Type designers love books for two reasons, they are full of beautiful specimens of typography and are a great source of knowledge. These are some of my most opened and referenced books while I am drawing letters.
Type designers love books. Just check out the Type Designers At Work blog and see how many have bookshelves in the background.
The fundamentals and history of type design are fairly static making books an ideal medium to contain this knowledge. In fact, sometimes the older and more obscure books hold the most interesting content.
The following are some of my most opened and referenced books while I am drawing letters:
Karen Cheng
This book was my main reference while drawing my first typeface. The book examines each letter in detail, comparing examples across different classifications of typefaces. It is very useful for figuring out visual compensations, metrics, and relationships between upper and lowercase.
Ivan Castro
Typographic letters come from calligraphic forms and learning some basic calligraphy really helps to create an understanding of letter shapes. The calligraphy section of this workbook is incredibly well-explained and has a great variety of traditional calligraphy models to reference.
Cristóbal Henestrosa, José Scaglione, Laura Meseguer
This overview of the type design industry provides an essential look into the process of making a typeface. I read it after I had been working in the industry for 5 years and it confirmed a lot of the things I had learned along the way.
Chris Campe and Ulrike Rausch
I think the same book is available under two different titles but I haven’t confirmed. I own the copy with the yellow cover and it’s a great overview of the process of making fonts.
Rian Hughes
This whole series is amazing. Each collection gives an excellent feel for the lettering and visual spirit of the time. A treasure trove of ideas and excellent reference for nailing the tone of a particular era in your work.
Cees De Jong, Alston Purvis, Jan Tholenaar
I didn’t immediately appreciate this book when I bought it in second year university – it was full of old stuff. When I gained an appreciation for old type specimens (especially the layouts and ornamentation) this book became one of my favourites. Also serves as a great jumping off point for researching more into a specific specimen book.
Edward & the Staff of Photo-Lettering (editors) Rondthaler
So many alphabets! This old photo type catalog is an excellent reference on how other designers solved certain problems in certain styles. Many of the specimens in here are no longer accessible because they were never made into a digital format so there are some unique things to look at in here.
Toshi Omagari
Pixel type is freaking cool! I heard Toshi had to play through and beat a lot of the games in order to collect the full specimen of each typeface in this book. It is impressive how much variation can be achieved on an 8x8 grid.
Shoko Mugikura, Tim Ahrens
Thinking of making a text-specific style for your design? This is a must-read detailed study of methods that make type work in small sizes.
Sascha Thoma, Ben Wittner, Timm Hartmann
Are you setting two different scripts next to each other in a design or just curious about other scripts and want an overview? This book is for you!
Sofie Beier
A scientific look into legibility. This book explains what happens in our mind when we read and how we understand letters. It gives a new perspective on how your type designs will be understood and interacted with.
Hendrik Weber
A deep dive into what actually makes an italic an italic. It gets a bit academic but I’m into it, it really helped me figure out how to approach italics from a conceptual level.