Dalton Maag

Dalton Maag is an independent font foundry with offices in London, UK, and São Paulo, Brazil. It designs fonts for use in corporate identities, logos, and other text uses. Dalton Maag has a library of 30 retail fonts as of 2016 and offers custom font creation and modification services to its clients.

An introduction in to type design:

1. When getting a new client they have a workshop to determine what existing typefaces they like, looking at the characteristics. 
2. They then present a series of images and ask the client to pick those which best represent their values, on the back of the images are typographic representations of the image which allows Dalton Maag to make the transition from values into typographic characteristics. 
3. Another exercise is a font grid, the client is asked to add cards to the sections wihch is most important to their brand. 
4. After the workshop Dalton Maag go back to the brief and go through discussion, sketching and design. 
5. The sketches are then digitalised on Postscript, which involves describing the outline of the letters with as little nods as possible.
6. The font is presented to client using TrueType, it allows control of the pixels within each letterform.  The font would be made in regular weight which is developed into extreme weights after the client has signed off.
7. After the font is designed, kerning needs to be looked at.
8. Once all of this is completed the font must be engineered to work on all platforms, coding is used to control the metrics of the font.
9. Final delivery comes in the following forms: desktop - TTF, web - EOT, TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, app - TTF

This talk was very interesting as I hadn't previously looked into the process involved in making a typeface. I learnt from this that the research is a crucial stage in creating something suitable for the clients. As well as this it is interesting to see how much work goes into the final product, as multiple options are developed to present to the client.