Building a Custom Typeface With Just Enough Personality

1. Welcome To Class: What is Up Skillshare we are out here. My name is Harber Bickmore. Today we're going to learn how to building a custom typeface with just enough personality, check it out. All right, now that we got that spice out of the way, this class is for graphic designers looking to get into type design either to open up a new stream of revenue or just add another creative tool to your repertoire. Either way, that being said, you do not need to have any previous experience in typeface design. This is an introductory course. However, experience as a graphic designer will go a long way. If you've used tools in Adobe software, Photoshop, Illustrator, that'll go a long way because the same tools are found or similar tools in the Glyphs Mini software which we'll be using in this course. So let's talk about key skills. The key skills that you will learn in this class are going to be first and foremost, the ability to design a typeface, capital and lowercase from A to Z. But with those skills, you'll also learn a few things along the way. You will learn how to use the Glyphs Mini software, you will learn an efficient workflow that will help you create typefaces faster because time is money baby. Finally, we are going to learn the anatomy of type. We don't have to call anything a thingy anymore. We're going to learn what it's all called. With this skills, you will be able to design your own custom letters, words, and typefaces for the rest of your design career. Now you may be thinking to yourself, "Designing all typeface I got to do 1,500 to 60,000 glyphs all from scratch is going to take 1000 years." That is not the case because I'm going to show you a few simple tricks that's going to make your life super easy and you'll be amazed how easy it is to design your own custom typeface. I am obviously very excited. I hope you are excited as well. Let's get into the next video where we talked about the project. 2. Class Project: Congratulations, you made it to the second video. Can I get a Woooh? All right. I didn't hear you, but I'll assume that you get it at your house. Let's talk about this class project. It is going to be first, you will choose a quote that you like. Then you will dissect the personality of that quote. What is it saying, and how is it saying? Next, you're going to interpret that personality into a Typeface. I'm going to show you where the personality lives in a Typeface. Where to stand out and where to be reserved. Finally, you're going to set that quote that you chose in the Typeface that you pay in a beautiful poster to show the world, simple. Now, that being said, there are a few things that will help you succeed in this class. First and foremost, do not be afraid to pause, rewind, and re-watch where you need to. I know this class is going to cover a lot of information, and it might seem like a lot the first go around, but that's okay. If you pause it, rewind it, and re-watch it as much as you need. If you follow along as I'm going, it'll be a breeze. Next are the resources. The resources for this class are a very valuable. I designed a cute little e-book that has everything that this course covers, but in an e-book form. It goes over type anatomy, letter spacing, and all that jazz more in depth. That's something that you can have for the rest of your life and you use as a reference whenever you build a Typeface. Not only that, but I'm going to include the Typeface that I designed for this class, for free for you as a gift, just because I like you. If you want to use it and give me credit, that's cool. If not, then that's cool too. That's the beauty of a gift, because we are friends. Last but not least, post when you are working on in the class projects. If it doesn't look perfect, that is perfect. That's why you get feedback. You'll get feedback from the community and me, and I promise you that one of the most valuable things is feedback in type design. Before we move on to the next video, make sure you download the type instructions PDF, and we are going to talk about type anatomy. Catch you there. 3. Type Anatomy: Video number 3, we get started here real soon but first we need to talk about type anatomy. Usually, when someone talks about type anatomy, they hit you with this. We are not going to do that. You have that information in the PDF which you can download. For now, we're going to talk about a very very basic overview of the groups of letters. They are as follows; first, we have straight glyphs that consists of the lowercase i, the lowercase l, capital I and the capital H. These are basic building blocks that your whole type phase will be based off of. After the straight glyphs, we have the round glyph. You already know what we're talking about. We're talking about the Os, the Es, the Cs and such. After the rounded glyphs, come the shoulder glyphs. Shoulder glyphs are very exciting. Let's talk about the h, let's talk about the n, the m, what have you. After the shoulder glyphs, we're going to get into the glyphs with arms and that's easy, that's just the capital L-E-F-T and I never left out of that. You know what I'm saying? Moving on from the arm glyphs, we have the angled glyphs. The angled glyphs consists of everything that has an angle. We're talking about the V, we're talking about the K, we're talking about the W and the like. Finally, the group with no rules, the rebels, the odd balls. I'm talking about the S and I'm talking about the G, and I'm talking about that a lowercase, of course. Once you can identify these groups of glyphs, your life is going to be so much easier. Very cool. The only thing we need to talk about now before we get cooking on this class project are the guides. Guides are very important and will go a long way in defining the personality of the typeface. So let's get into those. 4. Guides: In type design, there are five guides that we need to worry about. They are as followed. Number 1, the baseline. The baseline, is where all of your letters sit. If you look at the x and the capital X, you can see they rest exactly on the baseline. Whereas rounded glyphs, or pointed parts of glyphs, hang slightly under the baseline. Next, we have the x height. The x height is the height of the letter x. This dictates how tall your lowercase letters are. Again, notice on the rounded glyphs, there is a slight overshoot of where the x height is. After the x height, a little bit higher up we have the cap height. This is the height of the capital letters. Again, rounded glyphs should overshoot this height a bit. Next, we have the ascender height. This is the height to which the lowercase letters with ascenders reach. You'll notice on this b, it slightly overshoots because it has appointed top. Next we have the descender. The descender guide, dictates how far down below the baseline letters with descenders drop. You can see the p ends in the serif, but again, if there's a curving element, it should drop slightly below the descender. When you are building a typeface, you should make the decision as to where these guys will be placed. A typeface with a tall x height will be easier to read at smaller scales. It will also have more presence. A lot of the times the cap height and the ascender height are the same heights. These are decisions that you need to make. One thing to keep in mind is when you are using the glyphs mini app, when you open it up, the default height between the ascender and the descender is 1,000 units. The descender by default drops 200 units below the baseline and the ascender 800. 800 plus negative 200, well, in this context equals 1,000. When you are adjusting the guides of your typeface, one thing that I like to do is make sure that the ascender and the descender always equal up to a 1,000 pixels. If I want my ascender height to be 700, I'll want my descender height to be 300. If I want my ascender 900, I'll want my descender 100. The x height and the cap height, you can move freely without affecting the overall height of the typeface. This is an important concept because no matter how many units tall your typeface is, if it is typed out at 12 points, it will be the same height from ascender to descender as any other font typed out at 12 points. The only other guides we're going to worry about, which are present in the glyphs app are these; those are your side bearings. They appear to the right and left side of the letter. This indicate where the letter begins and stops. Not necessarily where the actual drawing begins and stops. That's a new concept. Each letter that you draw not only has the positive space, but the negative space around that letter defined. It's important to pay attention to these side guides and the side bearings or the negative space on the left and right of your letter, in order to achieve a consistent spacing between your letters. Now that we've talked about the guides, we got all the background information out of the way, we are well prepared to start in on this project. Catch you in the next video. 5. Type and Personality: Ooh, maybe we're getting close to building this typeface. But before we do, we want to talk about personality. We want to talk about what a typeface does to us. It has been said that a typeface is like the clothes that words wear, and I fully agree with that. Picture me, well, maybe not, let's pretend I didn't have no clothes on, I would still be me. I would still have a personality. But with these clothes, you can see that it adds an extra layer. You know, I got glasses so I'm blind. I'm wearing black, so I must be a designer. This and that. If I was teaching this class wearing a hard hat, a bathing suit, and some pool floaties, you would be a little confusing. You wouldn't know what's going on, and that would add a whole new meaning to our interaction. So how does that work in the context of time? Let's take a phrase with a lot of meaning by itself, "I love you." Now you can see here, I love you, set in this typeface, wearing these clothes. What extra meaning does it add? Honestly, not a lot because this typeface is so mundane. The advantage of this, is that the personality of what is being said is the start of the show, not necessarily the clothes that it's wearing. If we change to look something like this, it changes a little bit. It's a little more modern and will be a little bit boring. If we change it again. Oh, now that's an I love you with the personality, you're thinking it's probably written by a woman, with her hand, in a letter, to a loved one, as a more romantic vibe. I love you has a whole different meaning. Again, if we change the clothes, something like that. Now it's not necessarily romantic. Now it's playful. Perhaps you're going a little bit of retro vibes. It's the same words, but it has an extra layer of meaning than more playfulness that wasn't present in the previous examples. If we change it again, that`s even different, that's a little bit of irony going on, because that was written probably by a computer, who is not capable of love, and that is very sad, but that's the reality of computers, I'm sorry. So you can see that depending on the typeface, depending on the clothes that a phrase is wearing, it can take on different meaning. So in the next video, I'm going to show you the quote that I selected, and how I'm dressing it up, how I want it to be read. Where I'm taking inspiration from. It`s very exciting. I'll catch you in the next video. 