Fast Fonts - Turning ideas into typefaces with speed and ease

1. What Makes a Font Fast?: It has gone. My name is **** County. I'm an artist and designer based in Southern California, usually a little bit sunny here than it is right now. Gray skies have decided to come in and perfect day for me to talk to you about fast bonds. That's not vast, vast, vast parts. It's entirely possible that I've had entirely too much coffee and to celebrate that, I'm going to have another set, but the purpose of this course, It's pretty straightforward. It's showing you how to create your own fonts, your own typography, for your own personal use, or if you wanted to sell it, to share it with other people. I'm here to show you how to make them quickly and get them into the hands of the people as fast as you possibly can. But let's be honest for a second, the technical aspects of how to design one of these typefaces, at least in the past, was a lot more difficult than it is today. Today we can create a typeface in 1 tenth of the time that somebody would do it in the past. So we're going to talk about the technical aspects of how to build a font from scratch. But we're also going to talk about the philosophy and the craftsmanship behind topography, at least from my limited experience of creating letter forms, I'm gonna graphic designer for over 20 years now, one of the things that I probably struggled with the most is lettering in general, drawing my own letters. It's not my forte. But I did learn a few things about what real typographers do in order to make their typefaces even better. I'm gonna share with you my knowledge on this, but I'm also going to share with you my resources that helped me along the way. So teach you a little bit more about the art form that is topography. But we're gonna keep it fun. We're going to keep it light. We're going to have a good time. And at the end of this, you're gonna have two different typefaces that you can use for your own personal benefit or didn't, like I said, sell it to somebody else, give it away to other people, use it however you want. As a kicker, you're also going to get the typefaces that I created. How's that for a bonus. So sued up strapping, grab yourself a steamy cup of something, and let's get to work, shall we? What would a fast months? That's not. 2. What to Expect: Here we're gonna do the remainder of this course here in the studio. This is what I call the shed. Here. On the contrary, quarter acre or the CEQA, as I affectionately have just decided to refer to the homestead. Anyway, in this video, what I wanted to talk to you about is what to expect after you've finished this course, the most tangible things that you can expect to get from this course is to new typefaces. If you follow along all the way through and do the work, you will have at least two new typefaces that you can use for yourself or give to others or sell or whatever it is you decide to do with that. That's the bare minimum. Actually, it's not the very minimum because I'm also going to give you the typefaces that I created. So you're going to have those as well. And that also includes the bonus type based that I created before, the one that we will talk about later. It's called bleed. It's the first time I ever created my own typeface. Give that one to you because number one, I wanted you to have it. Number two, I want you to be able to reference it because we're gonna be talking about that one. I wouldn't say extensively, but we're gonna be talking about it quite enough. That gives you some perspective on my personal experience with this hole font creation thing. There are lessons to be had, things that I've learned, the mistakes that I made that though, the answers to the questions that you may already have that I didn't have and I had to go learn myself. I'm going to share all of that. And it would be good to have the typeface itself as a reference so that you could be like, hey, I know what he's talking about here. There's the typeface. This is my brain trying to ingest all of this stuff, right about this moment, you're probably say new stuff. What did I get myself into? Don't worry, I'll tone it down a little bit, but just a little, but on top of the tangible things that you're gonna get, you're also going to have more understanding about typography in general. You're going to have a better appreciation for what it takes to build these things, but also the appreciation for how easy it is to make this stuff and how quickly you'll be able to regenerate new ideas on your own, not have to fret about the process because it isn't difficult. It's time-consuming, but it's definitely not difficult. And when I say time-consuming, I mean, it's not going to happen like that, but it will happen pretty quickly. We are going to be moving through this pretty fast. And I guarantee you that the most time-consuming aspect will be the time you spend writing out the different letters. There also be some time when you're trying to tweak and make it like make it make it just just just so you got to make it just so that'll take some time. But other than that, it's gonna be, gonna be moving in grouping, we're gonna be debited best fonts. I plan to have a good time this old time, and I hope you enjoy what we got going on. So if you ever have any questions along the way, you know where you can reach out to me to ask those questions because I'm sure you're going to have them and I'm gonna be here for them. 3. Downloads & Gear: Okay, Just a real quick note about the things that you're seeing listed below in this particular section. Number one is all the different typefaces that we just spoke about in the last section. There's also a list of some reference material that we're also gonna talk about in a little bit. So you can go ahead and check that out. There's gonna be the forms that we're gonna be using to actually write out our typefaces. You're gonna have a chance to do that on your own, but I've included them down there in case you wanted to get started. And I might throw some other things in there just for the fun of it. Things that might be helpful to you. I don't know what those are yet. So if you see some extra stuff down there, I'll probably will have done a new video that talked about those things too, but no guarantees. Just click those links and I promise every single one is going to be helpful to you. Maybe, Possibly, probably, maybe that's the introduction out of the way. Now let's get into the meat. Head on over to the next section so we can start talking about typography. 4. What is Type?: Okay, Let's talk typography. This is gonna be interesting to some, actually, this should be very interesting to a lot of you folks. And if you're an experienced designers, some of this stuff is probably going to be rudimentary, basic stuff. I don't want to get too deep into typography because it is an entire course unto itself. But I want to impart some wisdom to share my thoughts, give you some design theory regarding topography. And that way we, going into the next stage, we have a little bit more better understanding about what's gonna be happening next. If you have no experience with typography whatsoever, this is gonna be perfect for you if you have some experience with typography, but don't necessarily know all the nuances and things like that. Well then this is going to be new information, maybe some new information for you, or it's just me rambling on about something I geek out on a little bit. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, I want to talk about one clear distinction that we need to set straight right here and now. And that is the difference between a typeface and a font. These two terms get thrown out a lot. In fact, it's probably more ubiquitous for people to use the word font when they are talking about things. Because it's just one of the things that people just associated with doing stuff on a computer or whatnot. But they are not necessarily they're not alike. I mean, they are like there's similar. They are parts of one of another, but they are not exactly the same. The most basic way to explain this is that a font will always be a typeface, but a typeface may not always be a font, or fonts as the case may be. And before we even get into the difference between typeface and font, and let's talk about type. What is type, plain and simple? It is anything that is letter representation of language put onto something. If you type a letter that is type. If you write on a board that is typed, if you put letters into a design that is type, anytime you see letters somewhere in some fashion, that is type in comparison and maybe contrast. Topography is the deliverance of that type. When I write this stuff up on this board, this is topography in action. That's me creating typography when I start to type into my machine and create something on one of my design apps that is typographer. When somebody's hand lettering a chalk mural inside your local coffee shop. That's typography type is all the stuff that we see. The topography is the act of doing that thing. So then what's a typeface and what's a font? Helvetica isn't typeface. Helvetica Black is a font. You, Ciara is a typeface. The future of bold italics is a font. Arial, Georgia, Baskerville, Bodoni, stencil, factor. All of those are typefaces. And within all of those typefaces usually exists multiple fonts. But here's the rub. We're building a font for ourselves or to give away or whatever. That font is also a typeface. Now there have been people out there that have argued in the past that a font is really the digital. It's the vehicle for getting that stuff into the computer. That's the weight like, Hey, I've got this file that will allow me to type funny things in letters that I like. And that's relatively true. But these things were fonts long before the computers were ever invented. When you've went back and looked at old-school type setters, they had collections of different typefaces that all contained different fonts. Helvetica existed long before Steve Jobs decided to incorporate it into the Macintosh. That typeface and the collection of fonts within the typeface have existed since 1957. So yeah, it's been a font or typeface or both for a very long time. So why is font so much more ubiquitous than typeface? My best guess would be that it's just, that's the word that everybody uses when they go to Add fonts to their system, doesn't say typefaces, it says fonts. And so everybody thinks of font as the thing. When you go to other websites like 101 fonts or font shop or duff font, don't say typeface or 10001 typefaces. It just, I don't know, maybe it just rolls off the tongue a little bit better. I mean, imagine if I had called this fast typeface and trust me, I wanted to call it something typeface, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't have sold as well because people who had been wet, but font works, it is what it is. Most people are just never going to conform to the idea that what they're actually looking at is a typeface versus a font. And you probably don't care, but now you know it and now you are, you are doomed forever. To explain this to all of your non designer friends, trust me on this. They will be annoyed and you'll be smug. As you explain it to them. You're welcome. 