The Type Specimen as Design Exercise

The specimen is a way of knowing a typeface

A type specimen — a designed document showcasing a typeface across all its weights, sizes, and styles — is how type foundries introduce their typefaces to designers. The best specimens are themselves beautiful pieces of design. They're also, from a practical standpoint, the most efficient way to understand what a typeface can do.

I make specimens for typefaces I use regularly, not to replicate the foundry's promotional materials, but to answer specific questions about the typeface that matter for my work: what does this face look like at 8pt? How does it behave tracked tightly at large sizes? How does the black weight relate to the light weight — are they visually harmonious or from different design eras?

What to include in a working specimen

A working specimen for my purposes covers: all available weights in a sample phrase at display size; the complete character set including special characters, numerals, and punctuation; body text at 10pt and 12pt; headline type at 24pt, 48pt, and 96pt; tight and loose tracking comparisons at two sizes; and a comparison of the face reversed out of black vs. on white.

These tests are designed to answer the questions that come up in real production work. Will this face work for captions? How do its figures look in tables? Does the italic have genuine character or is it just an automated slant?

What specimens reveal about typefaces

Making a specimen for a typeface I thought I knew well has repeatedly revealed qualities I hadn't noticed. A typeface I was using for headlines because I liked its uppercase letters has lowercase figures that I found uncomfortable for body copy — a discovery that prevented me from specifying it for a client project where body copy was a significant element.

Conversely, a specimen exercise revealed that a typeface I'd dismissed as "just another grotesque" had a black weight of extraordinary quality — useful for exactly the kind of bold poster work I'd been doing with less interesting faces.

The specimen as a design practice

Making a type specimen is a design exercise as well as a research exercise. You have to make compositional decisions about how to present the type information. Those decisions require you to think about the typeface's formal qualities — the decisions the type designer made — in order to showcase them.

The process of making a specimen is itself a form of close reading of the typeface. You notice things through the making that you wouldn't notice through passive observation.

Building a personal typeface library

Over years of making specimens, I've accumulated a reference library of personally designed specimens for the forty or fifty typefaces I use most regularly. This library is one of the most practically valuable resources in my studio. When I need a typeface that handles a specific problem, I can reference the library rather than testing from scratch.

The time invested in making each specimen pays back every time I reference it.