One of the crucial and most experience based challenges while designing a typeface is finding the right spaces for each single letter. It is a game of give and take between singular forms that have to be united in a continuous flow without interruptions or excessive narrowing. It trains the designer’s feeling for rhythm and teaches him about the importance of blank space.

Spaces are the backbone of a character’s rhythm. But it’s deeply linked to the rhythm between forms within the letters themselves. Only if a typeface has the correct rhythm within its single parts it may catenate in a perfect line. And even between those lines vertical rhythm of its single parts grants the success of keeping them together to create a harmonious surface. A type designer which has undergone such a training is highly doted to work with text in general. He is able to connect parameters as a text block’s width with its lines’ length, font weight and font size to determine the success of a page.

Such rhythm gives him insights which weight or “color” a text needs to adapt to not irritate the eye in sizes too small or too big. As he knows about the needs bigger typefaces have to get thinner in color and narrower in line contrast to keep elegance. As well as he is trained enough to know that smaller typeface sizes need more weight to not shimmer before the eye or get unreadable.

Alignment of a typeface means to be aware of the fact that round forms have to grow more below or above an imaginary line that horizontal forms more clearly determine. As a round form looses blackness and in an optical illusions seems to be higher or lower relative to a straight line when looked upon with an eye “out of focus” while slightly closed. A typeface designer painfully learns about these optical effects and automatically will be able to use it more generally in any type of graphic composition.

A typeface designer knows about history. He has to. So with time passing he learns about similarities that letter forms have even skipping between historical periods. He is trained to recognize subtle familiarities between a 1930 newspaper typeface and a classicism style as in french Didot. In most cases a typeface designer will develop an exceptional, yet unconscious feeling which letter forms may match each other in the combination of fonts.

Last but not least, each undertaking in art that needs to be based on a wide spread historical knowledge likewise an excellent piano player, will develop a certain “taste” which comes from years of experience and respect towards what others did before him. It is mostly accompanied by something that we even might call humility. If a designer succeeds to not succumb such experiences while keeping alive his very own personal spirit then such taste may lead him to greater results in general.