6. Choosing a Quote: You already know what it is. Ambition is beneath me. So after that little display, my quote is going to be from none other than Mr. Kanye West. He says, "I do not like the word ambitious. The word ambitious is beneath my abilities. I am just a doer." Knowing that little thing, let's talk about how I'm going to take out the personality of this quote. The obvious thing would be to just build a big, fat, bold, massive, condensed, take up the whole screen typeface. But I never liked doing the obvious thing is a designer and I hope that neither do you. What I'm going to do is I am going to first take an overall bird's eye view. I'm going to say, I want to make a typeface that is pretty legible. So I'm not going to go too extreme on anything. That being said, I also want a typeface that can be versatile and used for displays. Now I'm going to look at the quote itself. So we can see a few things here. This quote is talking about lofty ambitions. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the x-height in the guide and I'm going to raise it up. What effect that's going to have is the lowercase letters will take up more room and the overall typeface is going to look bigger and bolder, just more presence to it. Along with that, what I'm going to do is raise up the, quote unquote, visual center of the typeface. You'll see what that looks like a little bit later on the lessons. Now looking beyond just the quote for inspiration, I'm going to dig deep a little design research into the man who said the quote, Mr. Kanye himself. Lately, when this class has been released, MR. West is converted to Christianity and there's one thing we know about Christian typefaces. They are never sans-serif. So I'm going to make a serif typeface. Another thing I'm going to play with this typeface inspired by the man, not necessarily the quote, is the stress of the typeface, the difference between the thicks and thins. We all know Mr. West has his highs and lows. I'm going to visually represent that with thick thicks and thin thins in the typeface. Again, not go into extreme because I want it to be legible. Finally, I'm going to play with the axis or the tilt of this typeface. I'm going to make a little bit off access because, hey, let's be real. Sometimes we can be a little off kilter in this life and Mr. West is no exception. That's kind of what I like about him. You know what I'm saying? That's why I like this quote. It's a little bit abrasive, a little off kilter, a little bit ambitious and what can I say? Something about that just gets to me. Now that I have the overall idea of a display typeface that's still legible, that's tall, that has a presence, that has a high stress, that has access, that is serif, I can start building a typeface and as I'm building out parts, I'm sure that the building process will give me more inspiration. That's the beautiful thing about type design, is so much of the form is inspired by actually creating the letters. So before we move on to the next video, you're going to need to download the Glyphs mini software if you have not already. Now there's a free trial, you can use it for a month. If you fall in love, you can purchase the full thing and it's not too hard on the wallet. Nothing that you can't pay for with one typeface easily. I'll catch you in the next video where we give a brief overview of setting up your document. 7. Opening Glyphs Mini: Here we are. We're opening up Glyphs Mini. If you are opening up Glyphs Mini app for the first time, I know it can be overwhelming looking at new software, but don't worry. I'm going to show you what you need to know and nothing else to get started. We're not going to overwhelm you here. This is an introductory course. The first thing that we're going to want to do to set up our document is go up to the top left, click this eye icon. It'll open up a new Window. In this window, the first thing we want to do is name our font. I'm going to name mine "YE" after Mr. Kanye. I'm going to call this a display typeface. Cool. We have a name. The next thing we're going to worry about here is the Cap Height, x-Height, Ascender and Descender. We talked about this in the guides. I want to make my x-Height the little bit taller to give my lower-case letters more presence, make this typeface field bigger. I'm going to leave my Descender and Ascender the same. I'll go 800, negative 200, and I'm going to raise up the Cap Height just here to give the capital letters a little bit more presence. With that, I'm happy. I can go back to the Font Window. We open up the Font Window, and by default, if you just open up Glyphs Mini app, this is what you get. Uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and little bit of punctuation in one space. That's awesome, but for this video, we're not going to worry about numbers. What we're going to do is, we're going to delete them. We click the "0", hold Shift, Click the "9", and on this bottom left, you can see this minus. It's going to ask it for sure. We are sure. We deleted all the letters. These are the characters that we are going to work with. Now, let's say in the future you want to open back up this project and continue further. You want your typeface to include numbers. That's what this menu here, this panel on the left is for. We deleted our numbers, but we want it back. We can click "Numbers", click this little drop-down and over decimal, this is the numbers that we've just deleted. You can control, click on that pill. It will bring up all of our options, 1 through 9 and 0. If we click "1" Shift, click to "0" and generate, we now have these in our typeface. If we go back to all, we can see 0 through 9 back again. Again, we're not going to worry about them in this tutorial, but for future reference. The next thing we're going to look at right here is what to do with all of these letters. We have the capital letters here, lowercase here, and how do we edit them? Editing a letter is as simple as double-clicking into it. Let's say we want to start with the "I". Double-click into it. It'll bring up a Window up here where we can edit the "I". I'm going to close that. Now, let's say I want to do more than one letter. I can click the "I". Let's say I want to do also the lowercase "l". I can command "click", both of them are selected now. If I do command "down arrow", it'll open up both those letters and I can edit either one of them. This panel here on the right, we're going to get more familiar with as we start actually building letters. We're going to worry about that in the next video. 8. Building Your First Letter: So we're going to start with the straight Glyphs and the first letter that we are going to draw is the lowercase i and that lowercase i will give us the basis for the lowercase l, The I, and the capital H. All right. Now, for now we're going to worry about this lowercase i so let's click into it and you can see right away this brown bounding box. So what this is, is our guidelines. We have the ascender height, the x-height, the baseline, and the descender height. For the H we want to make the body stretch between the baseline and the x-height. So in order to do that, we're going to get this rectangle tool. You'll notice our cursor changes into a box, indicating that we got that active. I'm not going to worry about the width because, I'm going to change it down here. We're going to go a 120 pixels wide, and 600 pixels tall. All right. Awesome. So let's switch tools, and now we'll add the jot above the i with the circle tool. What we're going to do here is, just click once and it's going to bring up this dialog box. We're going to go width 174 and height 174. That's quite a bit wider than our body but for this particular font, we're going to be okay with that. Because, remember the quote, "Ambition is beneath my abilities" that's a big headed quote. So we're going to go with a big headed I. If you click V, select your selection tool, then we can move this into place. Now we're going to want to align this to the top of the ascender height. Now one thing that is awesome about Glyphs, are these little diamonds. You can see when a brown diamond is surrounding a point, it means that's lined up exactly with a guide. So awesome. We're lined up with the guide here and just because this is a rounded shape, we're going to want to overshoot the ascender height a little bit. So I'm going to move it up ten units. I'm going to hold Shift, hit the up arrow once and that'll move it up ten units. All right. From there we can zoom out and preview our letter by holding down the Space-bar. That's a beautiful i. The only thing we need to do now is add the serifs. So the serif consists of two parts, the actual serif and then, the bracket which connects the Serif to the body of the letter. So we're going to start by drawing the serif. I'm going to click F to get my rectangle primitive tool. If you click F and it brings up your ellipse tool you can simply click shift F, to switch between your ellipse and your rectangle primitive. So we have our primitive, we're going to click and drag and define the size here. I'm going to go 284 pixels wide and 24 pixels tall. Awesome. I'm going to select my selection tool and move that to the baseline. You can see my points are lit up, so I know they're exactly lined up. Now one thing I want to do is center everything. So in order to do that, with my selection tool active, I'm going to click and drag over my whole letter and you recognize this tool right here on the right. So we want to center our line there. Okay. Everything is nice and center aligned, let's hold to preview it. Awesome. Now let's add some brackets. To add the brackets, I'm going to come up here to the pen tool and select that. Now this is just like the Illustrator Pen tool, more or less. We're going to click to add points and then connect our path. Switch back to the selection and I'm going to drag these points so they match up here. Now, if we preview, we can see that this is a straight line, but we want