5. The Superheroes of Typography: In this section here, this is gonna be a little bit more philosophical. We're gonna be talking about the superheroes of modern typography. A little bit op-ed, a little bit, a little bit straight from the heart conversation about the things that I believe in the people that I believe are responsible for what we're doing today in our computers or even whatever we do on paper or whatnot. I think that there's at least two men that are responsible for how we interact with type today. Now use the term superhero pretty loosely for this one because it's not like they're just men. But when I think about the relationship of like say like Batman versus Joker, I think about how Batman comes from this lawful good side versus jokers, complete unlawful evil side. And it's the Yin and Yang of those two. And I wouldn't, when I, when I think about these two men, not that they are diametrically opposed to each other and they hated each other, anything like that. It wasn't like that. They attacked the idea of typography from completely different perspective. First one I'm gonna talk about is probably gonna be a huge surprise to you. That would be Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs. Why is Steve Jobs responsible for modern typography? I don't know how much you know about Steve Jobs in his younger era when he was going to school. And he was learning electronics and technology and things like that. And while he was there trying to learn these things, he wasn't really super inspired by what he was learning. But at 1, he got involved in calligraphy, but he went to school at a different school to learn how to in an embrace, handwritten tight, believe it was actually a Jesuit Catholic something college or something. I don't recall the name of the month that actually taught Steve Jobs about typography or about calligraphy. But it implanted something within him that made him think about what he was creating on a whole different level. And it was that new thinking that got him to the point where he would wanted to create the Macintosh computer, depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember the era where there were no wysiwyg displays. You just essentially typed letters into a keyboard and saw them on the screen, and that's all you saw. You may have played 8-bit video games on your Commodore 64, but there really wasn't the kind of heads-up display that we have on our laptops or computers as, as we do now, that didn't exist before Steve Jobs. And one of the things that Jobs was adamant about making sure his computers could do was create beautiful typography. I say that pretty loosely as well because back then, the Macintosh, it could create nice tight, but it wasn't like, it wasn't super beautiful by today's standards, it not even close. In fact, you'd probably be able to create something more beautiful using the traditional paste up method before computer design was even a thing that you probably get something better with that, at least during that period. But over time, Apple got better and the topography got better, and just the act of doing the thing in the machine got better to the point of board that really defined Apple as the machine to use if you were a designer, I don't know if Apple is still maintains the same dominance in the design industry as it once did. But when I was coming up in the 90s and early 2000s, you didn't use a PC to design things. Some people did. But for the most part, if you wanted to look professional than you worked on a Mac. And that was all because of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is Batman then who's the Joker? That guy right there. This is the end of print. It is the graphic design of David Carson. You probably know who David Carson is, and if you don't know who David Carson is, well, you need to go ask somebody because David Carson change the way we use type. The thing is, is that Carson wasn't even a designer. He was actually like a philosophy teacher at a high school in San Diego County. But one year the administration was having fliers passed out to all the kids. That said like, Hey, come do a internship of three to six weeks. I don't remember how long has to learn how to do graphic design. And Carson said, wow, this actually looks kind of cool. I'm gonna go do it myself. What he learned in that process was how to do things to paste up way. And so that kind of informed his understanding about doing graphic design. If you're not familiar with pay stuff is basically imagine a board where you put you put your type and you put your pictures, and then you take that, you take a picture of it. You put the Ascend that to the printer. And then they print it onto something that was paste up. That was old school. That's how I got started. I hate it, but Carson loved it. Now he's still used a computer, but he really embraced the combination of the two technologies. In fact, if you look at his work now and I'm getting a little bit divergent here. But if you look at his work now, a lot of his work is a very tactile. It's very like gluing paper to other pieces of paper to create something. But the most important part of all this is that Carson didn't know all the design rules that we learned when we go through that traditional design course. He knew just enough to get by to be able to do the thing. But he had a very creative mindset when it came to creating things. And so what happened was that he just would destroy type on purpose because it just looked good. Designers are super cringy about that idea because they don't believe that it's functional. They believed design should have a function, it should communicate their view is that if type is illegible, then it's not doing its job as a design element. And Carson would come back always and say, just because something is eligible, doesn't mean it doesn't communicate. Carson broke the rules almost daily, but it's hard to say that he actually broke the rules because he didn't really know the rules. Just like Jobs knew that creativity was an aspect that was going to help him improve the technology that he was creating. Carson knew that the creativity was going to help him improve the designs that he was made designs creativity that kind of goes hand in hand. But when you're dealing with a bunch of other designers who are grid-based design and everything. And you go and just throw it like painted the wall. Well, that's going to disrupt the situation. I once had a conversation with one of the big come ups in the early 2000s in the web design world. And we were talking about the book that he had just released. And he pretty much flatly told me that he wasn't going to make any money on the deal. It was really one of these legacy things that he just wanted to do. And I said, Well, why would anybody design these books? I mean, does anybody make any money? And he said, Well, Carson made money. This book was the number one selling art book in the world, not just design books, the number one selling art book in the world. And the reason I believe that happened is because carson showed us that the rules were all made up and that we could do what we wanted. There was a whole sea of graphic designers and artists that were just waiting for somebody to tell him it was okay to mess things up on purpose. I'm willing to bet the Steve Jobs and David Carson never met each other. In fact, I'm probably never even in the same room together, but they are as important to graphic design and important to topography as anything else out there. There were other people out there that made impacts before and after. But when we're really looking at modern typography and the way we do things, it is my personal opinion that those two men are the most important figures in the design world, at least as far as we're concerned when it comes to typography. 6. The Cornerstone of Design: It is my philosophy that topography is the quarter stone of graphic design because without type, you don't really have design. I'm sure you can have a logo without any words on it. What's a logo? If it doesn't have a brand and what's a brand if it doesn't have any kind of representation of what the company stands for. And I'm sure that that is their philosophy that a lot of designers probably standby. But what I've noticed by a lot of graphic designers is they don't necessarily live by that. They, they'd create things that where the type is just there as if it was placed on the page as an afterthought place that I've seen this pretty often, especially on Instagram is, and these daily poster designer, as much as I believe in the idea of doing a daily practice in any kind of field, whether it's art designed, whatever, something about that just helps you grow faster. But what I have noticed is that there are a lot of designers out there that are just willing to put forward just enough effort into that to be able to satisfy that daily requirement that they've given to themselves if the Internet is dictating it to them and they need to just do it. They're putting work out there that is substandard. And I don't think they're learning anything from, since we're talking about bolstered, Let's jump into the screen so I can show you exactly what I'm talking about, kicking it off. We're gonna go here to everybody's favorite purveyor of posters, Etsy. I mean, I don't know if it's everybody's favorite, but it's a good place to look at pollsters of all Elk's, good and bad. Now there's some nice ones up here and I'm just going to scroll through until I find some representations of both. What I believe is good typography and some that are not so good. Let's start with this Wilco poster right here as simple and straightforward is this is, I believe this is perfectly executed type because you obviously you have three bottles of condiments and we all understand what those bottles economists are supposed to be. They have used type in a way that is both creative by number one, interlinking these bottles together and overlaying the type on top of them. But we also see these other different representations here. Now, I'm not getting really deep. I can't see what everything says because the picture is small, but I mean, this is the town, this is where it's at, the trolley stadium there. This is the date of the event. And obviously Wilco and then with the people that are also in the show. So I think that as simply as this is done, it really communicates well and it's an effective use of typography in this poster scenario. I also think it's important to note that although the typeface may not necessarily represent the Hines brand, It's still works with what we're talking about. In contrast, there's this one done for the luminaires. Beautiful design. The illustration is excellent. I can't knock this illustration. The illustration is great and I think it perfectly represents the band. But this topography up here at the top just looks like it was just it was just dropped in there. It's not expertly done. I mean, it's not bad, but it's not good either. It's just there. And I don't think that that's the job of a designer or as us, as people who were designing typefaces. I don't think this is what we want to see with our work now this one here, this is exactly what I'm talking about. It to me, this is the design aesthetic of a lot of graphic artists right now, at least the Instagram designers, where it's just like it's done, but it's not really done. Well, it's, it's like almost anti design. I'm going to talk about that more in another section, but this is just, I don't know if I'm very passionate about this, as you can tell, there's nothing really that stands out here. It's almost meant to be purposely ironic in its execution. And the type, although not terrible, again, doesn't do anything. I don't know if the designer of these particular typefaces was intending it to be this doll. They have a display here, but another one, this one's actually, this one's more interesting. It's essentially the same exact poster. They've done the exact same poster. They changed out that band names, changed out the artwork and change the color way. But it's essentially the exact same post that's lazy design. And I don't think that we are here to design these typefaces so that they can be used like this. And you shouldn't be designing typefaces so that you can use them yourself like this. And I know this course isn't about typography design, it's about designing fonts that people can use their topography. But I think it's really important for us to truly understand what good typography is so that we can have a better understanding of how it's going to be executed when we release these fonts into the world, or again, just using it for our own designs. The more that we know about what makes good type, the better the chance that we're going to make a better font. Just like I said in the beginning, type plays a critical role in designing general, it is the cornerstone. And when we know this about it, we should have a better understanding of what we're creating because we have a responsibility not just to ourselves, but to the other designers that might use our typefaces, educate ourselves as much as we can about how type works, what makes it good, what makes it not great. And that will ultimately result in a better product. 