Riley Cran Profile picture
Sep 8, 2021 29 tweets 10 min read Read on X
A recent #fontSunday topic of ‘bold headlines’ made me want to talk about bold letters a bit.

THREAD:
I have been a fan of very bold letters for a long time. With the Lettermatic catalog, I think it has essentially been a self-imposed rule that all of our designs get taken to a very bold extreme. Because… it’s fun! The names of the Lettermatic typefaces, typeset in their bol
Not only are very bold letters eye-catching and powerful from an aesthetic perspective, I actually find they help my design process itself. I’ll explain… Me sketching a bold letter on an iPad.
Previously I did a thread about counterforms. I talked about the negative space trapped within letters, and how all letters are made from this positive/negative balance. So how do you… make letters bolder?

A collage of diagrams from the thread I wrote on 'counterfor
It is tempting to say you just add positive space. But typically it’s actually more like: add positive space while removing negative space. The counterforms sort of get the air vacuumed out of them, and the letters simultaneously get a bit wider, as the positive space grows.
As letters get bolder, the differentiation between thick and thin (also called contrast) tends to increase. This is primarily to allow the counterforms to be as large as possible, despite the extra weight, because we rely so heavily on counterforms for reading.
We also employ another method for emphasizing the counterforms as much as possible, even at very bold weights: bold letters tend to have a taller x-height, compared to lighter weights.
Let’s look at the letter ‘o’ in Parclo Sans as it changes in weight from lightest to boldest. As the letter gets bolder, the positive shape gets larger.
Additionally, the negative shape (the counterform) gets smaller.
Weight also impacts spacing. The spacing of a given weight of a typeface is connected to the amount of space trapped inside the letters. So as the ‘air’ is removed from the counterforms, the amount of space between letters is similarly reduced to maintain balance and rhythm.
When I am designing a typeface, I find that pushing the design to an extreme of weight helps me learn a lot about what this typeface really *is*. It’s sort of a stress test… what happens to these design details when I push them to be really bold? How could they work differently?
Certain letter constructions do not lend themselves to getting very bold in weight. For instance a grotesque-style ‘s’ with closed terminations tends to sort of ‘run into itself’ eventually… A sketch of a grotesque letter 's' that becomes so bold it c
…whereas a humanist ‘s’ with open terminations can get significantly bolder without feeling uncomfortable. A very bold humanist 's'.
I often wonder… are the open terminations (that help that ‘s’ become very bold) also a quality that helps the ‘s’ be easier to read in a Regular weight? I’m inclined to say yes, because both successes depend on a reader identifying the counterforms. A regular weight humanist 's'.
When @cleerdesign commissioned me to design what would become Parclo Sans, we pushed the design as far as it could go in weight. This Ultra weight is probably the boldest style of a typeface I’ve ever drawn, and it involved a lot of very careful optical trickery to make it work. The Parclo Sans typeface.
At that extreme of weight, the extenders get a bit shorter, to emphasize the way the words set like a BRICK. The lowercase ‘i’ actually gets shorter just so that the ‘dot’ can fit comfortably in relation to the ascender height.
The term ‘Ultra’ itself is probably worth talking about, too. Even though it might seem like there’s a book somewhere that defines what each weight name means, there is no such definition or standard to adhere to.
What is Regular? Generally it is the weight that looks nice in running text, as informed by all the other running text people have read. In that way each scribe and typeface designer has effectively been contributing a tiny bit to that definition, since we began creating letters. Type intended for text, both old and new.
What is Bold? Well, Bold is probably the style that seems to provide a nice contrast of emphasized weight, as compared to Regular.
I like to think of ‘Ultra’ as: this is as bold as I can make this before it becomes unreasonable. What’s the maximum amount of weight I can get into these letters before they become useless to designers? Or impossible to discern for a reader?
Bezzia has an Ultra weight too. Making very bold serif typefaces can be even more complicated because you… run out of places to put serifs. It can feel like trying to get a massive plane to take off on a 10 foot runway.
In the Bezzia typeface, at its the boldest weights, it occasionally will ‘forget’ a serif on purpose. I bet you didn’t notice that the ‘n’ is missing an interior serif here, at first glance. And yet that helped you read the letter without the clutter that two serifs would create. As the letter 'n' gets bolder, one of the serifs disappears
Really Sans has an Ultra weight in its large optical size. It’s purposefully designed with a tall x-height and very tight spacing, for that eye-catching visual tone that some associate with 1970s headline typography. A specimen of Really Sans.
Really Sans is a bit more geometric; this time the counterspace at the center of the ‘o’ becomes more like a pinhole, than a tall sliver.
Thinking about weight this way has some fascinating impacts on various styles of a type family. For instance, Parclo Sans has widths. Here are bolder words in the Normal and Condensed widths. They feel similarly dense, right? But why? Two words in different fonts, at different widths, that feel
The optical appearance of weight is clearly not linked exclusively to positive shapes. Because the positive shapes are completely different thicknesses in the two fonts. Two letters, with their stems measured, showing different th
Instead, the appearance of ‘boldness’ in type is directly related to the balance between positive and negative space. If you have significantly more positive space than you do negative space, you will always create the illusion of ‘boldness,’ regardless of the exact measurements.
Thanks for reading, everyone! And as usual, if you’re curious to learn more about the Lettermatic fonts, head to the site and take them for a spin. Get yourself some (fully-featured) trial fonts! 🔤🔠