it curved. So how do we change it? In Glyphs app, if you hold Alt or option, and then click the path, you'll see these two handles appear and you can click and drag them to make a curve. Now that we have our curve made, we want to copy and paste it. We can do that by double-clicking, holding Alt, and dragging the letter. Okay. Let's zoom in, make sure it's lined up. It's lined up. Now we need to flip it horizontally. So we're going to go over to this panel again on the right, flip horizontal. Boom, and it's done, beautiful. We have our bottom serif. All right. So now that I have the serif at the foot of the i, I wanna make a wedge serif at the top. A wedge serif is different, in that it's angled. So in order to do that, I'm going to start the same way with the rectangle tool and I'm going to give it a height of 27 and three. That's a good starting point for width. I'll have to adjust that later I'm sure. Now in order to angle this, what are we going to do? We're going to come over here, look at this right panel, and there's our rotation tool. 42 degrees I'm going to rotate this. Why? Because Mr. Kanye West was 42 years old when he said that quote and that is exactly the reason why I'm doing this. Sometimes you don't want to be so obvious with your inspiration, just weird little things like that to set it off. Zoom in. I'm going to line these points up just because and then if I preview the letter, that's look in like I obviously need to drag this down. Taking care to make sure that I don't move it to the side and then this looks a little long. So I'm going to drag that in. Okay. Now I'm going to add the bracket for this one, the same way I did. P for the pen tool. Draw my little triangle, V for the selection tool, drag my points back to where they want to be. Option click this line, and then drag the points to where I like them. Click Space-bar to preview and look, we got a problem here. What is up with that? So this is one thing that's very important. One thing that differs in the Glyphs app compared to Illustrator, and that is that paths have direction. That direction is indicated by little arrows on one of the points. So this triangle indicates that this path is going counterclockwise, this path is counterclockwise. This path, however, is clockwise, and it is therefore knocking out sections of the other paths. In order to fix that, we can select everything. I'm clicking and dragging over everything. You can go to the Glyphs menu and you can do correct path directions. Or Command Shift R. Command Shift R is much quicker. So with our paths corrected, you can see no overlap, weird, everything is working good and that is that. We officially have our first letter drawn. Feel free to congratulate yourselves. In the next video, we are going to finish the rest of the straight letters. It's going be so much quicker than drawing this h, because we won't have to start from scratch. You'll see. 9. The Straight Glyphs: Okay, very exciting. We're out here. In this video, we are going to draw the rest of the straight glyphs. I'm talking about the lowercase l, the capital I, and capital H. Like I said before, these letters are going to be so much faster than drawing the I. With the I, we had to make a lot of decisions, what do our serifs look like? How wide is it? How tall is it? This, that, the other. With these other letters, we already have so much established. We're going to be able to copy and paste a lot of these elements and we're going to fly by. You're going to see. In order to add more letters, we go up here to this T on the toolbar. We click that and you can see now we have a cursor where we can type. If you simply type on your keyboard, I'm going to go lowercase l, capital I, capital H. If we double-click into one of these letters, we can edit them, when we double-click in this lowercase l. This box right here will indicate what letter you can see on lowercase l. You can see on capital H. The lowercase l is simply the body of the eye extended up to the a center height. That's super-simple. What we're going to do is click and drag, command copy, and then click into the lowercase l. Make sure it's highlighted down here, check it's right. All right, then we're just going to Command V and we can paste over these elements. We don't need this jaw so I'm going to double-click a path to select the whole object, simply click delete. What we need to do now is drag all these points up until they reach the a center. I'm going to shift an up arrow until boom, I want this point to be hitting the guide just like how I have it in here. That point is hitting the x-height, this point is hitting the A center. That my friends is it now. To make the capital I, we're going to do a very similar thing. I'm going to select all these points here, command C, command V to copy and paste, and I am going to simply delete what I do not need. I don't need that, and I don't need that. The difference between a capital and a lowercase letter is in the width of the stem. If we click this ruler tool up here, we can click and drag and it will show us the distance between points. We can see in the middle here 120, but because this is a capital letter, I'm going to want to make it a little bit wider. I'm going to hold shift right arrow, move everything over 10 units and now 130, that looks good. I'm calling that wide enough, hold down space bar to preview. That looks good to me. Another difference, of the capital I is that the serifs are slightly more pronounced. I'm going to go 123456 points over here, I'm going to go 123456 points over there, and now it's a subtle thing, but these points are slightly more pronounced. You may have guessed already in order to get the I, look in how we want it, we simply select everything. We're going to command copy, paste. It pastes exactly in place. Then we're going to go over to this menu on the right and we're going to flip the shape vertically. This blue dot in the center of this box indicates that the shape will flip relative to the center of its bounding box. We don't necessarily want that, we want it to flip relative to the cap height. I am going to select this. The shape will flip along the center of the cap height, and that's perfectly what we want. Boom, we flip it. Let's do a little trick here, If we click a path and hold Alt Delete, it will delete the path without trying to fill it in. What we can do is simply click and drag this point. If you drag one point on top of another in the glyphs app, it will automatically connect to create a new shape. It looks good but just in case we're going to select everything and we're going to do command shift R to correct path directions. That looks good. We can move on to the next one. The next letter is the H. I'm going to show you one more way how to add parts and pieces or whole entire letters into a new letter. Control-click brings up this menu and I can add a component, that's exactly what I want to do. It'll bring up this menu where you can search for different components, you can type the name of a letter. I want to do a capital I. Here it is, make sure it's selected, boom. My capital I is a component inside the H, but I can't move it, I can't do anything with it and that's a problem. In order to be able to move it, you control, click on the component and you can disable automatic alignment. That's what we want to do. We can move it to our heart's content. The H obviously consists of two capital I's super-easy. I w ant to copy-paste, click and drag it over to about this. With this H, we will establish the overall width of each letter of our typeface. This H is slightly more narrow than the standard H, but that's on purpose, because this quote that we're using, ambition is beneath me. That's a lofty, high minded quote. I want to make a high, tall letter. This H is going to set the precedent for how narrow or wide my letters are going to be. Lastly for the H, I need the crossbar. I can do that. Click F, get my rectangle tool, boom. I want to make it at 34 pixels tall or worse will say just for kicks, preview it. That looks good. If we preview this, we can see that the crossbar is about in the visual center of the H, which is usually a little bit higher than the mathematical center. I said that I want to raise up this visual center because of this quote. I want it to seem like a tall, high-minded typeface. What I'm going to do is take the letters that have a visual center and I am going to simply raise them up. How tall? This tall, seems fine. Maybe we go this tall. Yeah, that's not too much. I don't want to be way up here. I mean that's just way too try hard. Like I said, I want it to be still a very legible typeface. Everything I do, I'm not going to take to the extreme. I'm just going to tastefully do it. That looks good to me. What we're going to do now, because this is something that will carry across between other glyphs, and we don't necessarily have a guide where our new visual center is going to be. The thing is, we can make the guide very easily. If we control-click, we can go to, add guide. You'll see we have a blue guide with a little circle here. If we click that circle, we can move our guide and I want to move it just so it lines up. You can see my points are highlighted so I know it's lined up exactly,and now we have our guide. The problem is if I click into another glyph, our guide is gone. We need to make this guide global. We can do that again by highlighting this little circle, control-click to bring up our menu and make global guide. This guide is global, so when I click into another letter, it will still be there. The last thing I want to do with this guide, is I want to lock it so I can't accidentally move it. Again, with the little ball highlighted, we control-click on top of it and we lock the guide. With other letters that have a visual center, we'll be able to keep a certain consistency. Last but not least, you may have noticed that the H is outside of this bounding box, that's a problem, but is a problem that can be fixed very easily. You see we have these two values, 49 and negative 93. They indicate the bounding box compared to the furthest left or the furthest right pixel of the letter. I'm going to change this to match 49. Our H is in the center of our bounding box, and that is exactly what we want. With that, we can type our first letter. Let's go back up to this type tool and hit return, and we got Hill, H-I-L-L. You may notice that the spacing between these letters is a bit weird. The H and I are closer together than the two Ls, and that is going to be a problem later on. What we need to do is we need to fix the spacing of our typeface. That is exactly what we're going to explore in the next video before we move on to drawing a couple more glyphs. 