Hey, why didn’t that work? A designer’s guide to font quality.

TYPO Berlin 2008 Image | Thursday, 29 May | 4:00 pm | english

Sometimes fonts fail to work as expected, either during the initial design work, or further on in a production workflow. What does a designer need to know about font quality, reliability and usability? Is there such a thing as a »bad font« or are all fonts good for something? What goes into making a »good« font? What are the earmarks of font quality? Thomas Phinney discusses how the elements of font quality affect real world design usability and workflows, including character sets & language coverage, glyph outline construction, spacing, kerning, hinting, naming issues, typographic glyphs, and OpenType layout features.

Thomas Phinney

Thomas Phinney

Typographer / Vice President @ FontLab (Portland, Oregon)

Thomas Phinney is President of FontLab. Previously he worked at Extensis (web fonts and font management tools) and Adobe (as product manager for global fonts and typography). Thomas is also a type designer, teacher, writer, and consultant on fonts and typography. He teaches type design with Crafting Type and has…

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