What's Your Type Spring 2011

We love typography!
What's Your Type Spring 2011 Class Tumblelog
Irina Lee and Lara McCormick
School of Visual Art
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Hamburgefonts Debunked

Question: What is the Significance of Hamburgefonts? No, it’s not a typo. It’s Hamburgefonts not Hamburger Fonts. Hamburgefonts is a technique used in type design.

Answer: When designing your own typeface it is often recommended that you begin your work by creating the characters that spell out Hamburgefonts. Hamburgerfonts is a test word contains most of the various shapes and strokes found in a typeface (alternate is Hamburgefonstiv). By concentrating on designing and finetuning these characters first, the bits and pieces can then be applied to most of the other characters in the font.

When submitting new designs or design ideas to a type foundry for consideration, designers often submit (or are asked to submit) the test word Hamburgefonts set in both mixed case and all caps either as a printout, PDF, or as a digital font.

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