In my last blog post I wrote about doing test prints with specimen sheets and looking at typographic color. It dealt primarily with the basic Latin alphabet and figures. Now I'm ready to push into accented characters, expanding the Latin glyph set to include greater language support. In this post I document what I did to add diacritics to my Protest font in FontLab VI, [...]
In the last blog post I wrote about how I space a font in FontLab VI using the Tracy Method, based on Walter Tracy's 1986 book, Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design. This time I'm going over how I test that spacing and look for areas of improvement. The ideal for the font (for most any font) is even typographic color, and that's [...]
Last time on the blog I wrote about what it means to space a font. I also made an introduction to the Tracy Method, based on Walter Tracy's 1986 book, Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design. If you haven't read that post yet, I highly suggest reading it before diving into this one. In this post I'm going to continue spacing my font, [...]
Last time on the blog I went through the whole process of taking digitized glyphs from Adobe Illustrator to FontLab VI. It was kinda long, because FontLab is powerful, but has some quirks. In this post I'm going to start the process of spacing my font, beginning with the overarching principles and methods. I'm including the mistakes I made so you can hopefully avoid those [...]
In my previous post I walked through my process of digitizing hand drawn glyphs. For a typeface that's supposed to look hand drawn like Protest, digitizing using Adobe Illustrator's Image Trace seemed to yield the best results. In this post I'll go over how I moved from Illustrator into FontLab VI. Standardize Digitizing To Make Importing Easier Remember those guidelines I'd been using when I [...]
Now that I'm finished drawing all the glyphs for my Protest font (for more on that, see my last 38 blog posts), it's time to digitize! I'd be lying if I said I drew everything over the last year and just now started digitizing. I've been digitizing as I go in order to make the featured images for my blog posts. Digitizing as I go [...]
The previous post in this series deals with round and symmetrical forms including the dot, umlaut, ring, breve, and macron ( ˙ ¨ ˚ ˘ ¯ ). Here in Part 3 I'll cover marks that appear below the letter, including the comma, cedilla, and ogonek ( ̦ ¸ ˛ ). I'll also throw in the slash and tilde ( ̷ ˜ ), because they're the only [...]
Part 1 of this Diacritics series covers the acute, double acute, grave, circumflex, and caron ( ´ ˝ ` ˆ ˇ ). These marks are the ones that are built with diagonal strokes and asymmetric forms. This post, Part 2, deals with round and symmetrical forms including the dot, umlaut, ring, breve, and macron ( ˙ ¨ ˚ ˘ ¯ ). Perky Little Dot I [...]
The previous series of posts focused on mathematic symbols, with the last post covering four Greek derived math symbols: Δ ∑ ∏ π (delta, sum, product, and pi). This three part series discusses most (but not all) Latin–based diacritics. This post covers the acute, double acute, grave, circumflex, and caron ( ´ ˝ ` ˆ ˇ ). These marks are the ones that are built [...]
Part 3 of this series was about the radical, integral, partial derivative, and infinity signs (√ ∫ ∂ ∞). This final math symbols post, Part 4, covers four Greek derived math symbols: Δ ∑ ∏ π (delta, sum, product, and pi). The only constant is Change The uppercase Greek delta symbol (Δ) is used in mathematics to denote a change or difference. Delta, being an [...]