10. Letter Spacing: On to the next, before we move on to more drawings, is important that we establish a spacing of our typeface. Just like how you need to design the actual letters, you need to design the space in between each letter. Let's talk about how to do that. Let me type out a line of H's to figure out this spacing. Right now, the spacing seems a little bit loose. This is a display typeface. The spacing in between each letter can be a little tighter than it would be for a body copy text. Let's click into this and see what we're working with. Let's look at our measurements down here. This and this are called side bearings, the side bearing is the space between the guide of the letter and the furthest point to either the right or the left of the letter. There's the right side bearing right here, left side bearing right here. On the letter H, they happen to be identical. This is too loose, I'm going to knock it down to 30 and I'm going to knock it down to 30. That's still looks a little loose for me, so let's try 20 and 20. That's looking a little bit better. To someone else, they might not like it. That's why it's important to get feedback from a lot of different sources. Now, that I have that established, let's do the spacing for the other letters. We'll start with the i because it is simply the same as the age. Now, I could type 20 and 20 here, but what if I decide later on that I don't like the spacing of the H? I would have to change the spacing of the H and I would have to change the spacing of the i's as well. One of the awesome things about GlyphMinnie is that you can type equations into the side bearings. Instead of simply typing 20, I'm going to type Equals H and Equals H. Now, if I change the side bearings of the H, it will also change the side bearings of the i. That is a beautiful thing. It will save you so much time to type in these equations. Let's go over quick to the i. Now, because all of these letters look pretty much the same, for now, I am going to make them all the same side bearings as this H, with L equals H and equals H, perfect. Now, when we go down and see here, we can see that each letter has a beautiful space in between it, and the word looks consistent and looks even and looks not to tie, it looks not too loose and we can springboard from there, remembering that everything will be related to the letter H. We only need to change the side bearings of the H to have the side bearings of our entire typeface change. 11. Shoulder Glyphs: Moving on, the next thing we're going to worry about are the glyphs with shoulders. Now the glyphs with shoulders are all established by the letter n. Let's click into that. Now, like with other glyphs, we can borrow components. We are going to borrow from the i, double-click into it. I'm going to do command A to select everything. command C to copy, click into the n, command V to paste. I'm going to select that and delete it because we don't need it. I'm a poet. Now we have the left side of the n. To get the right side, we're going to copy components again. We'd like the stem, we'd like the brackets and we'd like the serif. Copy and paste them and move them over. You know what? I am going to move them so they line up exactly. We'll see how that looks. Again, like I said, building the letters, you'll receive inspiration as you go, and that's one thing I love about typeface. Maybe it'll work out, maybe it won't. But I'm going to ride the train and see where it takes me. The next thing I need to do is drop down this bar. I want these points to line up evenly. I can use my align tools here on the right. Select them and move them down 100 units at a time by holding command and down arrow. Let's go. Let's go there. We can see here now it's 300 off the baseline. That seems good to me. Now, in order to draw the shoulder, I need to consider a few things. The main thing I'm going to consider is where it connects to the n. Is it going to be up high? Is it going to be down low? If it's up high and it'll have a strong horizontal stress. If it's down low, it will have a strong vertical presence. You already know about this lofty quote. We're going to go for that vertical presence. We're going to connect our stems low. Low? Maybe we try connecting our stem exactly at this visual center and see how that looks. Again, just building the letter, you'll receive inspiration along the way and you ride that train and see where it takes you. In order to build the shoulder, I am going to get the pen tool by clicking P. I'm going to draw some points here. That's a rough shoulder. But I need to make these curved. I am going to alt, click, alt, click, and one thing I want to do is line up these points. I'll select all three of them, line them up. Now the top of the shoulder should hit just above the x-height. I am going to do 15 points above the x-height. These, I want to line up as well. Again, with these tools. Round these, line them up, line it up. Now I am going to connect these points. Oh, so one thing we got here is this is a very abrupt bump. I think for this typeface, I want to round it off. I think in an interview somewhere I heard that Kanye likes circles, and things that are around, and so I'm going to go with that. He built those domes. I am going to build my own dome of the n. I'll click and drag these points out till I find something I'm happy with. Well, I said I want to try connecting it there. That's seeming a bit abrupt. Again, I'm just clicking and dragging these points, massaging them out to find something I like. You know what, this angle looks close to this angle. I am going to see if it really is. I'm going to add a guide. Control, click. I'm going to add guide. If I click this guide, I can adjust the degree. I want to do 42 degrees because we know that that's what that is. Forty two, yeah. This is close. But we'll see if we can get it closer. I think I want to raise this up. I'll want to make this stress equivalent to the thin stress and the typeface. If I get my ruler tool, I can see that's 37. That's close. I like that. We're really close here. I'm going to massage this until it's perfect. I must spare you the nitty-gritty details, and then we got me back up. We're back. If I hold the space bar, I got an n I'm happy with. It doesn't line up exactly with this, it doesn't line up exactly with that, but we tried. Again, sometimes a train doesn't take you far. However, I did keep this little noise and even made it slightly smaller than what it was. Before we move on to the other letters, we need to do one more thing. Set the side bearings. The side bearing to the left of the n is going to be the same as it is to the left of the i because they're so similar looking. However, the right side of the n backs off a little bit here. That will give it more visual space. We want to make the right side bearing of the n slightly smaller. Now I could just type 10 and have that, but that's going to be a problem. Because if I change the spacing of the edge, I'll need to change the spacing of everything. I'm going to type an equation. I'm going to type equals h times 0.5. That way it will be half aside bearing of h. Now to test it, I'm going to type a couple ns, a couple is, a couple hs, and see how it all looks together. I'm happy with that spacing for now. We can move on to the other glyphs with shoulders, starting with the m. I'm going to type it out and click into it. I'm going to command click, add a component. I'm going to add the n. I want to add this second half of the n on the end of this m. I could do that by clicking this, clicking this, copying it, pasting it in, moving it up. Oh, excuse me, moving it over. But there's one problem with that. If I move the n, you can see that it changes the m. That is because it is a component. However, this is not a component. But I want it to be a component. But I don't want this stuff, this little stem of the n. What is there to do? Don't worry, there's a solution. I can delete that. I can delete that. I'm going to click into this n and I'm going to select the shoulder. If I hold Control click, I can make a component from a selection. I'm going to do that and I'm going to name it, shoulder. That way this path turned into a component. When I edit the component, it will edit the whole path. Clicking back into my m, again, these are the same for now. Make sure you are on the m down here. I'm going to add another component and I'm going to search for shoulder. There it is. Now I will control click it, disable automatic alignment so I can move it around. I will do just that. This I'm pretty happy with. I'm sure it will not be changing. I feel good. Simply copying and pasting it into place. Let's move it over until we are lined up more or less. Now we want to check our measurements. I want the counter space of both of these holes to be the same. I'm going to grab my ruler and drag it across. I'm at 217 on the counter on the left and I'm at 221 on the counter on the right. I need to move it over four pixels. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Make sure this is lined up. It is. Let's change the side bearings equals h and on this side equals h times 0.5. That is the m. Let's move on to the h. The h is as simple as it can be. Double-click into it, add a component of the l, then add another component of the shoulder. Again, disable automatic alignment, move it over. Let's get this part of the n pasted in place, 217 is what we're aiming for, 240. Way off. Move that so it lines up exactly. Check it, 217, we have our h. From here, I'm going to move on a lot faster. You know, most of the basic concepts you need to draw the rest of the letters, and I'm going to show you simply how they relate to one another and leave you to draw them on your own. Because like a little bird, I'm kicking you out of the nest and I know that you will fly. 12. Shoulders Part 2: This is our team of shouldered glyphs, let's check it out. You can see double-clicking into the U, that is just an N flipped upside down but instead of having normal serifs, we have the wedge serifs. The R also uses the body of the eye and references the shoulder of the end, but not exactly. I ended mine in a ball serif with a pretty big ball because, again, that big headedness we wanted to go for. The F has a little bit of a mind of its own with that shoulder. Just try and do your best to make it reference the shoulder off the end. Now note that the crossbar extends further on the right than the left side to fill in some of this negative space. The T crossbar usually lines up with the F crossbar but I didn't like how it looked in my situation, so I didn't have to do it. I made the rules, so I can break them. Again, this little curve should reference the N. In thickness, I decided to go with something similar to the thin strokes that have already been established with the crossbar of the H and the stem of the F and the T. Capital J is very similar to the lowercase F, but keep in mind that because it is a capital letter, we'll get our ruler tool. We can see it as a 130 pixels wide at the stamp rather than a 120 of the F. The serifs are also slightly more pronounced and with that, we have all of our shouldered glyphs. In the next video, we are going to tackle the rounded glyphs. 