than I’ve been alive—it’s certified.
The Making of Thorn and Eth | A few tips on drawing the special characters found in Icelandic.
Thorn and Eth by Briem | Gunnlaugur SE Briem breaks down Icelandic letterform construction.
Vietnamese Typography | An online book with fantastic information on how to better design and support the Vietnamese language.
Romanian Diacritic Marks | A breakdown of the infamous Romanian letters and their messy history.
Well constructed ł examples | Well-made Polish glyphs showing a sample of reasonably common combinations.
Designing Æ and æ | A breakdown for type designers faced with the challenge of designing the letter Æ.
Christian Thalmann’s Capital Eszett Guide | An entirely subjective (but no less accurate) guide on how to draw a proper German capital eszett.
The design of the lowercase ß | Thoughts on the different design models for the German lowercase eszett.
The design of the capital Eszett | Thoughts on the different design models for the German capital eszett.
Good, bad, and ugly capital Eszett designs | An overview of capital eszett designs and some tips on designing the letter.
The Alphabets of Europe | A source of linguistic data for European languages.
The Insects Project | A report on the problems of diacritic design for central European languages, specifically Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak.
Fancy Diacritics | A collection of unusual umlauts, odd ogoneks, catchy carons, and other dodgy diacritics.
Typesetting the Dutch IJ | A simple overview of the unique Dutch ij digraph.
English Letter Frequency Counts | A comprehensive study into letter and word frequencies using Google’s data and the processing power.
Letter Frequencies in English | Analysis of 9,481 English works from Project Gutenberg showing the frequencies of letters.
Microsoft’s Character Design Standards | General rules and guidelines for character shapes in Latin based languages in digital fonts.
Cyrillic Script Support
Evaluate the quality of Cyrillic | A guiding article on determining the quality of Cyrillic letterforms in a typeface. Here’s an older version with slightly different visuals.
Cyrillic on Google Fonts: Old-Style Serifs, Geometric Sans, Humanist Sans, Neo-Grotesques, Transitional Serifs, Didones, Script | A fantastic series of articles where professionals review Cyrillic typefaces from Google Fonts, offering advice and suggestions.
type.today Serbian, Bulgarian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Tatar | A series focusing on languages that aren’t discussed as much as they should be. Additional languages can be found on their Instagram feed, but provide less written context.
Cyrillic Kerning Pairs List | A massive collection of Cyrillic class kerning pair examples and word strings.
Cyrillic Class Kerning | A smaller collection of Cyrillic class kerning pair examples.
Cyrillicsly basic letter construction | Samples showing the skeletal basis of Cyrillic upright, italic, and script uppercase and lowercase characters.
Cyrillic script variations | Krista Radoeva shares her knowledge on the importance, and visual differences, of Cyrillic localization.
localfonts’ Cyrillic Variations and Localization | An overview of the differences between Russian, Serbian, and Bulgarian.
localfonts’ Bulgarian, Serbian, Bashkir, Chuvash | A brief breakdown of localized letterform design in specific Cyrillic languages.
Serbian localized forms | A summary of localized Serbian letterform variation.
Bulgarian Cyrillic localization | Reference on how to localize fonts for Bulgarian.
Cyrillic Languages Sample Text | A collection of Russian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Belarusian sample paragraphs.
How to design Њ (Nje), Љ (Lje), Ћ (Tshe), and Ђ (Dje) | A guide on designing the upright caps and lowercase; italics are not covered here.
A Quick Guide on Cyrillic | A short booklet on Cyrillic letters with shape groups.
Greek Script Support
Greek Type Anatomy | A well-written article from TypeTogether about type anatomy relevant to Greek scripts.
Greek Type Design | A hub for numerous resources on Greek type design.
Designing Greek typefaces | A guide for type designers wanting to extend their skills to support Greek with some awareness of the script’s origins.
Devanagari Script Support
Devanagari Type Anatomy | A well-written article from TypeTogether about type anatomy relevant to Devangari scripts.
