 So today, I'm going to be talking about this class I teach. It's a typeface design class. And specifically, I'm going to be talking about the way that I use testing as part of the course. Really, it was more like quizzing, but testing sounded more academic. So yeah, I've been teaching a class at Type of Cooper West. The program is transitioning into Type West at the letter form archive, which I'm also going to be an instructor at this coming year. The class I teach is called Principles of Typeface Design. It's a 10-week introductory course. And it's for working professionals who are interested in learning how to make typefaces. Most of my students are graphic designers or product designers. Most of them have never designed a typeface before. And a few of them have never worked with Bezier curves before, even in Adobe Illustrator. We do a lot of different exercises in class, but their primary project over the course of the term is to create an original typeface. As a teacher, I place a lot of value on originality and process both. I really want students to work on something that excites them, something that's new and something that they feel really compelled to create. At the same time, typeface design is a hard thing to learn. Forms have a lot of interconnected parts. And it's really easy to get lost when you're starting out. And so I see my role as giving students the tools and the structure and technique that they need to make something original that is exciting to them. So I first learned how to design type from Jesse Reagan at Type of Cooper in New York. Jesse worked for Tobias when he was starting out. And then after I did the Cooper program, I worked for Tobias. So I'm really lucky that my foundational years were all spent under the Friar Jones umbrella. And the way that I work and teach is very much informed by Tobias' methodology. So as you all know, type design kind of consists of these two parts. There's the drawing of letters. And then there's the negative space that surrounds them. And this spacing dictates the flow and pace of a typeface. And so it's this drawing and spacing together that makes type. And I really want students to work on these two things together always at the same time. They start out with a small character set, which they draw in space. And then they continually add more glyphs to their character set over the course of the term as they keep refining their work until they have a full typeface. I expect them to review these things digitally as they go. But each week, we take time for a more structured review of their projects. And this usually takes the form of a printed proof. When we look at these proofs, we ask really big questions, questions about is this design working. But we also ask these smaller questions about the execution of the typeface. And it's these questions that I'm going to talk about today, because these are the kinds of things that I was able to incorporate into the quizzes I've been using in class. So proofs usually have these big characters, which are useful for figuring out what's wrong with certain shapes and what needs to be changed to make the outline smooth and the weight right, all of that stuff. And they also contain text. Sometimes it's spacing strings, which are what's shown here. These are neutral characters with letters embedded in them so that you can evaluate each letter. And sometimes they're paragraphs of running text. And seeing type in these text settings is really important for evaluating spacing and making sure that the rhythm is what you want it to be. So here is the kind of issue that I would sometimes spot when looking at a student's work. If you look at this O, you might notice that it's kind of deflated, that bottom left part. It's kind of deflated right there. And now you might want to make a typeface that does this, but in my class I really try to steer students towards really clean curves and consistent weight, because that's a better learning experience when you're just starting out. And here's the kind of issue you might spot in a proof when you're looking at spacing. And so here you might notice that any time there's a lower case A, it's crashing into the character that precedes it. And that's because there's not enough space on the left side of the A. So type design consists of a lot of this process of drawing and spacing type and then refining your work, proofing it, looking for things to fix, refining those things, proofing it again, and you repeat and repeat until you have something that hopefully doesn't have any more things to fix. And so typeface designers, when they're going through this process, they usually have this kind of mental checklist, or at least I do when I'm looking at work. You think about is the weight right? Is the contrast right? How are the character widths looking? How's the spacing? And I really wanted to find a way to help students also develop this kind of thought process as well when they were looking at work. So both my parents are creatives and have taught at design schools, so I grew up really familiar with kind of the classroom, studio, environment, crits, all of that, and I love it. It's a great way to learn design and it's awesome. But I also had a fairly traditional high school and college experience, so I also am really familiar with standardized tests and multiple choice exams and things like that. And I kind of like both things. I think that each have their roles. And when I was thinking about how I wanted to organize my class, I realized that a lot of the things, a lot of those skills where you're looking at type and you're evaluating it for inconsistencies could kind of be tested and quizzed in a structured way. And I thought this might be informative for me as a teacher and for my students. So to put this in context, the class is three hours long and the quizzes I give are 10 minutes long. I really want them to be pretty short and I want students to go through the questions quickly and not linger too much on any one thing. And I should say that you can't learn type design from taking quizzes. We've been the vast majority of class time kind of discussing big concepts and doing hands-on work, but these quizzes have been really informative for me in certain ways. And so the return on investment, given the time that they take, is pretty big. So what do the quizzes look like? This is like, the first questions on the quiz often have to deal with factual material that we've covered in previous classes. So questions like, what is the primary kind of contrast in this character? Or questions about the reading to make sure that students have done the reading. Or this really cruel question where I make them calculate the coordinates of a point on a Bezier curve. They really don't like this one, it kind of unnerves them. But so these questions are pretty straightforward there. The kind of things that people are used to seeing on any kind of test or quiz. But the majority of the quizzes deal with picking up on those inconsistencies of drawing and spacing that I showed earlier. So let's see some of those. So this is a question that I like to ask when students are beginning to work on their typefaces. And right now we're looking at the baseline overshoots and we have a cap I, V, I, O, I. And one of these characters does not have an overshoot that is quite right. You maybe have noticed it's the V. It really should be a little lower so that it appears even with the baseline. Here's another