Professional font mastering
What is font mastering? This is a service that involves taking your drafts, lettering, vector letters, or even sketches from any font editor and turning them into a fully functional font.
We are ready to help you with both complex mastering and solving individual visual or technical problems.
TypeType font mastering can be divided into several main blocks: visual mastering, technical mastering, kerning, and font hinting.
Visual font mastering
The simplest and most affordable type of visual mastering is a basic visual font audit, where we evaluate the consistency of visual solutions, the rhythm of the font, the proportions, and the designs of style-forming characters only. As a result of the audit, we provide a PDF presentation.
A comprehensive visual font audit includes all the work from the basic audit, plus a detailed inspection of each character and spacing. In addition, you can choose to implement the edits yourself or leave it to us, allowing us to bring your font to perfection.
Technical mastering
The technical audit of a font includes running the font through the TypeType’s proprietary validator, editing the starting points for the contours, evaluating the accuracy of contour construction, fixing errors, verifying anchors inside the glyphs, their work, and location, reviewing the quality of semi-approsh construction.
In addition, we will fill in the service and meta information in the Font Info of the typeface, create or fix OpenType features, create or fix Glyph Order, and check the correct operation of the font in the popular editors: Adobe, Figma, Sketch, and others.
Kerning
We create manual kerning according to our own system, which we tried and tested for several years on dozens of font families. This kerning allows to systematically define and create all the necessary kerning pairs for the combinations of characters UPPERCASE + UPPERCASE, UPPERCASE + lowercase, lowercase + lowercase, numbers + numbers, as well as carry out kerning of all the above groups with special characters.
Learn more about how we perform kerning in this video.
Hinting
Our team carries out TrueType hinting (Grayscale, ClearType, DirectWrite) for both static individual font styles and variable fonts. We use Visual TrueType plus our own technical support software and scripts to optimize the font hinting process.
We were able to optimize hinting significantly, and now we can transpose hinting between individual weights and upright and italic versions of fonts.
Read more about how we perform hinting here.
Mastering examples
A font is a work of art. Many designers think so, but we will talk not about the industry as a whole but about a specific font which is of interest for art lovers. It has all that is necessary: a beautiful creation story, aesthetics, and line flow. The Italian font designer Antonio Pace created the font for the Capelli Identity Design studio, and TypeType transformed their creation into a functional work instrument.
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Technical work on a new typeface by third-party designers always arouses professional curiosity. Especially when it comes to working with fonts for brands with a world-famous history. Olivetti is an Italian company whose name inspired admiration and respect in the 20th century, especially among journalists and writers.
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In this article, we will tell you the history of font hinting development. We will share our own experience of working with fonts and explain what tasks hinting solves.
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At TypeType, we’ve got a broad experience in creating both fully custom fonts and modified commercial fonts from our collection.
You might find some nuances of already existing fonts unsuitable for your purposes, or you need a completely original font in order to create unique corporate identity.
There can be a number of situations when you might need help implementing Cyrillic characters into a font. For instance, you are drawing a font and are planning to add support of Cyrillic characters into it, but you don’t speak any languages that use Cyrillic characters. Or maybe you are entering new markets and you need to add Cyrillic characters into an existing corporate font?
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Font hinting (also known as instructing) is the use of mathematical instructions to adjust the display of an outline font so that it lines up with a rasterized grid.
At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing clear, legible text. It can be accompanied by antialiasing and (on liquid crystal displays) subpixel rendering for further clarity.