Once you have selected the Pen Tool, go to the Top Left corner of your window. The FontSelf extension actually makes that quite easy.Ĭlick the Pen Tool in the Toolbar, or press P. Once it’s ready, the FontSelf window should look like Figure 2.īefore we can make a Glyph Alternate, we need to make a Glyph. Open Photoshop and Create a New Document.Īt the top of your screen, go to Window > Extensions > FontSelf MakerįontSelf Maker sometimes takes a while to boot up, especially on its first time. For the other parts see here: Part1, Part3, Part4.Īs before to follow this tutorial you will require:įontSelf Extension for Photoshop and/or Illustrator. If you're designing a text font for general readability, you may want to go further and design the rest of the extended character set, but know that that will be a lot more time consuming.This is part 2 of a 4 part series. So I tend to create all the characters and punctuation on an American keyboard. I stopped doing it for the later ones because it was too time consuming and most of my fonts are display fonts. You don't want to copy a full character, but there may be a specific style of ascender/descender/serif or whatever detail you hadn't thought to try.įor my first font, I designed extra European characters with umlauts and grave accents, etc. If you think a character design doesn't look creative enough, browse similar fonts to the one you're designing for ideas. It's preferable to design all characters at the same size since resizing from a freehand design may give you different proportions for different characters. If your font design is simple, you can reuse characters you've already designed as a template for others, like making a b a reversed d. I discovered early on in my designs that messed up anchor points on characters may be easier to spot when the characters are rendered in 3d with depth. It's not absolutely necessary, but I like to render my fonts as 3d text in a 3d modeling program like Autodesk Maya. Check the x and y coordinates to make sure anchors line up if you expect them to form a straight line, etc. If you create compound shapes (unite, minus front, intersect, exclude) in Illustrator, check the anchors to make sure the characters are rendered the way you think they are. When using illustrator, it's preferable to use as few anchor points as necessary to render the characters. My process is to design in Illustrator then export as svg to import into Birdfont. All latin letters have different width, the kerning is hands down the single most time consuming thing you'll face. Interlinear space, kerning tracking and leading are what kills a font. In the PC version it's once, but the linebreak is twice as witdh as is the interlinear space. Spaces: I love what Reddit did here, because to insert a linebreak in the mobile version of Reddit, you have to linebreak twice. Some fonts forcefully add serifs in the uppercase i/I to ensure differentiation, like the one Reddit uses (Which, considering this is a discussion forum, readability and a well organized text is quite important), just make sure that every single character can be spotted at first glance and with the bare minimum effort. Make sure to have the most important characters not lacking, you can check some character maps of other fonts similar to that of yours and see what characters they cover.Įnsure readability: I couldn't believe it until I saw it myself, but some fonts don't even have a differentiated glyph for the 1 and the lower case l/L. Make sure to have as many characters as possible: When a font is lacking a character, it can either show a square, question mark, etc, or use the unicode version of it you don't want it. That's about the stuff that shouldn't be missing, now, my typography teacher also had some standards she taught us when picking fonts you may wanna make sure they are covered up if you want them to pick up your font: Well basically the basic guideline sin typography: Respect the anatomy of the letters, respect the constructive lines, have an objective and that's about it xD
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