Practica Online Type Design Program ↗

Topics covered include:

• Evaluating typefaces using objective and subjective standards.
• Discovering how function and use impact design decisions.
• Understanding the type design palette.
• Structuring multiweight families.
• Creating new weights or styles through interpolation.
• Developing a more efficient type design process.
• Expanding character sets and designing diacritics.
• Keeping yourself motivated throughout development.
• Gaining control over your glyphs’ Bézier curves and cleaning up your font files.

Classes are held twice a week. Tuesdays will be primarily group or one-on-one feedback sessions with a few hands-on workshops in the beginning. Lectures will be held on Thursdays along with three open sessions — two Q&A and one student-organized class.

The Q&A session is a flexible class for students to ask questions or for instructors to give short presentations on topics of interest to students but not covered elsewhere. In the last edition, we discussed font export tools and strategies, typefaces with grades and variable fonts, structuring client-driven projects, coding OpenType features, working with reference material and old specimens, and more.

The final Thursday session will be organized by the students with support from the lead instructors. As a group, students will decide the topic for that class and arrange speakers. A budget will be provided to pay any speaker(s) if needed.

All sessions are held live via Zoom. For those unable to attend in real time, lectures will be recorded. The feedback sessions, on the other hand, must be attended live in order to benefit fully from them. This gives you some flexibility to work the program into your own schedule, but also the opportunity to connect with fellow students.

Lastly, lead instructors will be available to meet with students outside of class for those needing one-on-one support. There are more than fifty-five course hours for the entire program, not including office hours.