Devanagari Type Resources | A growing collection of valuable resources regarding type design for Indian scripts, particularly Devanagari.
Devanagari Type Anatomy | A well-written article from TypeTogether about type anatomy relevant to Devanagari scripts.
Arabic Script Support
Arabic Type Anatomy | A well-written article from TypeTogether about type anatomy relevant to Arabic scripts.
Arabic Type Anatomy & Typographic Terms | An article allocating typographic terms to Arabic type by comparing the anatomy to that of Latin type.
The Arabic Designers Handbook | A book focused on the incorporation of Arabic in graphic design, however the first fifty pages are relevant to type design.
Hebrew Script Support
Hebrew Type Anatomy | A well-written article from TypeTogether about type anatomy relevant to Hebrew scripts.
Guidelines for Hebrew Type | A dissertation containing guidelines and recommendations for the design of a Hebrew book typeface.
CJK Script Support
The Chinese Type Archive | An on-going, collaborative, open-access database of Chinese typographic resources.
Spacing, Kerning, and Typesetting
Hoefler’s Text for Proofing Fonts | A list of meticulously designed words to improve your spacing and kerning. This is worth its weight in gold.
Proof It! | James Edmonson’s logical approach to proofing your fonts.
Short Phrases for Type Specimens and Testing | A list of word strings using letters that contain most of a typeface’s DNA.
Project Gutenberg | A library of over 70,000 free books with a focus on older works that have entered public domain. Great for testing paragraphs with real text.
Standard eBooks | Project dedicated to producing new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted.
Words Containing [letters] | Type your desired letters combination and discover words containing that exact string in English.
Wordlist Maker | Enter letters you want to generate real words with and get results based on your custom settings.
Kern King | A restoration of the classic Kern King strings for spacing and kerning.
Basic Kerning Text | A list of… you guessed it, some basic text for testing kerning.
Lorem Ipsum copy | Simple dummy text available in paragraphs and bullet lists.
OpenType
The OpenType Cookbook | Everything you need to know about OpenType features and coding.
Microsoft OpenType specs | A wealth of knowledge about making fonts with OpenType features.
Software
Glyphs App Learning | A fantastic collection of in-depth tutorials and breakdowns about type design within the Glyphs app.
Glyphs Scripts Index | An index of scripts for the Glyphs app. Easy to find what you need.
Glyphs Handbook | An online book (and downloadable PDF) that describes the Glyphs app in great detail.
Ohno’s Essential RoboFont Course | A free two hour course teaching the basics of RoboFont, created by OH no Type Co.
Font Hinting | An article about hinting, screen optimization, and the behaviour of fonts under different rasterizers.
Vertical Metrics | A comprehensive guide on the absolute headache caused by vertical metrics, and how to best approach it. (Most relevant to Glyphs users.)
Latin Type Terms and Anatomy
The A-Z of typographic terms | A guide to type designer language and lingo used to discuss, critique, and refine designs.
A Visual Guide to the Anatomy of Typography | A walkthrough of typographic anatomy with a focus on defining human-counterparts.
Type Terms | An animated cheat sheet full of typographic terminology and short explanations.
Glossary of Type Terms | A basic guide to the anatomy of letterforms, identifying essential anatomy elements.
Other
Luc Devroye / On snot and fonts | The most chaotic encyclopedic site of all things related to type; also one of the most diverse and useful. Enter… if you dare.
Butterick’s Practical Typography | An incredible resource teaching everything from how to treat punctuation, to mixing fonts, to typeface alternatives. (More for graphic designers.)
Ohno Radio | A podcast featuring casual conversations with global type designers about their work and experience in the industry.
Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century film | Documentation of the unique type design process using both digital and analog tools.
Variable Fonts by Type Network | A long brochure all about variable fonts.
Help Using Variable Fonts | Dalton Maag’s information page regarding variable font support in modern applications and web environments.
Axis-Praxis | A website that demonstrates the capabilities of variable fonts in web browsers.