7. Typographic Styles: Let's talk about typography basics. Once again, this is not meant to be an exhaustive conversation. I'm not here to break down every single aspect of how topography works, the nuances, all those different things. Number one, I don't think I have the skills for that. Number two, I don't think it's essential for what we need to learn for this particular course, I'll give you the basics here just enough to get you dangerous so that we can go and get this thing handled. The thing about type design is that it is a craftsman game. It's definitely one of these things that requires a lot of attention. And patients, maybe you've seen some of these demonstrations or you've seen the images up on Instagram or somewhere. It's like it's like somebody's designing a letter and then part of that letter, it's got all these little circles design. This is how I'd made the arc of the T on this side and the arc of a t down here on this side. And this is where the golden ratio exists. And here's the lines and arrows. And think that if you're gonna become a type designer, you really have to be meticulous in your approach to that. Especially if you're building something as fine as like Helvetica or Bodoni or something like that, or even a display font that just happens to have a lot of detail to it. I think you're going to need to be very I focused and attention to detail and a whole lot of patients, not this guy. That's not what we're here to do. We're here to just make a mass and turn it into something that I can type on a keyboard at some 0.1 things. First, let's talk about styles and I'm sure you've probably heard all of these different styles and these are just a few of the main ones that you pretty much come across. There's some other ones that we don't really need to necessarily concern ourselves or rather subsets of some of these ones. If you're a designer and you know all this stuff, well then maybe you can probably skip this unless you just want to listen in for the fun of it. On the page here, serif sans serif, Script, monospace, black letter display and blender lingo or symbols. I mean, if you are brand spanking new to design and typography, then you probably, you may not know this, but my guess is the tube, please see me use these or understanding. I want to say serif is self-explanatory, but maybe it's not. It's basically when you have letter forms that have these little feet, dangling bits, these little swashes. And I'm gonna zoom in here, that's swash. That swash and this the little, little nub right there, san-serif was basically designed by a bunch of Danish guys and said, You know what, we don't need all those dangling bits. We want straight lines, we want edges, we want sharp things. Now, script typefaces are probably one of the oldest letter forms and maybe not necessarily. Well, what is going on here? Look at that, look at what is that mass right there. We're going to have to fix that. And there too, I'm gonna talk about this in just a moment. Monospaced typeface is basically mean that every single letter takes up the exact same amount of space. And if you look at this when I typed it out, like the kerning or letting, it is basically identical across the board. Don't know what Kerning and letting is. I got you covered in a minute. Monospaced lettering was specifically made for typewriters because when the keys would have to come and hit the paper in different spots, it all had to hit the exact same spot and they had to make sure that the spacing was exactly the same because they didn't want to have all these different sizes of things just to make sure that what fits and what doesn't. They didn't want to have to worry about tracking and kerning. They wanted everything to be the same so they could be easily consistent. And then you can just get your letter done as fast as you want, never typed on a typewriter before. I recommend it just for the aesthetic appeal. And then quickly diminish that device somewhere else because it's not as fun. It feels very nostalgic for about three minutes. And then you're like I'm over this black letter typefaces are meant to have a very Gothic. Gothic is the wrong term. They're just meant to have a very particular type of field kind of feel like they mean darker, like evil or, or wicked or foreboding. The sense that you get with the back when they were originated in earliest 19 know, probably 1300. I don't know. They were just meant to be bold. They're meant to be bold and stand out and also have some flourish. And you can see that just like the serifs, they have a little bit of flourish, a little bit of kick, a little bit of, a little bit of dangling bit. That display is an interesting one because display can pretty much be anything. It doesn't fit into any of these other categories. Anything that would look like you would put it on a headline at the top of a nameplate on whatever it is. It's not something that you would type out an entire letter in this typeface. Just wanted to be like, Hey, this, that, that's what a display typeface is for. And it can be anything. It can be this one That's another style, that's another one, that's another one. There is no particular definition. It's really just anything that you wouldn't normally just put as like body copy. Again, you're the designer. You make the rule. Last but not least, would be symbols. And this is zap Ding bats. When you need little icons and things, when you need a little bullet point, or you need some industrial feeling things, or you need some, it flourishes. So there's some really big flourishes, again, no rules as to what these can be. It's just a way to quickly throw down a bunch of different symbols if you needed them or if you wanted something like a bullet point, but not necessarily irregular bullet point, then you've got this and it's not like anybody is going to do an entire layout in nothing but zap dig vets. Remember that guy? That was him. So those are the basics and it just to give you an understanding of these letter forms so that you know, you may be able to incorporate what you've seen here into something that you're doing. But you don't necessarily need to. It's just good to know some things just between you and I. I've got a little bit of a plan for Dean beds. It's gonna be fun. 8. The Anatomy of Type: The next thing we want to talk about is type anatomy. And this is just basically understanding how these letter forms work together. How they should be shaped, how I should be size, how they should be spaced, so that we can design the best possible typeface for ourselves. And whoever else decides to put their hands on. This graphic is actually something I gracefully stole from font shop.com. They actually had a graphic very similar to this. He was like this big and so I had to recreate it for any other reason that it's just a really nice typeface that I like to use. We're currently looking at basketball is regular. This word is typed out just as is. I didn't really adjust any of the spacing between the letters because I just wanted them to stand alone. Most of these call-outs you're not really going to care too much about unless you are getting into that point where you're really going to design a violin crafted typeface. If that's not your bag, then you don't really need to know all of these things, but I'm calling them out just so you can get an understanding. Of course, this is serif typeface and of course we've got our dangling bits here. Now before we get into the letter bits, I want you to see these three call-outs right here because I think these are essential. In fact, they are essential, they are absolutely 100% essential. These are probably the most essential things you're going to learn in this moment up here at the top, we've got our cap height, which is where the capital letters exist. If I scroll back over here to the H, you can see it ends right on top of the cap height. The x-height is the top line of any lowercase letters and I don't have an x, but if I had an x, you would see that just like this be it sits right on that line and the bottom of it would sit on that line. The baseline is the bottom and the x-height is the height of the lowercase letters, at least the body of the lowercase letters. That does not include things like this, which is the descender of that lowercase y, or the ascenders, the lowercase l and the lowercase d, as you see them here. Again, this is a Serif. Obviously, this part of a serif is called the bracket. Anytime you have a crossbar, whether it's the h or the a, That's what that is. This stem is basically like the trunk of a tree. It's the trunk or the stem of the letter, the terminal is the point like say if you were writing this with a quill pen, it would be the port where your pen hits the paper. That would be the terminal. Now this next one here, I'm not a 100% sure about this. I think I know the definition, but I'm not a 100% sure because if you look at this, it says counter and that refers to this space inside the D. But if you look over here to this, oh, it's called a bowl. The only thing I can think of that why they have two different names is because the counter, it has a flat side. So if you had a B, it would be the reverse of this and it kind of has that one flat flush side. I don't know that for a fact. If you really want to know, go look it up. Like I said before, these are the ascenders. The ear is anytime you have a serif and it's got this little dangling bit like that. The link of the neck is this little spot offer to the main body of the letter. Now you'll notice that this g doesn't fill the entire x-height right there. It actually, I mean, this is technically it, but really this is the body of that g. But because it would look funny if you had this big loop here and then the dengue bit all the way down here like that, it would just be too far extended. So type designers and figured out that the spatial relationship, it should be a little bit tighter. And then this one actually is compensated by that link neck. By doing that, you might also see this. Where would you see this? You might see this in a DJ, maybe. Maybe, maybe a J or a lowercase z. And the ball is the loop of a full circle like that. This would be the bowl of this particular G, o. And over here, this a, this would be the counter for that a. If I have my definitions correct, the axis is the point of like say this g or this o where it lines up. And as you can see, if I zoom in really closely, you'll see that this isn't perfectly 90 degrees and that's because the OH isn't perfectly 90 degrees. And in fact, some letter forms when you type them out, background, I'm just going to change something here real quick. So this o is Iowa, and if you look at this, the axis is actually somewhere more like that. They're just some letters that are written like this. I'm not a 100% sure, but I believe this is referred to as a Gothic letter form. It doesn't seem to follow what you would think about Gothic means that you really like what I think a Gothic, I think of the black letter, but it dope that actually refers to how there's a slight tilt the things. And this is a perfect example of that. And that is the axis of a Gothic versus the axis of this basket bills, as you see here, next is the overshoot. And that's basically anytime you see an extension of a letter that goes below the baseline. And you'll see this often in letters like O's and iz. Sometimes in these b's, you'll see it in use if you were to size up this o to be perfectly aligned with the x-height, it would end up looking smaller than the rest of the letters, even though technically it would be the same height as the x if you put it right next to the X in fact, so let's, let's do this. See the x, you can see it's pretty close to it. But if I took this oh, I don't know if this is going to let me do that. That's about their height, that's above that. They've taken up the same amount of space, but you can kind of see that the OH, just looks smaller. It's kind of weird, but it's how they compensated for making these letter shapes feel like they fit with everything else in there. The AI is kind of like a counter except this way. Maybe the aperture is the gap in this space like between this part of the e and that part of the E, the shoulder is anytime you have a dangle like this, this would be the N or the M or the K. Maybe the tail is where you would finish In your letter. It's almost relative to the little dab of ink that ends anytime you finish a letter form, like there's a little bit extra ink at the end because you kinda rested for a 2.5th. So now you'll see these dotted lines up here, and this is kind of like the ascender line. And down here is the descender line. I drew these out because they really can have, they don't really have a particular definition of how far they should go. There is definitely some relationship to line height when the letter forms are being made, they're trying to take into consideration that if all this type was written out in different lines like in a paragraph, where should those exist? This ascender space here, in this descender space here is all kind of compensating for that. Now as you can see, I drew my line up here because I was taking that from the original design. But this particular typeface is a little bit unique in that these ascenders only go up to the cap height. Sometimes ascenders on some letters will go up above that. And even some ascenders on letters will be different from letter to letter. For instance, if you had this d in this L next to each other for whatever reason that l might actually be taller to compensate for that thing. If I had that L right here and they were current pretty tightly, it just looks a little too close together again, these are things that you might consider as you are making your typeface, your hand lettered typeface, but not something to take too seriously because hand lettering is meant to have the, your personality, your nuanced. It's not meant to be perfect necessarily. It's meant to be interesting. It's meant to reflect your hand. Your hand doesn't necessarily follow these rules. Well then so be it, That's your hand. It's not their hand. But at least if you're considering some of the things, especially when I was saying about the O's, how they get a little bit bigger than some of the other letters, then you have this understanding that okay, well, maybe I should make them attempted bigger than the other ones just so they look better on the line. And if you decide that you really want to get into this, and this is one of these things. This is the area of typeface design that you're really gonna, it's gonna be a test and tune situations. You make it, you test it, you go back and fix it. You test it again. If you go back and fix it and you test it again, and