I have been involved in type design and type manufacture for over 35 years, principally with Monotype, now AgfaMonotype. Over the last 5 years I have been particularly involved with custom typefaces for corporate identity and branding use.

This study follows the development process of the Opel corporate typeface family.

The brief for the Opel project was to take test characters designed by Gary Scriven and his team at Interbrand Newell & Sorrell, and to convert them into font format. A full typeface in the sans serif, geometric style was then to be developed, picking up design cues from the supplied test characters.

Test characters were supplied as an Illustrator file. The first operation was to convert this file into font format. This was done using Fontographer font creation software.

The converted data was then split into individual characters and each placed in its appropriate position within a new font. The next step was to check the technical quality of each character outline. Any superfluous on-curve points were removed (ensuring the basic letter shapes did not change), double points removed and shapes assessed for minor errors.

A Postscript font was then made so that a first proof could be run to see how the test letters performed over a range of different sizes. This showed that a careful assessment of stroke weights needed to be made (cap ‘G’ looked thin to other caps) and that the lowercase ascenders (‘f’) looked very tall compared to the caps.

Work was then carried out on the test characters to make weights more even; the lowercase was scaled down a little to bring the top of ‘f’ closer to the top of capitals. Checks were also made on the height relationship of round letters (such as ‘O’) to square letters (‘Z’)