Designing a typeface

It takes a combination of vision and dedication and plenty of serious hard work to conceptualize,…develop, and finalize a font.…My good friend Donald Partyka agreed to let me show the steps in his recent type design Benda.…Let's take a look at the steps along the way to the finished typeface.…Every typeface begins with an idea.…Donald was inspired by two sources of unpublished alphabets designed by the influential Czech designer Jaroslav Benda.…

Donald was attracted to the unusual letterforms and the variation between the upper and lower case.…His goal was to create a font that was modular and systematic, while still respecting the…source and keeping the personality of the letterforms.…Type designers start out the way most artists do by sketching.…There can be several stages of sketching where the rough sketches of letters are refined into tight sketches.…Here are some of Donald's initial sketches for the typeface Benda.…He worked both with pencil and a broad-edged pen and ink.…

The Roman, Bold, and Italic versions of the font begin to evolve in sketch form.…