Type
9 min read
Designing Severn Serif: three winters of drawing
What I learned drawing a text typeface from scratch, and why it took three times longer than I planned.
Severn Serif started as a weekend sketch of the lowercase ‘a’ and ended up as four weights, italics and 600 glyphs.
The hardest part wasn’t drawing the letters. It was spacing them. Good spacing is invisible; bad spacing is all you see.
If you’re thinking of drawing a typeface, start with a word, not an alphabet. ‘Hamburgefonstiv’ is a classic for a reason.
— Nell