V-Fonts | A simple resource for finding and trying variable fonts.
Type Archives & Specimens
Online Resources
Letterform Archive | An incredible online type archive with new digitizations regularly added. Seriously, bookmark this page now.
Typographica Open Library | A directory of type foundry catalogs available online.
The Internet Archive | A digital library with a mission to provide universal access to all knowledge. You can find nearly anything here.
Munich DigitiZation Center | A collection of millions of digitized manuscripts, prints, music, maps, photographs, newspapers, and magazines. [Site is partially in German]
The Digitized Collections of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin | Over 200,000 digitized copies of books, manuscripts and other media from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. [Site offered in German and English]
British Library’s Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) | An international database of 15th-century European printing.
archives.design | A curated collection of some notable type specimens available on the Internet Archive.
Type, Typewriter, and Typography Catalogs | A collection from the Internet Archive of 19–20th century documents related to type, such as an ATF catalogue and Monotype price lists.
A survey of type specimens | A list of type specimens that have been digitized and available online, as well as some that have yet to be.
Canadian Typography Archives | A digital archive dedicated to documenting and preserving Canadian typographic history. [This project is just getting started.]
Project Gutenberg | A library of over 70,000 free books with focus on older works that have entered public domain. Great for testing paragraphs with real text.
e-codices | An online archive containing over 3,000 materials of mediaeval European manuscripts, the earliest of them dating back to the 4th century. (Was originally focused on Swiss submissions.)
National Archives of Georgia | Anything related to the history of the Georgian script, including prayer books, maps, manuscripts, and film strips.
Archivio Tipografico | A collection of classic typographic books and manuals from a letterpress print shop based in Torino, Italy.
Found Type
Type Hunting Vintage Type Archive | An on-going archive of found typography.
India Street Lettering | Documented street lettering and signage from India, from Matra Type.
Articles
Tickle Your Brain Cells
AIGA’s Eye on Design Typography Section | Thoughtful reflection on every aspect of type design through original articles. (Sadly, they have been on hiatus since 2022.)
Toshi Omagari’s Ink traps and pals | The holy grail of knowledge related to ink traps.
Typotheque | Type design company and world languages expert. They write some fantastic articles.
TypeCulture Essays | A collection of academic essays and articles on type design.
A Brief History of Type: Humanist, Old Style, Transitional, Didone, Slab Serif | It’s exactly what you think this is. Buckle up for a history lesson or two (or six).
Typography Guru | Another great place to learn about typography and read some articles.
Shinntype | Articles and videos from Nick Shinn’s independent foundry, Shinntype.
Community
Online Groups
TypeDrawers | A discussion forum for professionals and enthusiasts in the fields of typeface design, lettering, and typography.
Type Crit Crew | A free resource for type design students to meet one-on-one with experienced type designers for virtual critiques.
Glyphs Forums | Discussion and help forum for the Glyphs app.
RoboFont Forums and Discord Server | Discussion and help forum for RoboFont.
FontLab Forums | Discussion and help forum for FontLab.
Book Recommendations
Treat Your Eyeballs
The Elements of Typographic Style (Fourth Edition) by Robert Bringhurst | The book Hermann Zapf called the “Typographer’s Bible”. It bounces between poetic writing about letterforms and dry instructions for wielding them.
Designing Type (Second Edition) by Karen Cheng | A straightforward diagnosis of Latin type design with a heavy focus on letter proportions.
Size-specific adjustments to type designs by Tim Ahrens and Shoko Mugikura | A study of the principles of designing for optical sizes (and the only book of its kind).
Designing Fonts by Chris Campe and Ulrike Rausch | An accessible walkthrough for designing your first Latin typeface in Glyphs app.
Book of Letters (Fourth Edition) by Yuri Gordon | The type designer’s bible on each letter of the Russian alphabet, its history, and comparisons to Latin counterparts. [Only available in Russian.]
Manual of Diacritics by Radek Sidun | Visual guidance on handling diacritics for common, extreme, and calligraphic types.