it's just one of the things that we will have to massage it a little bit as we go. And if you wanted to do something as beautifully crafted as basket bills, then it's gonna take you awhile to get this right. But that's not what we're here to do. 9. Typographic Spacing: Let's talk about spacing. When it's a spacing, I mean tracking, kerning and letting. I can tell a Pro Designer from an amateur strictly by how they Kern they're tight. What does that mean? It means the space between these letters, how consistent are you getting that spacing when you are putting it on a page by kerning isn't the only spacing. There's also tracking which is related to a different thing and then letting which is related to a different thing. Let's talk about these things that they're related to. The difference between kerning and tracking is that when a current, I am actually adjusting the spacing between each letter of each word. Like I'm adjusting the space between the H and then E. The space between the V and the quick tracking is if I'm selecting a whole word or paragraph and I'm adjusting the spatial relationship of everything at the exact same time, kerning is letters, tracking his words or paragraphs or whole documents. And letting is equivalent to the line spacing. So the space between the top line and the bottom line is my letting and I can adjust as I see fit. I mentioned in the last bit that type designers will take into consideration that line spacing, that letting as they're designing these things because you don't want to have an improper amount of letting that letters just bump up against each other. Let's just say for instance, I had a J right there, so that j and that Q are dangerously close to each other. And if my lines were spaced inappropriately, then it would be weird if I if I bring my like that, we don't want that. That's just a little too close for comfort. It just makes for a weird when you see it on the page, it just looks odd. If I have to fix that, then there's ways to fix it. In fact, one of the easiest ways to do it is just to adjust the kerning that I can get these letters to line up more perfectly. I don't know why the redraws a weird on this, please excuse the blurriness of this. I'm not sure why this is happening. It's not meant to be doing that, but there you go. I want to do this actually feels better than having it listed off to the side a little bit. But my point being is that we want to maintain that line spacing so that it feels good to the letters as we go. We don't want to have something that droops too far down and then ends up running into something else. Let me give you a really quick example. I'm gonna bring this up here and I'm gonna change this to zap phenol, which is a notoriously the encroaching typeface. It just bananas. I mean, look at that. It's all over the place. Interesting as it could be. I don't use this typeface because I don't know how. Wouldn't know, even know where to begin to layer these things on different lines with each other. I mean, look at this hot mess right here. What does this even say? If you're a zap fino fan, more power to you. Something else to note is that some of these designers that they take really good care about how they release these typefaces into the world because they want them to be almost like ready to go out of the gate. They want that kerning to be perfect. And Helvetica here is actually a really good example of one that does this well, but they can't negotiate every particular circumstance. For every situation. They understand the spatial relationships and some of these letters and sometimes they just they just aren't going to line up, correct? When I first typed this out, you can see that aside from those little touches I did here and here, everything looks pretty well spaced. Contrast that to my least favorite typeface. That's also very similar. This is Arial, which feels, I don't know, it feels a little bit lazier, like look at this space here, that space, but then the space gears weird. Every single typeface deals with this issue is you're creating your typeface or font. You're gonna deal with this issue too. And it's something that a designer, a pro designer is going to have to negotiate. So they're gonna have to go in and look at this brown and realize, well, it looks good, but this is bigger than that space and that space is bigger than that space. So what do we do? We go in here with our thing and we go do that and then maybe tighten that up like that. And they just did that one hot second. It just looks better, just like that. We're designing are things we're going to have to figure out, okay, what's the best spatial relationship of the letters as we put them onto the page. Here's a little side bit on kerning that is like it's one of these things like sometimes you're just going to come across a word that is just, just, just confounds you. It's just one, It's just a difficult word to get right. For instance, woman here and this one in particular, one of the notoriously the, the most difficult typefaces the garden sometimes is Futura, just because of the shapes of all the letter forms. It's just sometimes it's a little difficult to get something that looks good. No matter how many times I do this, some things are just not going to line up right there. Just gonna feel like there's just gonna be a gap. Let me just throw a bunch of different letters in here real quick. Let's say, let's put a y and then put an a and then put an M, and then we'll put a V, E naught V, and, uh, you know, it's like look at that gap right there between that Y and that egg. These are just things that you just can't account for some time, just kinda have to play with these things. Sometimes it's just never going to, you know, you can get it good, but it's never gonna be great. This space I like this one I hate when I click away from this. This looks weird. Did you just can't get away from it unless you do something really bonkers, you bring that. Why? All the way over here, somehow, this is not a word, this is not a word. I'm not writing a word, but you get what I'm saying between that WY and that a and m, this whole thing makes me really uncomfortable. It almost looks like three different words and it has certain point as we're designing these things, we're just going to have to be like, You know what? I'm just going to have to give it up to chance. And hopefully the designer that's using the typeface that we're building. They knew how to figure out what the two with it when they get there, do consider these things because they are going to be important to you or whoever else is using your font. But don't overthink them because if you overthink them, then you'll never get this done. We can always tweak, we can always massage, test, and tune. Like I said, we can do that later on. You can always even replace different letters and fix things and do that. You can do all of that stuff. What's most important is just getting to work in getting this done so that we can get it into our hands, at least get to the point where we can massage and then put it out into the world. 10. Font Design Applications: Now we're getting into the nitty-gritty. This is where we start books. This is how we build. Let's talk about fonts software before we go any further, because I think it's important to understand where we're headed before you even begin. You need to know where you're going and where we're going is didn some sort of font building software because we're not, we're not going to code this thing ourselves, are we? I mean, if you can code this thing yourself, the near a better person than me, and you shouldn't have paid for this course anyway, let's get into the different font app building options that we have available to us, including the one that we're actually going to use. First one we're going to look at here is font creator 14. I've heard good things about this from people who are PC users, Windows users. If you want to get into something heavy, but don't want to necessarily spend a ton of money, then you want to maybe checkout font created 14. And the reason that I say this very specifically to the PCs Windows users, is because they do not operate on the Mac platform. I can't attest to the viability of this because I'm on a Mac, don't know. But hey, look, it's got a five, almost five-star review up here. That means anything to you. But I've heard that this is actually a decent program and you can do some really cool stuff with it. I don't know. Go check it out. It's not super cheap, but it's also not crazy expensive either. You can get the home edition for 50 bucks, you can get the standard edition for 150 or the professional at 199. And I think that this main type is like, It's kind of like a subset, like a, like a micro version or maybe it's an add-on. I don't know if you can do that if you want, but check it out. You can find that over at high logic.com, font creator 14. The next one is fought forage. And I've also heard really good things about this. This is a free download and I think it's got a Linux oriented situation, but you can also get it from Mac and, and other places. Or maybe it's just messy. Mac Windows, GNU, GNU, Linux. So all different types of options you can get this free, it's all free and it's actually a really good program. But again, this is a very robust piece of software. So there will be a learning curve. And usually when it comes to free software than you were having to rely on documentation that is built within, like some sort of forum or Discord or maybe YouTube videos or whatever. There's not a concentrated effort to introduce a whole manual on how to do this. So if you're interested in doing that, you should go check this out on forage.org. Next one is photographer five. And photographer was actually the original program that a lot of people built apps in way back in the day. I don't even know if they're really fully developing this one anymore because this company font lab, I think they bought it from whoever else originated photographer, you know how software goes. Sometimes somebody build something and then they decided to build something little bit better off on the side and that thing ends up being the better thing. But they still have this other thing here. If you can imagine Adobe InDesign back when they still had a pacemaker. These are pacemaker and InDesign. The exact same time in pacemaker was Adobe InDesign was still get at MIT, but then Adobe InDesign got way better and then pacemaker width. But this company kept both. Bond typographer five was the program of record back in the day and has gotten maybe a little bit better and not terribly inexpensive. I mean, $259 or 129 for the educational version, it's a really good program. I remember using it. I mean, it has its quirks and it was tough to use and it was like one of these things like, I don't have the time for this back then, but who knows? I might dive into something like this later, but actually, I'm not going to use photographer five if I wanted to because I'm going to go to the new thing that's actually even better and easier to use. And that's gonna be font lab seven. Let's see, Let's go more info here so you can see everything. It's essentially it's the new standard. Anybody who's making really robust, detailed, high-quality sans serifs. Serifs display types, if they want to do something really good and intricate detail that you can get into designing these typefaces. This is the app you want to use. Now the problem though is that that price tag right there, Look at him for $159. Unless of course you want to get pay more for twice as much if you've found yourself being so interested into type design that you wanted to go further. You really, really loved those letter forms. This is the program. This is what you want. Is it the only option? Note these other ones were probably work too, but this one is from the people that I know who do letter forms, typefaces. This is what it doesn't, don't worry, we're using, know what we're using is a very simple app that you can find on the web that's really inexpensive, called calligrapher.com. Calligrapher. There's no there's no why am I using this one versus any other ones? Because it's well, you can do a free version or you can do a paid version, but the paid version is really inexpensive, that you can pay for one month of calligrapher for eight bucks. And you can build as many fonts as you want in that time period. Or we can pay for six months and get it a little bit longer or whatever you want to do. It's just enough to get the job done for what we're looking for. If you want to go deeper later on, go for it, but this is gonna be perfect for getting our feet wet. And why this particular app versus other ones? Well, if you look at their features, you've got standard top font files. You can get a true type font and an open type font, which is important if you're trying to do any flourishes, ligatures, variations, or whatever, then you're going to want that open type one character randomization ligatures, customized templates, which is actually super easy to use. That was part of a two is it was super easy to execute on and we're gonna go into that later, but it's like it's just easier. A lot of modification options available to you. Is it the easiest to modify? Know, is it wouldn't be a lot easier to modify in a more robust app. Yeah, absolutely. But can you do some modifications here? Yes, you can't. It could be cooler, but it's not, but for the price it's pretty rare. So there's plenty of options here, availability, I will leave links to all of these in the resources down below. But of course, calligrapher is gonna be the one we use. So let's push forward, get started on that. Time to get dirty. 