Kerning! It’s the last thing one does before one finishes a font. That means I’m almost done with Protest! What is kerning? I expect if you’ve read this far in the series, you probably know. But for those who might not: Kerning is the adjustment of space between a specific pair of glyphs. While spacing is adjusting the sidebearings of a given glyph for all [...]
My last post was about adding lots and lots of alternates to my Protest™ font in FontLab VI. This time I'm writing about adding OpenType features to Protest. This includes stuff like language support and cycling through alternates. I’m only going to cover a portion of the OT features in this post, because there’s a lot. I’ll cover more in future posts as I learn. [...]
In my last post I documented what I did to add diacritics to my Protest font in FontLab VI. This post is about adding alternates to Protest. And there are a lot of alternates. However, having already added glyphs to FontLab VI, and having already added diacritics, the process is fairly straightforward. Preparatory Work In another blog post I mentioned that I'd been drawing and [...]
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 [...]
This is a three part series on how to talk about letterforms. Basically, it's a glossary. This second part covers Process, the terms for the ways letters are made. Part 1 deals with the Anatomy of Letterforms, what the pieces and parts are called. Part 3 is Categorization, the ways groups of glyphs are labeled by form and function. This is by no means exhaustive, [...]
This is part five of a five part series detailing how I interpret certain values using various letterforms. In Part 1 I shared the process I use to visualize a certain idea through letterforms. Today I am going through example number 4, Joy. Community Integrity Kindness Joy Note that the order in which I'm writing this is not necessarily the order in which I work. [...]
