Patens

Learn type design

A pragmatic 8–12 week starter path, exercises that actually teach you to see, and the tools, books, and foundries a real practice runs on. Adapted from foundry essays and the standards docs that govern the format.

Tutorial · 10 steps

Make your first font

From opening the demo to exporting an OpenType file — the shortest path through Patens.

Guide · 9 steps

Kerning

Sidebearings vs kerning, class-based kerning, family-wide propagation, the audit codes that catch common mistakes.

Guide · 9 steps

Variable fonts

Axes, masters, instances, the 2D variation explorer, exporting a working .otf / .woff2.

Guide · 9 steps

OpenType features

Auto-detection from glyph names, ligatures, small caps, stylistic sets, figures, live HarfBuzz shaping preview.

Guide · 9 steps

Multi-script fonts

Latin + Cyrillic + Greek look-alike reuse, bespoke shapes (Я Ж Ф), OS/2 ulUnicodeRange, coverage audits.

Reference

Export formats

OTF, WOFF2, TTF, UFO, .font.json, designer bundle — which to pick for which audience.

Reference

Audit codes

Every warning the editor emits, what triggers it, and why it matters — grouped by family.

Beginner timeline

8–12 weeks

1

Week 1–2

Phase
Research + control set
- Write the brief (intent, audience, use cases, reading conditions).
- Collect three corpora: functional (real text the font must handle), historical (writing / lettering / print models), competitive (existing solutions to study).
- Sketch only the control glyphs: n o H O p d a e v + punctuation + figures.
2

Week 3–4

Phase
Make the glyphs cohere in text
- Refine proportions; lock UPM, cap-height, x-height.
- Get spacing right before kerning — proof in HOHnonHo strings, not isolated glyphs.
- Add a couple of kerning pairs (AV, To) and prove they help.
3

Week 5–8

Phase
Expand cautiously
- Fill in the rest of basic Latin; add diacritics with composites.
- Add the first feature set (kern + liga is enough).
- Build static OTF + WOFF2; install in Font Book; type something real.
4

Week 9–12

Phase
Test in real conditions, then release
- Walk the full Release checklist — browser × OS matrix, app proofs, language tests.
- Fix the audit issues that actually matter; mark hints as accepted.
- Write design notes, version, license; ship trial + full binaries.

Exercises that teach you to see

Redraw a historical model

Pick a typeface you already love and trace its proportion logic. Not to publish — to learn how it was constructed. Cover an alphabet in one weight.

Build a control set and proof in repeated strings

Draw n o H O a e s c p v y f g. Spend a full day spacing them inside HOHnonHnonH strings — single glyphs lie, strings tell the truth.

Make a serif and a sans that share a proportion model

Same UPM, cap-height, x-height, advance widths. The only differences are terminals and contrast. You will learn what structural choices really carry style.

Test in paragraph text and a browser before calling it finished

Compile WOFF2, drop it into a real page, set a paragraph at 14px. Most fonts that look great at 200px collapse in a paragraph.

Tools the practice runs on

The actual editors and pipelines used in production. Most are open source.

Glyphs

Mature all-in-one editor on macOS. Best learning materials.

RoboFont

UFO-first, Python-scriptable. Modular for design systems.

FontLab

Cross-platform integrated editor with variable + web support.

FontForge

Free, open source. Wide format support, modest UI.

fontTools

ttLib / feaLib / TTX / designspaceLib / varLib / subsetting.

fontmake

Builds static + variable binaries from Glyphs / UFO / designspace.

FontBakery

Automated QA checks with Google Fonts / Adobe Fonts profiles.

opentype.js

Read / write OTF + TTF in the browser. (This app uses it.)

Designing Type

Karen Cheng

Practical, shape-specific. Treats optical correction and structural consistency as inseparable.

The Stroke

Gerrit Noordzij

Theoretical. Trains you to think about writing logic, stress, and the white around letters.

Microsoft OpenType Specification

Microsoft

The actual format. Authoritative for tables, layout, variation.

Google Fonts Guide

Google Fonts team

Strongest public model of open-source workflow, QA, and web deployment.

AFDKO Feature File Specification

Adobe Type Tools

The grammar for .fea — what every modern build pipeline ingests.

WOFF2 (W3C Recommendation)

W3C

The web baseline. Why @font-face works the way it does.

HarfBuzz Manual

HarfBuzz authors

The shaping engine inside Chrome/Firefox/Android. Read it before debugging OT layout.

Reading

Books that train the eye, plus the standards docs that govern the format on the wire.

Foundries worth studying

The strongest type-design education isn't in books — it's reading how foundries argue for their decisions. These public pages model the rhetoric, the system, and the production craft.

KLIM Type Foundry

Historically informed contemporary families

Their design notes (Söhne, The Future) model how to turn references into a concept.

Hoefler&Co

Editorial + institutional systems

Strongest public writing on optical sizes, feature depth, and family architecture.

Commercial Type

Editorial workhorses

Graphik essay explains "deliberately plain" as a design position.

TypeTogether

Editorial reading + multiscript

Adelle Sans Multiscript: best model for thinking across writing systems.