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EnglishWhich Type Design Books Are Recommended by Type Design Resources?
Updated
Type Design Resources lists eight specific books on its site, plus two TypeDrawers community threads where designers share further reading lists. The core recommendations cover professional practice (Designing Fonts, Designing Type, How to create typefaces), single-topic deep dives (italic, legibility), and one opinionated studio book from Ohno Type. If you are starting out, begin with Designing Type for form and terminology and Designing Fonts for the production process; add the Blaze Type PDF if you want a low-cost, practical walkthrough.
The books listed on the site
| Title | Author(s) | What it covers | Notes from the listing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Designing Fonts: An Introduction to Professional Type Design | Chris Campe and Ulrike Rausch | Professional type design from the ground up | German edition also available |
| Designing Type | Karen Cheng | Letterform structure and type design fundamentals | — |
| How to create typefaces: From sketch to screen | Cristóbal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer, José Scaglione | Full workflow from drawing to digital font | Spanish edition also available |
| How to design fonts? | Blaze Type Foundry | Practical font design | 140-page PDF and print-on-demand book |
| Italic: What gives Typography its emphasis | Hendrik Weber | Italic design and its role in emphasis | German edition also available |
| Legibility: How and why typography affects ease of reading | Mary Dyson | Reading research and legibility | Free online in English and Spanish |
| The Ohno Book: A Serious Guide to Irreverent Type Design | James Edmondson | Studio-style, unconventional approach to type design | — |
The site also points to two TypeDrawers discussions for broader lists: “Recommended Type Design and Typography Books” and “Teachers, show us your reading lists.”
How to choose among them
- Complete beginner who wants one book: Designing Type builds the vocabulary you need to evaluate your own drawings. Pair it with Designing Fonts when you move from sketches to a working font file.
- You want the production process end to end: How to create typefaces follows the path from sketch to screen, which suits self-taught designers who keep getting stuck between drawing and compiling.
- You want something short and hands-on: the Blaze Type PDF is the most compact option on the list and is available in print on demand.
- You are past the basics and want a specific topic: Italic for slant and cursive construction, Legibility for reading research. The Dyson book is free online in English and Spanish, so you can read it before deciding whether you need a copy.
- You want a studio perspective rather than a textbook: The Ohno Book is the outlier on the list — an opinionated guide rather than a systematic course.
What the site pairs with the books
The book list sits inside a wider learning section. Alongside it, the site links to Design with FontForge (described as a strong introduction regardless of which software you use), Jonathan Hoefler’s getting-started guide, the Glyphs tutorials (useful even for non-Glyphs users), GT Academy’s glyph-construction posts, Charles Nix’s LinkedIn Learning course, the Ohno RoboFont video class, Ohno Type School articles, and Lynne Yun’s Type Design School video guide. For structured teaching beyond books, it lists the Plantin Institute’s expert class, I Love Typography Academy, and the Knuth-Bigelow Type Design Incubator, plus workshops from Letterform Archive, Type@Cooper, Type Design Class, and Cyrillicsly.
A practical sequence: read one fundamentals book, work through a free guide such as Design with FontForge in parallel so the concepts attach to actual drawing, then use the TypeDrawers threads to pick a second book aimed at whichever stage is giving you trouble.
Practical notes
The listing gives no prices, so check each publisher for current cost and shipping; the Blaze Type title is the only one described as print-on-demand. Availability of German and Spanish editions is stated for the Campe/Rausch, Weber, and Henestrosa/Meseguer/Scaglione books, and the Dyson legibility book is the only one confirmed free online. The site’s own framing — “everything from learning the basics to running your own foundry” — matches the spread of the list: fundamentals, production, and one studio voice.