13. Round Capital Glyphs: Now, that we have the straight glyphs, we have the shoulder glyphs, let's get cooking on our rounded glyphs. We're going to start with the capitals, and we're going to start with a capital O. Let's double-click into it. The first thing that we need to worry about with this O is what elements are involved. It's a rounded glyph, so that's new. We have to decide how wide we want the rounded circle to be. Let's double-click into it and check it out. The height is already going to be decided for us. We have our cap height and we have our base height, and we wanted to overshoot each one by 15 pixels for this typeface, I'm going to say. First things first, let's draw a circle. Get my primitive tool, start from the cap height, go down to the base height. Now, I'm going to select each one of these points and go down 15 pixels, up 15 pixels, and get a little overshoot. Okay, we like it. Now, we need to worry about the width of the O. How do we know how wide to make the O? Well, everything is relative to that H. Let's add an H to the mix, hold Control click Add Component, we're going to add the capital H. Now, what we're going to do with this capital H, because right now, it's a little bit in the way, we're going to send it to the background. You can send something to the background by clicking it, and holding Command K. Now, if I delete the H, you can see that it's copy is in the background as guides. I can't move them or edit them, unless I go to the background. You can switch between the foreground and background by Command B, or going up to the menu, Glyphs, choose Edit Background. But Command B is much quicker. Now that we have the width of our H established, let's change the width of the O. I'm going to double-click. I'm going to use these down here. I'm going to increase the width until I get something that is a little bit wider than the width of the strokes of the H. Maybe I want to be about there. That looks pretty good to me. I'm going to want to center this. For now, I'll do 2020, I'll be changing that later. We have our O, we're happy about it. But we need a center. Otherwise that just is a big old dark situation. We need to add another circle to give us a counter space. How are we going to do that? We could click and drag another circle here, and eyeball things, but that's not what we're going to do. We have an easier way. We are going to double-click this path to select the object, copy and paste. Now, we have a copy of the object exactly over top. Now, we are going to go up to our filter menu and do offset curve. You can see that it's set to 135, negative 135 and negative 36. Now, that's perfect. How did I get these numbers? If you remember the width of the stem of the H is a 130. Now, because this is rounded and it tapers towards the ends, I want it to be a little bit wider than the vertical stroke, so I went with 135. This 36 comes from this 34. Again, that's rounded, so I want to make it a little bit wider to compensate visually. I like that. I'm going to click Offset. Now, I want to hold down the Space bar. Oh, we have a problem. The O is not knocked out. If you remember, our paths have directions indicated by these arrows. They're both counterclockwise. In order to fix that, so the O knocks out, do Command A to select everything, Command Shift R to correct path directions. Now, you can see this one's running clockwise, while this one's counterclockwise. If we hold down Space bar to preview, the O has a counter space. But the problem with this counter space is it is super abrupt, and not rounded at all? In order to fix that, I'm going to show you one of my favorite things about the Glyphs app. That is the fit curve tool. This panel here on the right is the fit curve tool. We have everything selected, and if we hold Space bar, we can prove our letter. Now, if we click these different buttons, we can see that the curve of our letter is changing. Eighty percent is going to be almost a square 100 percent, and that is airy square. We can change these values up here. I generally leave them between 60 and 80, and for this letter, I like the 60 percent curve. We have the width of our O, we have the stress of our O, the last thing that we're going to worry about is the axis, or the tilt of our O. Instead of tilting the whole entire letter, if we tilt just this middle circle, it'll give the illusion without throwing it off balance visually. To do that, I'm going to select this inner circle. I'm going to go to this tool here on the right panel, 10 degrees is a good place, and I like that curve. Let's check our measurements, 143, that's a little bit wider, 150 has a little bit wider than what I had originally anticipated. But again, with type, everything is visual, not mathematical. If I type an H next to the O, that looks good to me. They look like they carry about the same way. The last thing to worry about are our side bearings. In order to check the side bearings, I'm going to type out a few Hs on either side of this O. Now, if I zoom out, I can see that the space between the Hs is a lot looser than the space between the O. Sometimes, I like to blur my eye a little bit to make sure. Another thing that will help with spacing is this eyeball tool down here. As you see, you can open it, and it'll bring up just a small little string of text that you can make bigger or smaller. If you do it small, it helps to gauge another perspective. Instead of 20, again, I want it to be an equation relative to H, I'm going to do equals H times 2. I'm going to do equals H times 2 here, 40. That looks good to me up here, it looks good to me down here. Maybe in the future when I experiment more, I will change that. But for now, I like 40. Again, you have all the skills you need little bird and you can fly. I'm going to show you the key parts and pieces that make up each letter, and trust that you can build them on your own. After you do, we're going to worry about the lowercase rounded glyphs. Here we are with the rest of the capital rounded glyphs. Let's click into the Q to see what's going on. You can see the Q is simply the O, with a cute little tail. The tail of the Q is somewhere where you can be extremely expressive. Let's not overdo it as amateur, doing this and that, with the tale, we know it's an exciting element, but let's not go crazy. There are a bunch of different ways that you can handle the Q. I would suggest looking at other typefaces, seeing what you like, and adding something that will fit with your typeface. For the C, you can see we have an O in the background and the C very closely relates to the O, a few little adjustments are made so that the C doesn't look like it's falling backwards or forwards. Another thing that's common in the capital C is to add a vertical serif on the top. I thought, and I experimented with the 42 degree serif, but in the end, I really didn't like how it looked, so I broke my own rule again with that angled serif, and I only did the vertical, not the 42 degree serif. One last thing to consider with the C is the aperture. The aperture is the opening right here between the top and bottom. For the capital C, I decided to go with the straight crossed cut rather than an angled cut, and I went with a semi-open aperture. However, you can see on the G, I broke my own rule and made that aperture super small. That's because I wanted to, again, have something to play with with that visual center. I decided to give this arm of the G a little bit of expression. Now again, I pasted the O in the background, and it follows very closely the angle of the O with a few deviations, just so that will look balanced to my eye. Moving on to the D, the D gets its width from the capital H, as you can see, slightly overshooting it like the capital O does. The D consists of the capital I and half of the O, now you're going to have to do some adjustments here. The main thing to worry about is this right here. The overshoot. The overshoot is going to be more subtle than the overshoot of the O. It's going to have a very subtle taper into the end of the I. Same here on the bottom, we have that subtle overshoot. The D is going to take some visual adjusting, and just testing with your eye until you have something you are happy with. Moving on to the P, the P, as well as the B and R later on, get their width also from the capital H, but they are slightly more narrow than the capital H. The P normally has a much lower bowl, maybe something that would look like this. That's a good P. But because I'm the master of this typeface, and I've decided that my new visual center is up here. I'm going to continue that motif with the P. The stem is just capital I. Now, normally moving on to the B, you would use the bowl of the P for the bottom half of the B. That is because the bottom half of the B should be ever slightly bigger than the top bowl of the B. However, because I broke the rule here, I'm just going to continue the same bowl of the P for the top bowl of the B, and invent a new curve for the bottom of the B, saying B and P that many times in one sentence, Hallelujah, that was difficult. I'm going to pat myself on the back. Moving on to the R. The R normally is not just a copy of the P with a leg. But in my situation, that is the case. Normally, the R has a smaller top bowl that echoes the top bowl of the B. In this case, however, the top bowl of the B and the top bowl of the P are the same. I can simply copy and paste the P into the R. But remember, this is not the norm. This is a decision that I have made. Just to reiterate one last time, normally, the top bowl of the R is the same as the top bowl of the B, and the bottom bowl of the B is the same as the bowl of the P. Moving on, one last thing. The leg of the R, like the tail of the Q, is open to interpretation. I would suggest looking at other typefaces, see how they handle the leg of the R, and decide on what works for your typeface. Moving on, finally, the U, there are no hard and fast rules for this bottom curve of the U. Know that the top curve is just the top of the I copied and pasted. However, on the right, we introduce a new element, the narrow vertical stroke. The narrow vertical stroke, if we get our ruler, is 40 units wide. Now, if you remember, the horizontal thin strokes are 34 units wide. That is because visually I want them the same way, and a horizontal stroke will appear thicker than a vertical stroke. Therefore, mathematically, the vertical stroke must be slightly thicker than the horizontal stroke, in order for them to appear the same way. One thing worth noting is that the serif from the stem to the point is a 123 units. That is the same distance we have here, a 123 units. Before we move on to the rounded lowercase glyphs, I'm going to remind you to take care of spacing. I will not cover it here, but in the PDF download that's available on the resources, you can look at the in depth spacing for each letter. Now on to the lowercase rounded glyphs. 