Thursday, 3 May 2018

OUGD603 - Typeface design - Development and Production

Once I finalised the designs in illustrator It was time to refine the type in a font software. Prior to this I knew of the main softwares which turn a your designs into a functional type. Glyphs and FontLab are the industry standard so I looked more into both options to see which one would work best. From research into Glyphs, it showed how simple the workflow can be between Illustrator and Glyphs, with the software almost mirroring Illustrators control panels etc. Additionally, Glyphs offer a one month free trial to test the software, and from a chat with Orlando about the effortlessness of Glyphs I decided to pick this over FontLab.

One the best features as mentioned above is being able to import from Illustrator straight into the software. It may be a great feature but from research it does have it's downsides, such Glyphs needing a better curve quality than Illustrator can provide. Although, tools in Glyphs do help you achieve a higher outline quality, especially when it comes to curved segments. However, the type I designed in Illustrator is rigid with no elaborate curves so I hoped to not clean up paths in Glyphs.



Before jumping into Glyphs I made sure use a useful tool in Illustrator which would clean up my designs. Using the shape builder tool I combined all the paths into one shape, so once I imported it into Glyphs the paths would disfigure.




Importing from Illustrator to Glyphs is as simply copy and paste, then once the paths are imported I had to resize the type and adjust the individual kerning for each letterform. Compared to Illustrator Glyphs is far more precise, as it allowed me to see small faults in the paths which I could see in Illustrator. Correcting faults is simple as it highlights each with a red circle then you simply have to backspace the fault until it automatically aligns with the other paths.



I fine tuned each individual letterform, number and glyph numerous times and tested along the way using the built in type tool which allows you experiment with the kerning.





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