lettermatic.com/fonts
Special thanks to @danellecheney and @heather_cran for their help assembling the imagery for this thread!

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More from @rileycran

May 25, 2022
It's tempting to think that simpler letterforms = more legibility. But in my experience, that's not true. Typefaces are design systems too, and they need a certain level of complexity to work well. Here's why

(thread) 🧵
Humans love patterns. We see patterns in everything we do, and it is in our nature to organize and categorize things. Naturally, we try to do this with the Latin writing system.
Some of the most popular typefaces in the world have very systematic details. But this doesn’t mean they are the pinnacle of legibility. In fact, I think the systematic details can actually make them harder to read.
Read 30 tweets
Jan 14, 2022
Today I am 30 years old. To celebrate, I’m going to do something I wouldn’t normally do: I’m going to talk about the work I made in the last 10 years. I’m honestly a bit shy to share all of this older work, but frankly I’d like to remind myself of how I spent that time.
One of the primary reasons I want to do this is… that I normally wouldn’t do it? I want to be better at embracing what I’ve made, and appreciating the journey I’ve been on. I want to understand self editing and self criticism as separate things.
I also remember, when I was 20, discovering designers who I admired and looked up to, but having very little perspective on where they were in their careers when they were 20. So here’s me saying: everyone’s journey starts somewhere, here’s what that looks like.
Read 37 tweets
Sep 21, 2021
What exactly is kerning? What is spacing? How are they different? Let’s talk about it!

THREAD 🧵:
Spacing and kerning are two separate things, and both are crucial to the experience of reading type. When done correctly they are intended to be practically invisible. In this thread I will attempt to make that ‘invisible’ part a bit easier to observe.
Latin typefaces are made from a lot of individual glyphs. Each individual glyph has a left and right ‘side bearing.’ Think of it like a margin for either side.
Read 36 tweets
Aug 4, 2021
NEW 🧵: Did you know we only started mixing Sans and Serif typefaces in the last 200 years? One genre is much older than the other.

Let’s discuss the birth of sans serif typefaces.

I’ll use @lettermatic_abc fonts for some visuals: Parclo Sans & Serif.

lettermatic.com/fonts
Put simply: serifs are these little barb things on the ends of strokes. A ‘sans serif’ typeface means a typeface in which these are omitted, usually resulting in a blunt ending like this.
Serif letterforms are VERY old. A great example is the inscription on Trajan’s Column. People have been drawing inspiration from this inscription for over 1,900 years (and counting). A casting of the inscription carved into Trajan's Column.
Read 33 tweets
Jul 27, 2021
Today I would like to do a thread about 'counterforms.' They are a critical building block of typeface design... but what are they? How do they work?

I'll also talk about how I thought of the counterforms in Really Sans.
This thread won't be about science. It will be about observable logic, practical experience, and some ideas to think about.
Put simply, counterforms are negative spaces. One way to think about it is: all positive shapes exist purely to create negative shapes, and vice versa. A diagram pointing to counterforms of a letter 'a'.
Read 37 tweets
Jul 19, 2021
I started designing a typeface called Really Sans about 2 years ago. It is now available at @lettermatic_abc.

I am going to try something new today: a twitter thread about the underlaying ideas in Really Sans.

What goes into a typeface design?
There are a lot of Sans Serif typefaces. Why does the world need another one? This question is asked of any new entry to the genre.

There is a very clear reason, for me, as to why Really Sans exists.
Really Sans is a typeface in two halves - Large and Small. These refer to the fonts being designed for use at large and small point sizes; a common term for this is 'optical size'.

But how does optical size... work?
Read 25 tweets

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