14. Round Lowercase Glyphs: We have made it to the lowercase rounded glyphs and from here on out, we are going to cook on gas. Let's click into this and we'll see what's happening. This lowercase o, much like the capital O, is going to use all the same tricks, but the width is going to be derived from the n, not the capital H. It goes up to the x-height, shoots up by a few pixels, down to the baseline, shoots down by a few pixels. Pretty standard stuff. The only thing that you need to pay attention to is that the stroke of this right here is going to be about 125 pixels, that's in-between the stroke of the lowercase letters and the stroke of the capital letters. Again, we want to visually achieve the same stroke with and in order to do that, because this is rounded and tapered, we're going to make it 125 pixels wide as opposed to the normal 120. That is on the lowercase glyphs. Moving on to the c. The c as you can see is derived very closely from the o. We have the o in the background here to keep us in check. Now, if we hold space, we can see a few differences. The o has a bowl terminal here at the top. In order to make this bowl terminal, I used a circle that is smaller than the jot of the eye, 127 pixels. The jot of the eye was just a little too heavy, so I made this a little lighter and again, I connected it with a bracket. The aperture on the lowercase c, I decided to open up a little bit. I kept trying to make it echo the c, but in the end I think an open bracket is what I'm going to go for. Again, I'm going to test it and adjust this and that accordingly, but for now I landed on this open bracket. Moving on to the e. The e is a very important letter to get right because it is the most commonly used letter in the English alphabet. That lowercase e, you're going to see it more than any other glyph. That being said, you want to give it a little personality so it can distinguish itself from an e of another typeface. A good place to do that is in the eye. The eye is this little counter of the e. For my e, I decided to make it have a little teeny eye and I liked to line it up with my visual center I created, so that is that. Again, I'm closely tracing the o but compensating for a little bit of visual this or that. The goal here is to make the letter not look like it's falling forward or falling backward, but nice planted on the baseline. Moving on to the b. For the b, I copied the stroke of the l, but clipped off the bottom serifs and replaced it with this little spur. The spur you're going to see in a few glyphs, but this is the first place we're introducing it. For this spur, I decided to go with that 42-degree angle and I made it come to a point. Sometimes, a spur will be cut straight like that. In my case, I wanted to echo the top of the wedge serif and have it point out and jot back in just a little bit. Another notable thing on the bowl of the b, the d, the p, and the q, is that this is not a perfect copy of an o. If we add the o component, control click, add component, let's find the o. I'm going to line it up best I can, Command K to send it to the background. Now if I delete that, you can see that this left side of the o is pushed in and what that does is it makes the joint right here a little bit smaller. If this were pushed out all the way, that joint is a little bit thick and I am not down with that. I wanted to have a little bit deeper of a cut here. Now let's talk about the d. The d is not just a mirrored copy of the b. If you notice, the stress of the bowl and the stress of the bowl of the b go the same way. Again, I skinnied up this one arm. Note the connection here, that is a different joint than the joint that's on the b. Another notable difference is that while the d uses the l for the stem, it does not have a regular serif on the bottom, it has a tail. For this tail, I simply copied the wedge serif on the top. In another situation, I wouldn't have been able to copy the wedge serif from the top, but because my wedge serif just looks so taily, it just so happens, I'm able to copy that and put it onto the d. Again, moving on to the p, this is our first descender. We are going to line up the bottom of our stroke with the descender. The main stroke of the p is just a copy of the l with a few adjustments given so that it lines up with the descender and the x-height. Again, the bowl is not an exact copy of the o. I changed it so this joint is a little more delicate. Now, if we look at the q, we can see that much like the p, it is just a copy of the l that reaches the descender and x-height. However, this top serif does not exist, instead we have a spur, much like the spur found on the b. Again, a little bit of adjustment was made so that this joint is a little more delicate. With that, we have all of our rounded glyphs and we are ready to move on to the glyphs with arms. I'm talking about the capital L, E, F, and T. I will catch you in the next video. 15. Glyphs With Arms: We have made it to the glyphs with arms, L-E-F-T. Now, you can see that these are very similar to the straight glyphs, and they all use the capital I as a component for the main stroke. Let's click into the "L". If we zoom in, we can see that the arm, double-click one path to select the whole object, is 34 pixels tall. Now, that is a little bit taller than what our serifs are. In order to make up for that, I drew a new bracket here that evens out the space right here. Without this bracket, things would look a little bit abrupt, has a sharp angle and we don't want that. We draw the bracket there to compensate. Normally, this would have a vertical serif, but because 42 is a thing, I've decided I have an angled serif as 42 degrees. Last but not least, the overall width of the L is similar to the width of the P, the B, and the R, that is more narrow than the capital H. Now, let's talk about this E. Clicking into it, we can see that it is essentially the L copied and pasted up top here. One thing I did that I didn't mention on the L, is I put a bracket right here. Without it, it just looked a little too sharp and I didn't want that sharpness present in this typeface, so with that little bracket softens that curve. Let's look at this middle arm. This middle arm normally is in the visual center of the letter, normally, something like that. But because I've established the new visual center, I'm lifting that up. Moving on to the F. The F is essentially an E without the bottom leg. But the key difference here is that, this middle arm, or I guess the bottom arm of the F, is moved down slightly. That is done to compensate for so much negative space under the F. I could leave it up and have it like that, but it just looked a little too uptight for me. Instead of lining up the bottom bar, I lined up the top bar with that visual center. Finally, moving on to the T. The T is again, the eye with two arms from the E. These arms are, you'll notice, slightly more narrow than the arm of the E and the F. That's because this T has so much presence up top, I did not want to look into, top heavy and wonky and too far away from the other letters. I made the T slightly more narrow on the arms. With that, easy as can be, we have the glyphs with arms, and we are ready to move on to the capital angled glyphs. 16. Angled Capital Glyphs: We are getting close. We are about to tackle the capital angled letters. We're going to start with the V, which is the basis for all of these letters. Let me double-click into it. The first thing we want to establish is the width of the V. We do that by adding an H in the background. Command Add Component, make sure that H is selected. We have an H, very beautiful. I'm going to Command K to send it to the background, then delete it. We have the beginning width of the V. In order to start making this V, I'm going to steal from a few other letters, mainly the U. Let me type out a U. Select everything with Command A, click into the V. Command V to paste everything and I'm going to delete what I don't need, which is this bottom bump. Now, we have our two arms and I'm going to set the width to the width of the H. Make sure that's lined up. Perfect. Let's select everything over here. Make sure this is lined up. Perfect. I'm happy with the width. Now, it is time to angle these arms. But before I do, remember that horizontal strokes appear heavier than vertical strokes. These are going to be halfway in between horizontal and vertical, which means 135 ain't going fly. I got to change this down too. I'm going to go 120. That way when it's a little vertical, it should appear the same width as a vertical 130 unit stroke. Let's test it out. This one, 40 units, I think that will probably be all right. One way to find out is simply testing. I'm going to grab these two points and I'm going to move them to roughly the center. Then I'm going to grab these two points and I'm going to make it so the point on the left lines up exactly with this point on the left. We hit it. Let's focus down here on the bottom, we have this little overshoot part that I don't like, so I'm going to fix. How I'm going to do that? I'm going to click P to have my pen tool active. Wait till this little plus sign shows up on the cursor. Click to add a point, switch back to the selection tool and I'm simply going to do that. We'll love it. One thing to consider with the V is whether you want it to end, poked out or cut flat. I'm going to cut mine flat as just a personal preference. I don't really like a poked out V. If you do poke it out make sure you overshoot the base by a little bit. The next thing to consider with the V, are the serifs. Let's zoom in a little bit. We can see now that this serif, 123 pixels across is perfect and matches the other serifs. However, the serif on the outside, we want to move in just a little bit. We want to do that so that the V can sit closer to the other letters. The shape of the V is pretty weird and there's a lot of negative space on the bottom of it. By moving the serifs in, we can put