Commentary

Make Fonts with Hannes Famira

Typographica on April 12, 2006

True type design courses are few and far betwixt. So the Cooper Union‘s upcoming class with Hannes Famira is worth noting, and, if you’re in the New York area, worth taking. Famira is a qualified instructor. He got his chops at KABK in one of only two full-fledged design programs in the world, worked with Font Bureau, Meta, and Petr van Blokland, and his Thesisesque superset InterFamily shows he can put out some quality fontage. An intro to his teaching style can be found at the brimming TypEdu.

The Cooper Union class starts this summer for $625. Details below the fold.

Cooper Union Continuing Education presents:

Digital type design: Introduction to type design in FontLab Studio v.5

Hannes Famira
9 sessions 6:30–9:30
Tuesday nights May 30 – August 1 (no class July 4)
$625.00 (plus one time non-refundable registration fee of $25.00)

The design and production processes of typefaces have significantly changed in the past 20 years. In this hands-on course, Hannes Famira will guide the participants step by step through the different stages of up-to-date font development. The participants will be made familiar with the software application FontLab Studio v.5 by drawing and producing their own functioning digital type faces. The topics covered will be tracing artwork, techniques of perfecting curves, building diacritics as well as the secrets of spacing, kerning and hinting. Participants should have a basic typographic knowledge and some experience in a vector based drawing application such as Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand.

Hannes Famira studied graphic and typographic design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, Netherlands. After apprenticeships at Studio Dumbar and the Font Bureau he worked at Meta Design and at the Buro Petr van Blokland. Hannes established his studio Das Kombinat in 1999. He taught type design at the SfG, School for Design in Basel, Switzerland between 2002–’05. He now lives in Brooklyn, NY since summer 2005.

Recommended reading:

   The stroke: theory of writing
   Gerrit Noordzij
   HyphenPress, fall 2005
   ISBN 0-906259-30-8

For more information and to register, contact:
Cooper Union Continuing Education
41 Cooper Square, NY, NY 10003
212-353-4195