Now, make no mistake about it, I’ve been a type-nerd for some time now (just ask Jason, as I regularly harass him about his use of emdashes). Up until last semester though, I’d only been reveling in the work of others and the rules they discovered along the way. Our typography course began with our instructor drilling us—seriously drilling us, pop-quiz style—on instances of good and bad typography/typographic rules. Whether it had to do with inappropriate leading or kerning, or using a forward-slash (a virgule: /) in the place of a true fraction bar (a solidus: ⁄ [you can type this on Mac by simultaneously pressing Option-Shift-1, but not on Windows {of course} without the glyph palette]), we had these rules pounded into our heads throughout every class.

While this was all interesting—and certainly entertaining considering the instructor’s vehemence for inappropriate/bad typography—about half way through the semester, we finally got to the really good stuff: learning FontLab Studio in order to build our own fonts. As with nearly any design, this process began with sketching a few ideas for typefaces (typefaces are essentially the way that the letters look, whereas fonts are comprised of code that tells a computer/printer/etc. how to render these letters).

From there, our instructor chose which typeface we were to pursue, thereafter asking us to create three and a half inch tall refined drawings of all letters A–L—then M–Z, and finally a–z & 0–9 during the consecutive weeks. These were all drawn on drafting graph paper, and had to be perfect, no smudges, no erasings, etc.

With only three weeks left in the semester, we had to learn FontLab well enough to translate these drawings into beautiful fonts, complete with metrics and kerning pairs. This turned out to be an amazing amount of work, but I found myself falling into this sort of font-zen as I built my font, transcended time and space to the point that the sun was rising before I realized I missed bedtime.

After making my way through the hellish 30 pages of filling out font information prior to rendering my font, there was something beautiful and almost… numinous about seeing something that I designed and created reveal itself on the screen every time I touched a key. In the end, everything turned out beautifully and Inflectia was born of immaculate conception; a beautiful nouveau-inspired sans-serif featuring the elegant thick-to-thin stroke and old-style figures of many serif fonts (dude, how many sans-serif fonts have old-style figures?), one of many Graves Foundry™ fonts to come.

download Inflectia.