this letter closer to the other letters and not have so much weird negative space. Right now I'm working with 120. I'm going to go about half that, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I'm going to try this and see how this looks. Again I got to fix my bracket here. Click and drag this. Click and drag this end. You can see here that I have this little white sliver where my points meet. That is not because my bracket isn't overlapping, that is because my bracket is overlapping but the path direction is the wrong way. Looks like I need to correct this path direction. I'm going to control click and reverse selected contours. Now it looks good. Do the same thing over here. Line that up more or less. We look good and I'm going to repeat that on this other side. I won't make you watch this time. I'll skip ahead until it's done. My V is almost done. I'm somewhat happy with how it looks, but I think it is too narrow compared to that U, the V looks pretty wimpy. What I'm going to do is click select all these and drag them out again until they are as wide as the serifs on the edge and see how this looks. Now it's looking a little bit wide. I'm going to back it off,1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ,9, 10. Shift clicked to 10 units. Now that to me is looking more balanced, so I'm going to go with that. Again I need to adjust these brackets, it's just a hair, and again I won't make you watch me do it. We have our V completed. It is looking so nice. The next thing to do is use this V to create our other glyphs. Again, I'm not going to draw them all out for you. I'm just going to explain the key parts because I know that by now you have skill enough to draw these letters. Here we are. The rest of the capital angled glyphs. Let's click into it and see what's going on. This A, super simple. It's an exact copy of the V, but rotated 180 degrees. Notice that the thin arm is now on the left and the thick arm is on the right. Normally with this cross-bar, I would put it at the visual center. Maybe something like that. Where the space here and the space here look about equal in volume. But remember my new visual center is up. If I were to do this on the top, that's way too little I did not like how it looked. Like the capital F, I queue it on the bottom of that guide. That is as simple as the A is. Moving on to the W. As you can see, the W is simply two V's copied and pasted and moved close together. Now in some cases, what people do is they will decompose this control-click, decompose. They will get the knife by clicking E, slice that arm, and then get rid of all these parts. They have a W that looks like that. That's fine. But for this typeface I wanted to keep both arms. I'm going to command Z to undo all of that. I don't know, I just like the two arms. One thing that I did do, is I added this smoothing little bracket here. Without it I just didn't like that pointy abrupt. I just did that to smooth it out. It makes this counter and nice teardrop shape, very smooth. Moving on to the M. For the M I copied the arms of the V without the serifs. For the left side, I used a thin stroke. You can see it's 40 pixels wide, the same as the stroke on the U. I threw on a half serif which is standard. Down here, I threw on a full serif. The arm on the right, is simply a copy of the I, but missing one serif. Sometimes you might need to adjust the angle of the V slightly, until you have something you're happy with. Again, it's all about the I. So just look at it, show other people get some feedback and find something you're happy with. The N is similar to the V, but a little bit wider. How wide? Well, that's up to you. I like to make mine about as wide as the edges as you can see. I think that might be. It's almost exact, but not quite. The width of the end can be dictated by the width of the H. With this angled stroke here, the important thing is that it is visually the same weight as the horizontal and vertical strokes not mathematically. If I pull out the ruler tool, you can see that it's only 109 pixels, whereas these are 130. But if I preview them next to each other, they look pretty close. Now looking at it this might need a little bit of thickness to it. Perfect. I like it. With the N, take note that both the vertical strokes are the thin strokes of the U with full serifs. There's no serif on the bottom right corner and a half serif on the top left corner. The K consists of a copy of the I for the main stroke. The arm is generally the stroke that protrudes from the body and the leg connects to the arm. Normally that happens in the middle, the visual center, but remember I lifted up my visual center. We have a K that sound like that. The width of the K is dictated by the letters such as the P, the B, and the R. Again, the serifs on the outside of this stroke are pushed in, made thinner so that the K can sit closer to other letters. The Z is another letter with arms, but it would have been tricky to construct without constructing first the angled glyphs. Even though it has arms we throw it in with the angles. The width of the Z is slightly more narrow than the capital H, more similar to the width of the B. If you'll notice from tip to tip on the base, we have 679 pixels, whereas on top here we have 614 pixels. The Z should be wider on the bottom than it is on the top, just to achieve a visual balance. Onto the X. What I like to do to construct the X is copy and paste the V. I keep the serif on the top in the same position that they are when I copied and pasted the V in. The serifs on the bottom however, are a little bit more spread out than the serifs on the top. Like the Z we're just trying to achieve a visual similarity of weight between the top and bottom. In order to do that we have to make the bottom half of the letter a little bit wider than the top half. One last thing to note is this crossbar. You can see that it is split and separated. The top portion is moved to the right, just a hair. What that does is it makes this stroke right here, appear as if it continues perfectly through. To construct the Y, I simply cut off the top half of the X and added the bottom half of the I. Very simple. Those are all of the uppercase angled glyphs in our set. In the next video, we'll tackle the lowercase. 17. Angled Lowercase Glyphs: All right. We are out here with our last group of letters, not including the oddballs, but they even in-group. They each do their own thing in proximity of each other. Moving forward, let's click into it and see what we got. Let's look at the v. It is constructed the same way as the capital V, using the same tricks, only it hits the x height. The serifs are not as pronounced as the capital serifs of the v, because they are lowercase serif, and the stroke is going to be slightly thinner than the stroke on the capital V. The w simply consists of two vs. Again, you can do the trick where he cut off the right arm or the left v but I didn't want to do that. Onward to the y. The y is constructed with a v, but you simply continue this stroke down into a little ball serif. You can see that it extends slightly past the descender to make up for that curve. Awesome. To the x. The x is constructed the same way as the capital X, but again, using these lowercase serifs and slightly thinner strokes. Again, the thinner stroke is separated and offset. Let's check out the k. The k is constructed much the same way. The arm is supposed to hit this x height. The arm is the stroke that connects to the body of the k and down here we have the leg. Again, make sure the serif is a little bit pushed in. The main body consists of simply a lowercase l. On to the next, z is constructed the same way as the capital Z. With that, we are done with the lowercase angled glyphs, as simple as can be. Congratulations, you've done most of the work. We got one more video of drawing letters, and then we can move on to the fit and the finish. 18. The Oddball Glyphs: We have reached the last group of letters, the odd balls, and I'm going to show you how to draw these tricky ones. I'm going to start with a capital S, double-click into it. I'm going to control, click and add a component. The shape of my S is going to be loosely based off the capital O. I want to send this capital O to the background by doing command K, and simply deleting it. Now I have my O, as a guide for the background, and the first thing I want to start with is my capital C because I want this serif at the top of the S to match the serif that I used on the capital C. Let me get that. I'm going to copy this whole glyph command A, command C, click into the S, command V and because I don't want this bottom half, I'm going to click E to get my knife tool up here, and cut it. I'm going to delete the bottom half of that letter. I'm going to cut it a little bit higher, and I can delete that. I have this top curve that I'm working with for now. I like it, it hits my visual center. Now I'm going to add a bottom curve, I'm going to do that by typing a capital O and borrowing parts from that. Again, I want to E for my knife tool and cut this. Now, I'm going to select the top part and delete it. If I hold shift, you can see I have a top loop of an S and a bottom loop of an S. What I need to do now is draw the spine that connects the two. This is going to be the trickiest part is getting this spine right. Let me show you how I go about it. I get my pen tool, select by clicking P and I draw a box. Wow, it's a hideous spine, but no need to worry. We are going to connect these points here, and now I need to turn these paths into curved paths so I will Alt click, and then using the selection tool, I am going to move these points up and down. Now that is an extremely skinny spine, I'm not too happy about it. What needs to happen? I need to thicken it up, and I can do that by first moving these points down a little bit, and then grabbing the handles and moving them up, moving this handle down. Same here, I'm going to move this handle down. Now you can see that right here, I have an abrupt turn and I don't want that. What I think I'm going to do now is connect these points together right now, they're separated. I'm not a big fan of that. I need them together so I can move them together. Due to that, I'm going to select this path, hold Alt and click delete, and then I have my second path. Same thing, I'm going to click it hold Alt, delete. Now I have two open paths. You can tell that they are open because when I hold the space bar to preview, they're not filled in. I simply need to click and drag the points together and they will automatically fill in. Now one thing you'll notice that these points are blue, that means that I can move the two handles independent of each other, but