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How to Design Arrows
Typographic arrows serve as a mirror for a typeface's identity, requiring careful optical balancing to maintain stroke consistency across angles.
What: Designers Andrea Biggio, Caio Kondo, Francesca Bolognini, and Valerio Monopoli from Pangram Pangram discuss the technical challenges of creating coherent arrow glyphs. Key considerations include maintaining stroke weight at 90-degree intersections and ensuring arrows align with the optical feel of the parent typeface.
Why it matters: Arrows are no longer supplementary; modern OpenType features and design expectations make them a core requirement for any professional font family.
Decoder
- Glyph: An individual character or symbol within a font.
- OpenType: A cross-platform font format that allows for advanced typographic features like contextual alternates.
- Contextual alternates: OpenType features that automatically swap a glyph for a different version depending on the surrounding characters, such as converting --> into a single arrow symbol.
Original article
Typographic arrows, though visually simple, function as a mirror for the entire typeface.
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