Typografie The birth of a typeface: the example of Anivers
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Tags: Anivers, Jos Buivenga, type, typography
Typography is much more than just drawing letters – a great deal of attention to detail goes into a good typeface. Typeface designer Jos Buivenga provides insights into the development process of the Anivers typeface.
For some people, type is something you do not think about: select, type text, done. Some people even skip the selection step, since Word does it all by itself. But type can do so much more: it is the main information carrier in every document and deserves a little more attention for that reason alone. And it has an enormous influence on the impression a document makes on the reader – not to mention whether they even want to read it.
So it is worth spending a little more time thinking about typography. Using Jos Buivenga’s Anivers as an example, I would like to show how much attention to detail can be found in a font.
The Anivers design process
Jos Buivenga recently designed a special gift for the highly recommended design online magazine Smashing Magazine: the Anivers for its first anniversary. In a short post about the development process, he gives insights into the thoughts of a typeface designer: he starts from a detail that he considers characteristic of his typeface, a sharp element in his letters. In the picture, some of these elements have been circled.
He then develops further letters and changes their height until they create a harmonious text image. After that, the spacing has to be adjusted, and the icing on the cake is coming up with alternatives for certain letter combinations (such as the double ff, where the letters converge).
The whole thing then has to be adapted for each typeface, of course. For example, italic and bold fonts have to be treated differently than a normal font.
Jos Buivenga’s article contains a few technical terms that can be looked up in the typography glossary, but it is still easy to understand. Above all, however, it is suitable for providing a brief insight into the design work of a typeface designer, which is still not appreciated enough.
Anivers Regular as a free download
Anivers is a chic, robust font that can be used for a variety of purposes. It offers support for a wide range of languages. The normal cut – Anivers Regular – is available to download for free from MyFonts-Shop. Simply sign up and add the font to your shopping cart for $0. Then “purchase” it and download it. The other fonts are available at a low price; the whole package costs $24.95. On his homepage, he also has some other excellent fonts that he offers as free downloads.