Hello everyone,
When you are drawing your glyphs in your font software, do you only draw one master at the time, or do you draw all of the masters? For example, when you've drawn your 'a', will you then move on to the other master to draw the 'a' there, as well?
—Mads
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I've found that since all of this 'data' so to speak is so interrelated that each master or even a particular instance can influence important glyph or spacing adjustments. With so much time spent working on each master sometimes it is an instance that you see fresh and notice something unseen prior. For me, I prefer to sort through these changes at an earlier, rather than later stage. For instance, your drawing of 'a' in the thin master informs a subtle change in your black 'a' master and that change is reinforced by what you see across all instances and vice versa. I move progressively in this way through the basic characters into the more advanced characters while using the Robofont testing feature along the way to test the fonts in real time among my preferred design applications.
Of course, this depends in part on how many axes and masters one has.
If I had an axis that was less fundamental, I might be inclined to do that a bit later. Yet, for any axis/master, whether more fundamental or not: if I am doing it all along, rather than adding it all in one go, I find I am more likely to catch some issue or subtlety sooner—in terms of how many glyphs I have done on that particular axis/master. So that is a good incentive to doing all masters/axes sooner.
When my vision of the typeface is weaker, or less fully conceived, whether I benefit from more from more glyphs or more masters depends on which aspect is less fully realized in my head—that is the one I should work on next. Not the one for which I know better what I want from it.
* * * * *
This reminds me of something I always hit when teaching type design to beginners, which I have done a fair bit of. The beginner is usually tempted, once they have the n, to immediately make the m, h, and u. And similarly with other letters, as soon as they have one member of a group, fill in the rest.
But in fact, their best bet is to do the opposite: just get one representative of each key group (ok, maybe plus a full set of vowels so you can do more real words). Work with those and use that to work out your issues, before you propagate those key designs onwards.
* Whether I immediately have the heaviest weight depends on whether I can do that without optical adjustments. Sometimes the boldest that is necessary for interpolations needs adjustment in the heaviest weight, for example with more monoline designs. In such cases, an intermediate master may be needed, at least for some glyphs. I might avoid that complication at first by not immediately going as bold as I want to... at least not for the first short while.