Dear TypeDrawers, I am a young graphic designer who has been admiring the beauty of your craft for the last 2 years, now the moment has come when I also want to create font. An opportunity has come my way to create a font for a pc game created by my cousins. I have a general idea and understand the basic issues regarding fonts. I would like to ask you what is your process of creating fonts, how to be efficient and how to avoid beginner mistakes. Also I want to point out that I will use FontLab 8 for this so anything regarding FontLab would be also usefull. Thank you for your answers.
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And I use Fontlab 8 after working on Fontographer, Studio 5, Fontlab VI and 7.
I really think this is a good choice, even if I use Font Creator sometimes, specially as a proofing tool. "Glyphs" is not available on PC.
I just want to say that the FL8 manual will be soon available but you can use FL7 manual as a starting help.
I'm not a professional type designer, more an expert amateur. But I find here on this forum some good advice and some tricks, even if it's "sometimes" a bit garrulous.
For me, beginners' mistakes are:
- mimicking existing fonts
- not being creative (a bit the same)
- neglect readability
- not starting with good sidebearings definition and kerning too soon
- not working and revising ALL glyphs a lot of times, specially if you work on your own
And finally, not reading some good books like "Designing Type" by KarenCheng or "Type Tricks" by Sophie Beier.
I wish you success with your game!
My favorite book right now is this one:
https://stbridelibrary.bigcartel.com/product/how-to-create-typefaces
Cheng’s book is fine, but more a complement than a replacement for a more general good book. It has a LOT of material on specific characters, one by one, focused on western European languages.
Spacing (I would say the most common beginner mistakes happen in spacing, however, it is definitely something that takes time to get right. Setting your space character as too wide is all too common)
Spacing Blenny
Ohno Type School
other books: "the origin of the serif" by edward catich (helps understand why a lot of letters are the way the are), and "the stroke" by gerrit noordzij (a very technical look at how pens work / why pen writing is the way it is). you don't have to be a calligrapher but it definitely helps to know how the tools work. "counterpunch" by fred smeijers is also a nice one in that (and other) regards
The secret reason: the person who invented python (Guido van Rossum) is the sibling of a type designer and programmer (Just van Rossum), who created a key font-support library called “fonttools” that made it easy to do font-related work in Python. FontLab adopted Python back in the late 90s, and so did many other tools, font editors and libraries… it became a self-reinforcing system very quickly.
Moving forward, we will be seeing more font tools in Rust, for performance and security reasons. But Python is definitely the place to start, still!
P.S. “How to Create Typefaces” has the subtitle “From Sketch to Screen”; it is non-obvious, but Jeremy and I are recommending the same book!
I think this book, while famous, is wrong, and https://lettermodel.org is much better to explain why letters are the way they are.
But just from reviewing the table of contents, I can see that as you say, there is considerably more of the general/broad coverage that was missing from the first edition. Looks promising.
Broadly: In the second edition (white cover in USA, red in UK) of Designing Type, Karen Cheng took a book that was great as far as it went, and did a decent job of covering most nearly all the areas that were missing. This elevates the book from being a good choice as a second book to own on type design, to being at least a plausible candidate for one’s first book.
I am still a big fan of How to Create Typefaces: From Sketch to Screen
Unfortunately, its availability is limited. You need to order it by mail from the St Bride Library (see https://stbridelibrary.bigcartel.com/ for shopping), and shipping to the USA increases the cost from £24 to £37, but despite being a slim volume, it is very much worth having. Getting three complementary perspectives on some of the same issues is interesting and helpful.
- practice really does make you better
- have a unique selling point for your typeface that drives the theory behind the design
- refine your glyphs
- work non-destructively
- don’t try and cut corners with tools that aid in spacing and kerning because you need to learn these foundations
- relevant kerning strings you can find online help, but are often incomplete
- spacing is really – really – important
- kern only when spacing no longer makes things better
- don’t forget to kern punctuation
- learn about foreign languages and how they’re typeset
- learn about readability and accessibility
- learn about python and opentype features
- when you think you’re typeface is done, it probably isn’t
- sit on for a while
- test your typeface
- design with your typeface
- it takes time to find your voice, so don’t sweat it and just enjoy it