I want them to be green so there will be a smooth curve in order to change these from corner or blue points to curved points that will stick together. I simply double-click them. Now they are green. Now, you can see when I move one handle, the other handle will move in accordance. I'm going to do the same thing to these points here, just super fast. Select it Alt delete, select Alt delete, grab a point, arrow down then up, grab a point down and up, double-click, double-click. Now, when I move these points around, it's going to be a little bit smoother. I'll be able to work with them a little bit easier. That's what I want, that smooth curve going around. This one still needs some work. Pull that out, that's a little bit better. This one needs a lot of work previewing as I go along. I'm just going to massage this around until I get something I am happy with. We have an S we are happy with. One thing that I did here is I moved this slightly up from the x-height and move the whole entire spine up a little bit. Again, it gave me a higher visual center. I decided to thin out this bottom stroke to match the weight of my thin strokes because I wanted the bottom part of my S to take up more area but not necessarily more volume. It was looking a little too bottom heavy unless I thinned this out, and that is the capital S. For the lowercase s, I used the same tricks but made it slightly smaller, slightly more compressed. Again, taking care to make the width of the stroke, appear visually the same weight as the width of the other lowercase letters. Moving on from here, I drew out the g. For the g, I echoed the curve of the S more or less, but I gave it a little bit of a bump out just to give it more balance. Something that I thought looked nice, and that made the loop of the g. From there the next part to worry about is the neck of the g. That is this connecting part right here. I simply followed the curve, made it connect really thin, and as it came out I just matched the width of the loop. Next, I drew this little bow. I used the same technique that I did for the O, offsetting the inner path, making this and this have a good consistent visual weight. The last element to worry about is the ear, and you already know I took advantage of that 42 degree angle to construct my little ear. There we have it, that is the g. Last but not least, let's talk about the a. I have an a here. Now you'll notice if I type out the n, the shoulder of the a is a lot different than the shoulder of the n. Originally, I tried to go and echo the shoulder of the n on the a, but it gave me something like this. That is something that I was not really happy with. You can see it looked a little too thick, I could have thinned that out, but still this counter space was not open enough for my liking so I went with a more rounded standard shoulder here. Now, I didn't want to miss this personality of this sloping down 42 degree angle, so I echoed that in the bow of the a, and I even did a strong cut here to make a nice delicate joint. One last thing to know is that the a has a tail. This is the serif of the L that I copied and pasted, and with that all of our letters are complete. We have the two S' the g and the a, and give yourself a big congratulations, you completed all of the letters in the alphabet. We're so close to being done, before we are able to use this font, I'm going to hit you with the fit and finish of this typeface and then we'll show you how to export it so you can use it for your personal projects. Catch you in the next video. 19. Fit and Finish: All right, we have made it almost to the end of the line. We have drawn all of our glyphs. Now we just need that fit and finish. We have A to Z capital and lowercase. But let's keep in mind that we still are missing a few things. Were missing punctuation, we're missing numbers. All that jazz, but that's a lesson for another video. For now, we're going to be happy with A to Z capital and lowercase. There's a few things we need to do before we finish this off. Keep in mind that this is just round one. The real test and the real mastery of typeface design comes with testing, reviewing, sharing, and revising your typeface until you have something that you are totally happy with. My advice would be to type out a bunch of words, type out a bunch of sentences, just type everything and see what looks good. For the fit and finish, once we have our spacing, we're happy with, we can move on to kerning. Spacing deals with the space overall between the letters. This I'm more or less happy with, again, testing and revising will go along way. But because this video doesn't want to be hours long and days long and weeks long, testing and revising we're going to call this good. The spacing is right. Now, let's deal with kerning. Kerning is the space between individual letter pairs. There are certain letters when put next to each other, cause a lot of problems. For example, if I hit you with a capital Y before the A and a capital W after the A, you'll be able to see that this spacing is very different from my H's. Look at how loose this is. What do we need to do? We need to do some kerning. In order to do some kerning, I'll go up to window and select Kerning. Now that I have my kerning window here, I'll be able to see what's going on. If I placed my cursor to the left of the H, you can see that H is highlighted here. You can see faintly kern and kern. What I want to do is I want to change the kerning of the Y, change the kerning of the A. I put my cursor to the left of the Y and go down. This will be the kerning on the left side of the Y, which is fine next to that H. But we need to worry about the kerning on the right side of the Y. I am going to change this by simply holding down arrow, holding Shift. That to me, looks pretty good. I'm going to go with 90. Now, you can see in our kerning window here, we have our Y. If we drop it down, when a Y is next to an A, it will be kerned by -90. If I select, so the A is highlighted. You can see on the left side here it is -90. The software automatically knows when the Y and the A are next to each other like this, that there is -90 units in between. I'm going to go to this A and I need to change this side as well. I'm going to go something like that. That looks all right to me. Now we have a new space the A. When the A and the W are next to each other, we can see that -80 is the kerning. I'm going to hit you with a list of all of the letter pairs that I kerned. The key with kerning is that you don't want to go too crazy. Less is more. If your fit is good, if you're spacing is good, you will not need to kern a lot. If you find yourself kerning much more than the list that I give you here, then your kerning too much, you need to worry about the fit. One last thing with the kerning, do not kerning until you are extremely happy with the spacing of your typeface. Because if you change your spacing, you'll need to throw out all your kerning and kern again. Finally, you should be able to kern in one sitting. If it's taking multiple days, it's too much and you need to adjust the spacing of your typeface. You should sit down, be able to kern it all, call it good, wash your hands on this whole situation and have a typeface. Now that we're happy with our spacing and kerning, the last thing we need to do is export this typeface. To do that you simply go up to File export. Open type deals with fonts that had to do with coding and this, and that it's a little more advanced than what we want to get into in this lesson. We're not going to check that, we're not going to worry about it for now. We will, however, remove the overlap and auto hinting sounds fine. You hit Export, it will go to the destination you specify right here. You'll are graphic designers. I'm going to assume you know how to add a font to your computer to be able to use it. With that, the last thing we need to do is simply set our quote and our typeface. I'll catch you in the next video for that. 20. Set Quote and Celebrate: Skillshare. We are out here. We did it. You made a typeface. I shaved the little mustache. In my book we both have reason to celebrate. Before we are done here, obviously the last part of this assignment is going to be to set the quote in your typeface, and y'all are already graphic designers so I don't need to walk you through that. I'm just going to show you what I did real quick and leave you with the last parting words before I send you on your way, the young aspiring type designers that you are becoming. As you are watching me design this poster, I just want to talk you through a few more things before we are done. Like I said before, one thing that's going to be very valuable to you are the resources available included with this course. I made an e-book that goes over everything in this course and more. That will be an awesome resource for you moving forward with type design. Not only that, you can have this typeface that I designed here. It's just free to you if you want to credit me, awesome, if not, still awesome. I'm just glad that you like them enough to use it. Last but not least, type design is all about endurance. What separates somebody drawing letters from true type designer, is the ability to review and revise, and review and revise. When you're designing letters, make sure that you type them out in words, make sure you type them out in paragraphs, titles. However, when you use them, review them in that context. If it's printed, if it's onscreen, it's very important that you review and revise your work over and over and over until you have something you are entirely happy with. This alphabet that I've made here is a basis. I'm going to continue to review and refine it until I'm perfectly happy with it before I release it into the world. With this poster, I think I'm going for a type only vibe. I'm going to stick to black and white to let the type really be the hero of the composition. I'm going to go with the square layout because I want something that I can easily show off on Instagram. Just like that, bada bing bada boom, sweep it up with a broom and we have our poster. Now I don't just want to show you what I've done. I want to see what you've done so make sure to post up in the class projects. We can go look at your stuff, celebrate it together, figure out how we can make it better and we can build a community there. Again, type design is all about reviewing and refining your work until you are perfectly happy with it and it is ready to go out and live in the world. There we have it. We fought the bad guys, we saved the day, we made a typeface. I hope you continue on in your type design education. This is only the beginning. Catch you later. We'll see if I do catch him later.