11. My First Font Experience: What we're going to talk about right here is my very first experience of building a fought for the first time. That's our first experiences work there The first time I had a vision for what I wanted to create and I knew I was going to use the calligrapher app to help me with that. And then I'm just going to execute. I executed and I learned a lot of things that I'm gonna share with you right now. If you go to my website right now, Dave Cambria.com, you don't have to go. But if you did, you would see that I have that very first type based available. It's called bleed and it's an adaptation of a font that I know and love. I said what would happen if I took Helvetica to the extreme and then made it my own. But of course they didn't just do it once. I did it four times. As you can see here, I've got bleed 102030, bleed 40. I built these with the intention of them working together as layers, I believe 40 you obviously can't read or maybe your freak like me and you can but I meant them to be layered so you would use bleed ten on top of leave 40 or maybe Bleed 2030, whichever I wanted them to be. A mix of things. For those of you who are like me that liked to make a mess of things, just to go back and clean it up a little bit before you make it a mess. Again, this typeface is so far out there that I don't want to expect a lot of people to use it. I don't know if you actually solve this though, but it's up there for you if you wanted to download it and check it out for yourself. And if you do decide to use it in something that you've built, please share with me because I would love to see how you've used it. And I originally called this typeface Helvetica because it's a Helvetica and I'm like, Yeah, but I decided to change the name because number one, I thought, well, maybe it's a little too close to home, maybe it's a little too on the nose. I didn't want to get into any trouble with the people over at EITC or Adobe or whoever owns Helvetica anymore, I don't know. It was in that arduous process that I decided to create this course because I didn't want you to suffer through all of those things. I wanted to kind of help you get through the tough parts of difficult parts. I believe discovery is an important thing, but sometimes you don't necessarily need to walk completely off the path in order to find out who you are as a designer, recreate or whatever. I think sometimes you can't follow a path and just kind of maybe diverged as you see fit. But when you get to the treacherous parts, you know what's the best route to go? And so that's why I'm doing this, to kind of show you the path through these treacherous parts. And let's be honest, nothing's all that treacherous here we're building a typeface, not traversing the Amazon River. But we'll get through this together tip number one in regards to moving forward with this particular project. And this is actually going to be really easy for us as we do the handwritten version. But if you decide to do the deconstruction of another typeface or something like a digitally, I think there's something you need to heat because it will make your job so much easier. So what we have here is the template that calligrapher gives us 4 billion our typeface. And this tip is actually more geared towards when we do like deconstruction of another typeface. I recommend that you type everything out exactly as you see it on this template. I didn't do that. I actually did like, Oh, I did all the ABCs and 12 threes and all those things that I did him in a completely different order the first time around. And what I ended up having to do is cut and paste every single one of those elements and put them into these boxes. Whereas if I were to take this template into Affinity Photo, Photoshop, adobe Illustrator, affinity Designer, publisher, InDesign, whatever app that I decided to use to build my typeface in. If I'm typing it out exactly as it's written on this particular template is just going to make it so much easier to get it where it needed to be. The second thing and we're gonna actually going to go into detail on this later once we start to build our typeface. And when you go to download that template, you have a chance to change the size of these template sales. If I go back over here, you can see that I don't know, these are probably sitting at about an inch a high all the way across the board. And it's still renders itself into two different pages for this particular layout, you're going to handwrite this. I recommend that you do it at something that's gonna be comfortable for you to write your letters. So if you write small, then you're probably going to want to have smaller template size. And just because you don't want to overcompensate for the size of your letters because they're bigger, you probably don't naturally right at this size. So maybe you want to come down a little bit. I tend to write a little bit bigger and I'm probably, if I'm gonna do a handwritten one with ink and pen, I'm probably going to use a Sharpie. And so that's gonna be, it's gonna bleed a little bit. So I have it a little bit bigger. I definitely recommend when you get this point, you draw the help lines. And I also recommend that you have your characters as backgrounds. That's this gray area back here. You can go without this if you want. But I definitely recommend that this is what you do because you're going to want to put these in the right places and you're going to want to give a good spatial relationship to everything. We're gonna go over all of this in more detail later. I just want to put it out there just to reiterate because sometimes redundancy helps solve problem. The next step I have for you is to make sure that you keep your files clean if you're using a pen or ink that might have any kind of splatter. I want you to know that that stuff is gonna get picked up by calligraphers system. You want to make sure that whenever your letter forms are, that you keep them as clean as you possibly can because the tiniest little mark could end up affecting your letter spacing. Now I cleaned this up considerably, but as you can see, there's these little fragments every once in awhile in these spaces here. And these fragments sometimes added a little bit of a problem. If I had this extra dot over here and I didn't compensate for that or I didn't erase it, didn't remove it, then either this S or the T would pick some of that up and that would get carried over into the typeface itself and create this weird spacing issue. And if you're doing this with pen and paper, I recommend that you keep yourself like a handy-dandy little thing, a whiteout. You're going to need it to mark out these little things that happen if the mistakes happen and if they don't happen good for you, but if they do happen, just, just work as clean as you possibly can. Third thing to understand is that we only building one font or at least individual fonts. We're not building an entire typeface family like I seem to have here. But here's the thing. Even though I have these four different fonts that should be within one particular family, they are not in a family. Calligrapher does not have the capability of Bringing typefaces together into a family. I've actually reached out to them and ask them Is this a possibility? And they have responded that it is not it is not something that is possible at this point. If you did want to create a typeface family and have a bunch of fonts within that. Well then you're going to need to do that within one of those other apps that we talked about in the last section, be prepared to spend some money then number four is pretty basic. I would go ahead and pay for the pro version of this at least for one month while we get this bond process, you can do a free one and it is unlimited. You can only have one font going and you can have up to 75 characters. The problem is, is that if you want to do even the most basic Latin letter set of numbers and letters just enough to cover what's on the keyboard by itself, that's 79 characters. So you're going to be four characters short if you decide to go with the free version, which letters or numbers that are you going to sacrifice in the name of keeping a free? Just go ahead and pay for the $8 for the single month and get it done. And that way you have full access to over 480 different characters. Or if you anticipate being super ambitious with your typeface creation, just pay 24 bucks per six months and you're golden for awhile. I mean, $24 from being able to do this whenever you want it for the next six months. Come on. That's easy peasy, Dave. So cheesy. Well, why wouldn't you do that? And finally, and this is an essential part is that calligrapher is a really good option for us because it's inexpensive and it's easy to operate, but it is not pro level equipment, so we should not expect pro level results. We need to be okay with the tiny little things that are gonna make this quirky. This is a handwritten typeface and that's meant to be a little quirky or this altered typeface that we're going to create also, it's meant to be a little bit off. So calligrapher works for that. If you're gonna create a script typeface, I definitely wouldn't recommend calligrapher because it's probably not going to come together like you expected. Is it good? But you're gonna work really hard to get there. We need to be okay with a little bit of chaos that we're gonna be working with here and understand that that is what's going to add to the personality of what we're creating. 12. Some Important Considerations: We're getting so close. You're getting so close, we're almost ready to start working on this thing. Just need you to watch this one more video before we get into the meat. Because I think there's some things that we need to consider before we go forward because there's the sub-questions need to be answered within yourself, within the work that you do before you go forward again, these are some things that I learned in my process of doing the last typeface, that if we ask ourselves these questions, will be able to better understand what we're doing when we actually get into it and make that whole journey so much easier. One of the considerations that we need to make right now before we even begin is whether we're gonna actually do ink and paper. If we're going to do this digital, I've already done this in an ink and paper version. I did this mostly just see how it would feel. But personally I am not particularly stoked about how this turned out for me. I use a blunt sharpie to create these letter forms and I'm not particularly stoked. I may keep it and I'm not a 100% sure if I'm going to go this route because what I want to do is I want to take this same template. I'm going to bring it into one of my apps on my iPad and I'm going to hand draw it with my eye Apple pan. I want to do that for two reasons. Number one, I want to have the flexibility of doing a command Z. I can't command Z on this. I can't undo anything that's been done here. And if I wanted to undo anything, I'd have to print out another sheet and start all from scratch, or at the very least, redo certain letters and then cut and paste them onto the page as needed, which I don't want to do that either. The other aspect of me doing it on the iPad is that I get the flexibility of using different brushes. And different brushes are going to give me a different response to the letter forms. Maybe a wanted to be thinner in some spots, maybe I want it to be more in other spots whenever it means I want to have that kind of flexibility. I don't want to test and tune that as I go or I end up doing it multiple different times in multiple different ways. And it becomes a whole new subset of fonts that I've created. I don't have that flexibility with pen and ink. That being said, pen and ink has a certain amount of cache that is attractive to me. I'm not gonna get the same nuance out of an iPad app as I do here with ink and pen, It's totally up to you which one you choose, but I would pick one now before you begin, your gonna have an opportunity to create a template all your own, based on whatever glyphs and letters and numbers that you want to use. But I've included two up there for you. One is the basic Latin character set, and the second one is the standard Latin character set, which just kind of expands on that a little bit, expands, expands, expands on that one just a little bit again, the decision is completely up to you and it doesn't matter one way or the other