question that I've asked before. He were looking at weight. And one of these letters doesn't have quite the right weight. You probably picked up on it. It's the cap O was a little bit too light. And so I really try to time these questions with where students are in the design process. So like this question about weight and that previous one about overshoots, those are things that are really important when you're starting out a typeface. You really want to get those things right at the beginning because as you go on, other things will come together more easily. And so I would ask questions like this during the first few weeks of the class when students are starting their projects. Now, here's a question I would ask about drawing. And here, these questions I tend to phrase something like which of these characters is, in which of these characters is the weight most consistent? And here you might have noticed that those two Ms have this weird kind of like tapering and swelling going on that happens nowhere else in the letter. So the left one seems, I would describe that as the most consistent. And I sometimes ask questions about punctuation, like which of these periods is drawn most smoothly? And you can probably see the furthest left and furthest right, both have these kind of lumpy areas there and there. And so that middle one kind of has the smoothest curves. And I try to divide the questions pretty evenly between drawing and spacing. And so for the spacing questions, it's a very similar kind of structure. Here, there's a letter that has not quite right, side bearings. And the students are kind of asked to detect which letter that is. You may have noticed that there's a little too much space around those lowercase n's. This is another kind of question that I would ask at the start of the course because it's really important that students get these letters, the cap H, cap O, lowercase n and lowercase o, spaced correctly because then the rest of the spacing kind of comes together more easily. So I ask variations on this one with this exact set of letters a lot at the beginning of class. Here's another spacing question. Here we're trying to detect which of these letters has something wrong going on with the spacing. And you maybe can see that that lowercase s has kind of shifted to the right on the body. If you look at it between those two o's, it's way too far to the right. And this also raises another interesting question. Some of you might have seen that lowercase v and seen that when it's next to the o's or when it comes after the n, it looks like there's a lot of space there. But that's actually a kerning problem. And when students are starting out working on their typefaces, there is no kerning in them. So it actually is important to me as a teacher that they can differentiate between a spacing issue and an issue that shows up because there's just no kerning in the font yet. So those are, at first they see these as trick questions, but it's a good skill for them to pick up on for sure. And here's a kind of question I might ask towards the end of the course. And here again, there's a spacing issue and they need to pick up on what it is. And if you look at irredeemably in the top right, you might see that these e's just look a little loose, like everything looks a little too open. And so that's the problem there, is there's too much space to the right of the e. So one of the reasons I started doing this is because when students are working on one project over the course of the term, they are seeing one style of type over and over and over again as they work on it. And I wanted to see if, as a teacher, I could check in with how generalizable the skills they were learning are, cause I want them to be able to take the skills that they're learning in the class I teach and then apply them to other styles of type. At first I started making these quizzes like in Adobe Illustrator, but it got to be, it took too long. So in the end I ended up making tools that they kind of build these graphics. And they're pretty straightforward. I basically take an existing type base that I think is well done and I break it in some way. So the script will move points around randomly to make those drawing error questions. And it will generate text with kind of an altered side bearing on one of the letters for the text questions. So it's definitely possible to ask a bad question. It took me a while to get the error amount into the proper range. If the letter is too close to the way it was originally drawn, then the question's really hard and no one can pick up on it. And if it's too different than the question's too easy and it just doesn't really serve much of a purpose to inform me of anything about what the students are learning. This is also complicated by the fact that these quizzes are done on screen. I use Google forms to build them. So all the students have their own computers and it was tricky to figure out the right amount of error to put in the questions. And this is true of spacing as well as drawing questions. And perhaps most interestingly, it's also possible to just ask a question that's not answerable. This is a mistake that I made early on in giving these quizzes. I asked whether in the text here, whether the straight sides were too loose or too tight or whether the round sides were too loose or too tight. And you can see there's clearly some kind of issue going on. The left side of this text looks much tighter and the right side looks much more open. So either the straight sides are too tight or the round sides are too loose. But because there's only straights and rounds in this text, there's just not enough information to answer the question. And what was interesting about this is that almost all of my students answered this and said that the rounds were too loose. But if we're basing this on the way that this typeface is drawn, it's actually the opposite. The streets were made too tight in that question. This is a typeface that's made for text so the spacing is pretty open. And I found this really interesting because one of the challenges of teaching type design is that it's really hard when you're starting out to anticipate how something is gonna look at a small size when you're working on it at a really big size. This is seen all the time when students try to draw punctuation, you know, you're working on punctuation pretty big on your computer and it looks like a period is big enough. But then when it's at a text size, that period is too small. And this question to me was sort of like the negative space equivalent of that punctuation problem because when students are working on a typeface and it's large on their computer, it might seem like that tight spacing is gonna look fine. But when it gets small, it's just gonna, everything's gonna crash into each other. And I had noticed that my students were spacing everything really tight at first, even if they thought it was supposed to be for text. So asking this bad question kind of helped me to think through why that was happening and I worked through it. So I track students' progress over the course of the term. This kind of helps me to see where students need help so that when I meet with them in class, I can kind of tailor my time with them towards what they need help with. And on top of that, I find this to be fun. I don't know if my students feel that way, but to me it's fun. And here are a few of their projects. All right, thank you very much.