which way you go because the result is all going to be the same. I would just make the decision now rather than later. Like I said just a moment ago, you're going to have the opportunity to create a template that's perfect for you. In fact, if you're working in a different language outside of English, you're gonna have the chance to do all kinds of glyphs, letter forms that you can use for the language at the using or if you just wanted to really expand the realm of what you want to put into this template that's completely and totally up to you. But one thing I do want to caution you on is that you can have almost 500 different characters in your template, but that's 500 different characters that you're going to have to hand letter. When I go into the calligrapher template section, I have the opportunity to add all of these different types, minimal Spanish, minimal French, middle determine minimally English, Japanese numbers, punctuation. I could also add the more robust Dolby Latins, the modern Greeks, the ancient Greeks, the surrealists, and then moving into the miscellaneous, I have mathematical punctuation, extended currencies, ligatures, Ding bats, and then all of these different languages. If I wanted to go there, this combination in this templates that I have going right here is 434 characters and that includes all of the Latin, that includes some of the mathematical, the punctuation, and includes all of these ligatures down here. I could do this if I wanted, but it's gonna be in a lot of work, but I have to question myself, what are the people that are downloading my typeface going to actually use? Are they really going to need all of these different symbols? Some of these, yes. Some of these, not so much. Have you ever used any of these symbols in your life? You don't have to have them all. If I wanted to print out this entire template, but only draw in the ones that I actually want. Calligraphers only going to use those because those are the only ones it's going to see what you decide to use in your template is completely up to you. Just make sure that you're getting all the characters that you actually need. And then maybe stripping down the ones that you don't think are actually necessary for your typeface. Not every typeface has to have every single character. In fact, I'm sure you've probably downloaded some, you've used some that don't use all of the different glyphs available. You don't have to be robust as one of the more popular typefaces up there, you could just have whatever it is you want or whatever works best for you. Again, make that choice now so that you don't have all this excess work later. Last thing I want to talk about real quick is file types. When we're finished working on our font in calligrapher, we're going to have an opportunity to download either the true type and or the open type formats. But what's the difference between two type and open type short history? In 1984, Adobe launches the first postscript. Type one style of font, and that was available for anybody who was doing desktop publishing at the time. Somebody wanted to take whatever they were building in their Macintosh and turn that into something that they could actually print or sent to a print shop. They were using the type one style fonts. Even when I was coming up as a designer in the late nineties, the postscript type fonts were the ones that the printers were recommended as US, they could use a true type font if they needed to, but the postscript clients were just a little bit better quality typefaces, at least from a technological standpoint, they've just were superior. Somewhere in the late eighties, apple decided to invent the true type typeface font system to compete with the Adobe Postscript style. And they ended up actually licensing that to Microsoft for free. And I think it ended up becoming one of these things where like if you were on a PC, all you could use was true type because postscript didn't even work on Windows. So if you were trying to export something out of your Microsoft PC and get it to your print shop. You only had the opportunity to use True Type, which was kind of like it's almost like it personally. It was like this little dig like like what you don't work on a man. That was a big thing in the nineties and even in the 2000s, like people who worked on PC versus Mac, it just, it was just, it was bragging rights. But in 1990 for Microsoft and kind of jumped into the game and they invented open type, which ended up becoming the standard for most typefaces. They didn't actually become ubiquitous within the industry for many, many years. But it recreated a new opportunity to make fonts a little bit better and open type created new opportunity for us. It created opportunities for ligatures. It created more opportunities for glyphs. It created even opportunities for alternative letter options. So if you ever have a typeface that might have and like I say, the E can go one way or it can go another way. And you just have to choose which one you want. That's because it's open type. So even after all these bragging rights about who's better, the Mac and the PC, it was actually Windows who invented the system that we use universally now should you use open type versus True Type? I don't know. I don't think it really matters all that much, but I believe you have more opportunity to create something cooler with an open type typeface. My personal recommendation is when we get to the point where we're downloading our typefaces, download both options and if you're gonna sell or give away your typeface to somebody else, give them both options and let them decide. And now I believe that covers all of the things that we needed to talk about before we actually get started. You're halfway into this course and you haven't even put pen to paper yet, promise you, you're gonna be better off for having all of that information. As I said earlier, if you have any questions about anything that we've talked about so far, please drop them in the comments. I will be going and reviewing all of that stuff. And if I need to add more content to this after the fact, now let's get, let's get the font making. 13. FF Calligraphr Walkthrough Final: Now there are effectively two different phases to this process. There's the before, this section stage, what would I call that? The before stage. And then of course, the after stage obligated man. Essentially what that means is everything that happens in calligrapher. Before we get to the point where we start to draw all these letters on a piece of paper or draw them in your computer however you see fit. Or once we scan the sheets back into the computer, or we've created a new PDF with all of our art on top of the original layout. That is the after stage. We're going to head over to calligrapher.com. Remember no, e, It's a calligrapher for now. I already have an account, as you can see down here, when I look under current plan, I am using the pro version and I have 134 days left because I've started this last month just to run down what's going on here, you can see the features of everything that we've got available to us. They offer these two different types of files. You can do this randomization as we talked about with open type files. You can do your ligatures and you can customize your templates and you can modify after scanning. These are primarily the reasons why I decided to choose calligrapher versus any other options, because one, it's less expensive to, its easy to use In three, that they just give you enough flexibility to make you dangerous. Pricing is basically two different options. Well, technically three, you've got your free option, which you are required to register, of course, and then you can create an unlimited amount of fonts, but you can only have one font currently going at any given time on here. Once you have downloaded the one that you created, you have to remove it and start with a new one. You only get a max of 75 letters. And we've already discussed how even the most basic character set of English or Latin letters, numbers is 79. You're going to have to sacrifice some if you'd want that or be really super handy about like, hey, these are the numbers and then these are the letters, and then do it that way. If you're super eager about not spending any money on this project, well, you're going to have to rely on ingenuity to figure out how to get around this particular valley. You're gonna have two variants per character. And that basically means like say you have an a that has the bar at the top and then one that doesn't have that bar. You can have that in here. The one thing that I've don't know is if those variants count against your character count, like if you have two variance for one letter, does that mean you have two characters? I'm not a 100% sure about that. I've never tried. So if you're going to run the F31, you're going to roll the dice on that one a little bit. So again, use your ingenuity. You're not allowed ligatures and you're not allowed to adjust your spacing for any single character. Your data storage is your browser and you do not have any prioritized processing mount is a tongue twister. Now of course, the pro is eight bucks a month for dollars a month. If you decided to go for a six-month stretch, it's like $24 per six months, you have an unlimited amount of fonts as well. You can have 12 different fonts concurrently in the system. So if you go over 12 and then you have to download all of those and kind of shelved the ones that you don't want it so that you can add a new one in there. You can have a maximum of 480 characters per font and a maximum of 15 variance for that, bond. Ligatures are loud, adjust the letter spacing is allowed and they hosted on their server as well as on the browser itself. And you do have prioritized processing. In my personal opinion, it is a no-brainer. You should just go for the pro version, it's $8. You're making an $8 investment in creating this typeface for yourself, which if you sell it one time to one person at guarantee, you're gonna make at least eight bucks back so you can get started for free. And it's really simple. It's just like signing up for anything else. He's e-mail address, password, and that's it. That's all there is to it. And then I think you'd have to confirm if you want to get some updates, whatever. If you just signed up for the free account and didn't have the pro version. The only difference that would be here is that if it said current planet would just say free and it would tell you what's available to you, your limits right down here. And if you wanted to upgrade everything else between free versions and what I've got here are exactly the same. So there is no other bells and whistles except for the things that you know that you have the limits on. I'm going up here to templates and you can see we are empty, which it should be empty for you as you go through this, you have these minimal options, which is when I click on that, That's English is just the basic characters with some punctuation, your uppercase and lowercase, that's it. You can also add minimal numbers and then minimal punctuation, which are the extended punctuation beyond basically everything that's on the keyboard. When you look down on, you look down here in the far right corner and you can see how many cliffs we have available right now. That's 79. That's for more than the free account will allow. You would have to sacrifice four of these in order to get this one done with the free account. And if you wanted to do that, so be it. So what you would do is you would click on maybe that parentheses and say delete it, click that one. In fact, I'm just gonna go ahead and do that and click that. And let's see, I don't need plus signs. Who needs plus sign? And then maybe I don't have question marks, hoot questions, anything. If I don't have a plus sign, then I'm not going to be doing math, so I'm not going to need an equal sign. And now back here you can see 75. I now can make this a free font if I wanted to. That seems kind of ridiculous, doesn't it? To sacrifice those four basic characters or whatever else did you could have available to you. For a mere $8? I don't know. I mean, hey, you do your thing, whatever feels best for you, but I would say go ahead and upgrade to the pro so that you can go and add all of these in or go one better and just to add Adobe Latin one. And that basically includes everything that you need for most characters. Or you can go Latin to or Latin 30, ambitious. Do you feel, when I do that you see 326, which is actually what I'm going to be using, like I said before, the more characters that you add to your thing, the more work you're gonna have to do, you would you feel is best for yourself just to run these down real quick. Modern Greek, ancient Greek, Adobe Cyrillic, in Cyrillic to, I don't know who uses Greek, except for Greek people have more power to you. Ancient Greek, I have no idea who does that except for fraternities and then Adobe Cyrillic or Adobe. So really to this is if you are Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, I don't know. Those folks up there in the European North, you can add basic math or full mathematical, which I believe would take you way over the top with your actual glyphs here. If you have any intention of doing mathematical equations with your typeface, well then maybe you create a secondary one. That's just that, that way you have one font that is your letter, most tight, your Latin stuff. And then you have another one that is just your math. The basic punctuation, extended punctuation, you have currencies and there are a lot of currencies in here. You can see there's the pound right there, the yen. That's just sense. There's dollar signs, there are zeros in here. If you want to go further with currencies, like take them even just further than that, then you can. And then if you wanted to create Ding bats, you could, but this kind of nuts, you can create two Dang beds if you want, but we're not gonna do that. In fact, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna have to clear all these out and start from scratch. So we're gonna go back up here. Common scripts go to Latin three, I'm not going to use any of those other ones. We're going to add the basic punctuation. I was thinking about doing ligatures for the handwritten one. I don't think it's really a thing. I just don't see the functionality of having ligatures with the handwritten one because in my lettering is not, it's not gonna be great. You, could you imagine what this would look like with ligatures? Your writing might be much better, much cleaner than mine. If you want to add ligatures, go for it or don't do your call, you can do whatever you want. Hey, if you want to create nothing but a Cyrillic typeface, more priority, once I have my full letter said what I want to create, I'm just going to go up here and I'm gonna download template. I would go ahead and change the file name, DC handy sounds like a good name. You could choose PDF or PNG. You're going to print them out. I would go ahead and recommend that you do the PDF because then you have one document, PNG, I believe it will create separate documents for each page. Now at the page size is going to be dictated by the size of these templates cells. If I reduce the size of this template cells. And again, this goes back to how small do you write naturally, if you look at the size of these squares, there may be a little less than an inch here. And when I'm in the sharpie, when I was writing over the space of the letters themselves. You'll notice that I've got some room still and I've felt almost a little bit constraints. So I would actually go a little bit bigger if I were gonna do this again, which would mean that I would probably extend this to four page. If you write really small, then you may want to reduce the size of these template cells. I'm actually going to go up to about the middle point here. I would go ahead and draw the help lines in because that's going to help you set your baseline, your x-height, your ascender line, your descender lines and all that. It'll show that on here. You can't see it here because my printer sucks for printing light gray and your printer, you probably better than mine. So go ahead and put those in just to give you a guideline so that you can, you know, we talked about this now, you don't have to have your characters and backgrounds, but I'm not a 100% sure how you would do this otherwise, if you look at the template, I don't know how close I'll be able to get with this. You'll see you The each box where it has the letter or the character itself, but in the corner of the box, it'll tell you what character is supposed to go into that box. You don't have to use the characters as backgrounds when you do this, but it does just kinda help you give you a guidance about what they're looking at when they are making their adjustments to the spatial relationship. When I say they, I mean calligrapher, what you might also do is create different PDFs just so you can see for yourself, one without any guidelines or characters, great characters in the background, and then one with just the help lines and then one with the help lines and the characters. Just so you can see all three side-by-side and make a judgment call about what he feels is gonna be best for you. Again, those, those help lines and those characters in the background, those are all going to disappear once you scan this back in or upload it into their system from your own PDF and then you click Download. It processes. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna right-click and then my Download linked file as just for our purposes, I went ahead and downloaded both the PDF and the PNG file so you can see what's going on here because I upgraded my cell size to significantly bigger than what they had. You can see that it actually created 12345678 different PNG. If you want to manage a different PNGs, go right ahead. It's kind of a non factor because even if I were going to use just the PDF, I'm still going to have to bring each PDF page into my iPad at once really, it's just about whether you want to print these out or do them on your screen. It's totally up to you. There is no one better way than the other. It's just a matter of what you like best. So now here's the fun part. This is where we take our templates and we go draw our letters. Now I will share a small portion of how I do that myself in the next video because it's really, it's just you going in and lettering however you see fit. There's no magic to this is no instruction really. It's just a matter of like, Hey, copy these letters is right back into kindergarten era where within the lines of your dotted line favored, That's really all this is. So we'll get to that point in our next video. And then we'll take our sheets, will get them back into calligrapher, and then we'll noodle. Let's noodle as test and tune, tweak and noodle. 14. Building a Font - Part 1: Okay, let's build a font. Let's take this or this and turn it into this. But wait, there's a lot going on right here and we need to talk about it. I decided to go ahead and push forward with the paper one because I wanted to test it. I wanted to see because I haven't actually done this technique just based on what I created here. I was like, man, I don't know if it's gonna work too well. I decided to go forward because some of you are gonna be doing this thing and I want to show you what I experienced when I did this. I just want to head over here real quick because this is actually where I built my templates. I took photos of these and I then brought them into here so that I can create a PDF out of this. Then I could import that as one piece. You could use any app for this. It doesn't have to be Affinity Publisher, could be an InDesign, could be Photoshop, could be any of those over here. What I did is I had to make some adjustment to the levels. And I'm gonna zoom in here real quick just so you can see what's going on. I'm going to unclick that levels. And you can see there is a ton of stuff going on in the background. That's just because even though I made some levels adjustment to the image before, when it just wasn't quite enough. When I brought it in, what happens? And I'm gonna zoom in here, you can see that there is a lot of residual things happen. Part of me is like thinking like, oh, that's kinda cool. It's just a little bit of grit, little bit of added extra thing that would go into the typeface. But unfortunately what's happening and you can see it, especially I'm gonna zoom in real close to this V right here so we can get in here and show you, you see that little glitch stuff happening there, even on the EU and the R over here. Like I said before, if you don't create a really clean file, what's going to happen is those little dots there are all going to be included in the spacing of that letter. So when I click over here to English and we'll get to this part later. But when I click over here to the English part, you can see that it's just creating weird gaps. I'm assuming this is a snippet from what is it, Moby ****, just the word scenes look out oddly spaced. It is because of all that stuff happening. It took all that stuff from the maybe it's the S and maybe it's the C. It might, it's probably the sea. So that gap between the sea, that gap there in the e. But it's weird, it's different here. It's not fluid. And it would require an inordinate amount of tracking and kerning to get it to look good for anybody who wanted to use this typeface, even for myself. And I'm not creating this to make it harder for people to use. These little elements are cool, but I don't think it's going to, it's not going to add to the experience. It's actually going to probably detract from it because people are gonna have to spend so much time trying to tweak it to get it to look right. That's not what we want. So going back over here to Affinity Publisher, I went ahead and added that levels adjustment and I went pretty extreme with it. And I'll show you here by when you open this up, you can see I essentially went full contrast all the way to 50% on both. This layout is probably going to look a little different if you're doing this and one of the Adobe apps, but this is what it looks like, an affinity. And then I brought the gamma all the way down so as bright as it can get, it normally sits up here, but I brought it all the way down like that. I literally wanted straight black and white. I could also have just dumped a threshold filter on top of this and that would've I would've taken care of a lot of them once I did that. You can see that there's not a whole lot of that line happening anymore. It's like it's pretty clean now. Not perfectly clean. We just totally okay. I don't necessarily want it to be perfectly clean. I just don't want to have all this excess stuff that might be a little bit pushing it, but because it's not moving outside the ln of the box rather of the why. It's not too bad if it was outside here in this S. In fact, let's go find that. See, where's that cx? Let's find the CEE. Let's find the c. Don't mind me. Okay, here's the sea. You can see I've got a little bit of stuff happening, but that's not really going to affect the kerning or tracking of that particular element because even at the edge of this C here, or on this side, it's not a big issue. What was the H? The H was another one. A little bit of stuff happening here, but not externally on these sides, this side. So I'm not too mad at now. Next we're going to go ahead and jump in to how I got all these pages up into calligraphers step-by-step and showed you how I tweak them and did all the thing. If you go over here, this thing is ready to go. All I gotta do is right-click on either one of these and I can export this typeface out just like that. It's ready. It's good to ship, but it's not, is it? Because it looks like crafts. So the point being, we're going to do all that step-by-step. But make sure before you even get here, before we even get to the point where you go up here and you create a new font and then upload your template, makes sure your files are as clean as they possibly can get. 15. Building a Font - Part 2: Back into calligrapher. We'd go instead of being in the template section, as you can see here, we're gonna go to my fonts and you can see I've already got my old fonts bleeds and then my crave Beta, which is what I'm calling this one right here. And this one is gonna be crave alpha. Why crave? Well, it's kind of a family story about my name. My first name is Dave, my middle name is Chris and some people call me Chris. Some people called me Dave, somebody who said, Well, why don't you just call yourself crave? It's kinda lame. It's just a name however, because my first one is called bleed. This one's kind of like it's all about the things. It's almost like these action verbs bleed for me, crave me. I know. Weird. Just stick with me please. Anyway. So what you're probably looking at is a completely clear slate. There's nothing on this page. You won't see any of these things here because, well, you haven't made anything yet. All you're going to need to do is it Upload Template and then you are going to go find your files and do that thing. If I hit Upload Template to this one right here, what it's going to do is it's going to try and upload the template on top of what I've already got in this font. I don't want that if you've already tried to dabble and you've got a font already there. Then what we're gonna do is hit new font. I'm gonna call this one crave Alpha just as a default, I like to kind of bring my letter spacing down to about 85. That's personal preference only because of some of the things that I've seen. We're probably going to tweak this even more, but I'm just going to leave it there and leave the font size at a 100%. And word spacing is what it is. I don't know why they don't give you a percentage here. Maybe to data, we can choose our font-style. I'm just gonna call it regular because we were only going to be one of this one just because these choices are here does not mean that we're building a font family. Even if we had multiple fonts, you can sort of build them like that, like I did with bleed, but you can't encapsulate them into one typeface and have all of them just housed together like that. I wish good. But you can't go anywhere. We're gonna do that. We're going to have version one. And if you update this at all, it will just start upgrading that version by itself. Copyright notice I'm going to you can put whatever you want here. Yeah, David Kanri aren't designed. Dave Conroy is the designer. Description is whatever you don't necessarily need that licensed description. I'm not going to put anything there either. I'm going to hit Save. And now I'm ready to upload my new template. Now, for this particular one I didn't save as one PDF. I actually saved as eight different PNG files because that's what I got from them to place into procreate. What I have to do is pick these and bring them in some Choose File. And it's these files right here. Now, this is the tedious part. I wish you could just select all of these and bring them all at once, but you can't one at a time. I'm going to have to go in here and click that and you can see it got added here, but I want to show you something real quick and I go in here and this right here, this PDF, this size 19.7 megabytes. When I click this, you're going to see something happen. You need to look at the bottom of the screen down here because I didn't see it the first few times and I was like, why is this not working? Look down here at the very bottom of the screen after I hit this Open button, this file is too large. Maxilla is file size is eight megabytes, so that's eight megabytes per file. So if you have one PDF that's in less than eight megabytes, cool. If you have six different JPEGs that are each less than eight megabytes. Cool, a scratching my head. Why is this not working? Picking all these files one at a time. I'm gonna go through this real quick. We'll meet on the other side. Okay. So here's something I didn't anticipate. I haven't run across this before. This is new territory for me. So it's good thing that had happened here while we're watching is only able to add six files to this first starts, so we're gonna go ahead and upload these templates and this is going to take a minute. So, so far I've got 192 glyphs in the six images that I uploaded. If I wanted to add new variants, I could at this point, but we'll get to that point later. And I don't have a way to just automatically go back and add the other two templates that are still left. So I'm just gonna go ahead and hit add characters to your fonts. So now these are all in and everything looks good. So I'm gonna go back up here to upload template, and I'm gonna choose those last two files that seemed to work. But what I've seen in the past or what I've experienced personally in the past is if I was trying to add to crave beta and it's solved this same code here. It's going to just try to replace the code for these characters on this particular sheet. If I had printed out a new version of this sheet and then written in new styles, did these characters then I could add variance to this one if I wanted to. But otherwise it's just going to look at that code and it's gonna say, hey, are you trying to replace what you've already done? Which could have happened. You could have said, well, I really didn't like what I did there, so I did it again. You could do that if you wanted to anyway. So we're gonna go ahead and move to add characters to font and build this even larger. If you look here at an corner and bottom right, it says glyphs 255, There's something I wanted to show you here. You've seen this sheet right here. I did not fill out the entire page and I did that by design. Most of these are lowercase letters. And the reason I did that is because I tend to not write in lowercase like I want this to be reflective of my own personal handwriting. And so I don't write in lowercase, not enough for me to use it as a font. So I'm just doing only uppercase letters. So the only exception to this is obviously these marks that I've been there a little bit smaller than the glyphs, the symbols or whatever. But as you can see even on this page here, it's the same letters. All uppercase, but let me get one in particular. Let's see. We've got the NOP QR here, but then we've got NO PQR here. And what that's going to do is it's going to give me a variable option just by hitting the shift key. When I type NOP QR without hitting the shift key or lower caps, then that's what they're gonna get into. And if I hit the ship key, they're gonna get this one up here. So it's a built-in variant that I don't really have to worry about. The regular open type where I have to go and try and figure out the very end for that one. I didn't do that. I just have to hit Shift key. It's a hack. You might have lowercase letters, may want lowercase letters. They, they have no business. In my typeface, maybe a little bit of business, but I don't really see a desperate need to have them there's again, just go with it, but do what you wanna do. Just let me do what I'm gonna do. All right. Get off me. Oh, there's one more thing that I almost forgot. I want to caution you when it comes to the templates because they have a little bit of a trap aspect to them that I just want you to be mindful of before you get started, it's kinda hard to tell. But in some of these letters you can kind of see the gray template version behind my letters. I hope this focus is my letters. Template discussion. To your benefit. Don't get trapped into thinking that you have to follow those gray letters in the background. Exactly because that's not what they are. Therefore, they are merely there to kind of show you height in depth, width of that particular letter. If we're talking about building the typeface that's based on your hand lettering, then you should be using your hand lettering. It's not about tracing the letters, It's more about using your style and flair of your particular hand lettering, just with that kind of guideline there to help you. So your A's and your ends in your EMS and your bees in your whatever is your ones, twos, threes, all of those things should feel like they came from you. Not like Oh, I have to follow the line exactly. That's not what it's there for. Okay, moving on now, just to review what we've looking at here, you can see with each one of these, it gives you the symbol up top what it should be. This is the exclamation point. You can see the exclamation point up here in the corner. You can also see this number right here. It says one, and that means that there's only one variant to that symbol. Let's say I wanted to add some variants. Do these symbols here, I would just go every print this page out, rewrite all of these symbols and then upload it again, and then I can add them as variance. And they would, then that number one on there on the screen would turn to a two. Now, because this was all done in a digital format, I don't have to worry about the cleanliness of it. I don't have all these random little blips and blobs of ink isn't or like the things that got scanned in with the paper sheet. Worried about that. So I'm just going to go ahead and hit Build Font grave alphas, the name. I'm not going to randomize my characters and I'm gonna hit bill. Now I do this just to review because really it's kind of a cart before the horse because I haven't tweaked anything yet, but I want to see what's happening here on the screen. And if you look at this compared to crave Beta, it's pretty clean. I mean, the spacing is a little bit wider than what I would expect, but that's okay. That's just the way they operate. You remember I went back and I told him. I said I'd like to give me and I'll bring this basing debt a little bit. But that's just because I need to see what it looks like first before we go and do some heavy tweaking, everything looks pretty solid here. I'm satisfied. I'm gonna bring it up in size just so we can see a little bit closer and I did it. I'm feeling this already. Let's look at the alphabet now. This one here, size comparison. This is kind of cool. I like this. What this does is it gives you a kind of a relationship to what a standard point size of whatever that font would be. So if you imagine like a, like a 14 type in Helvetica versus your font. That's what's looking at here. We click that you can kind of see this is what whatever that font size would be. It's not, it doesn't tell me what the preview size is. Let's say this was a 48 typeface right here or right here. How does mind compare? Now my dollar signs and little small, some of these are a little bit small and honestly, I'm not that worried about it. When this becomes an issue is if you're trying to mix and match typefaces in say, a particular paragraph or a line or something like that. And you want to throw in a different font for emphasis or whatever. And you want the sizing of that to be the same. That's where this would be an issue. I don't see people using this typeface intermixed with Helvetica, it could happen. In fact, I might actually do it. So if I'm going to do that and even considering it, then probably wouldn't want to do is just up the size of my typeface, just a little, but let's say I'm cool with whatever is happening here. All I got to do is go right-click and then Save link as and boom, you've got yourself a true type font or an open type font. But I'm not terribly cool with this. So I'm gonna go ahead and close that. And then I'm gonna go here to Edit Details and I'm gonna go in. And I definitely want to, I think I'm just going to start with the word spacing and I'm going to bring that down significantly just so I can see what's going on. The problem here is that sometimes when I do this in calligrapher, it doesn't render well, they're rendering of what the adjustments that are making doesn't translate. I almost have to download the typeface to test it myself. I'm gonna go a little bit heavy handed here on this one just so I can see what's going on. I'm going to keep my letter spacing at 85%. I'm trying to think about where we were before. So I'm just going to go up like 125% and I'm gonna hit Save. Now I'll go back to build font one more time. Hit build, raised the preview size up just a little bit and you can kind of see it tightened up quite a bit, which I'm okay with. But what's bothering me just a tad here is that word spacing also affects this space between words. So anytime I have a gap or a space between. They say scenes and however are temporary, it's affecting that as well. And things are getting a little bit too tight. But before I go and fix it, I'm gonna check size comparison. And when we look at this side-by-side, I'm pretty much right on where I need to be. Everything looks pretty good. I'm gonna leave it at 125%, but I'm going to close this again one more time. Go back to edit font details. I'm gonna take the word spacing back up again, but I'm gonna bring my letter space down. Let's maybe go 50% and then build font one more time. This is much better. So I'm happy here, but I think I'm still going to open up the word spacing a little bit more just to give it a little bit, little bit more edge, fix that. It saved one more time. Build font one more time. Let's see where we stand. This is the test and tune process. This is what I talked about in the last one. It's just one of these things you just kinda have to tweak until you find out what works best for you. But we're still not quite out of the woods yet. Even if I do like this, there's still one last testing system that we need to work on. But because I'm good now I'm going to right-click on this Save link as find my folder. Now you notice that the name it changed it crave Alpha and then it added that regular because when we change the, the type details we added regular as opposed to bold or italics or bold or italics or whatever. So that's why it's adding that regular. You can keep that if you want or you can get rid of it. It's up to you and then I'm gonna do the same to the open type font again, do I need both? Probably not. Do I even need the open type font? Probably not. It's actually a little heavy handed for what we'd going on here because I'm not using any ligatures, I'm not doing any variance. This font is pretty straightforward, but what I've found is that people want to buy a typeface. They really liked that open type aspects. Now we have to experiment with the typeface. So I'm going to bring in a new file. I'm just going to bring in a text box here, and I'm just going to fill that, insert filler texts. This is just for testing purposes. Now, what I need to do is load my font. I use a font app called right font. You can just load your apps directly if you want. But I like to do this. I'm gonna load my open type font right here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to drag it right here into font library. This one's ready to go. It's already into my system and all I got to do is go over here and change it there it is. All snap. Look at that. I'm gonna duplicate this layer just so we can see what's going on. Duplicate this layer changes that one too recent. I just used it. So let's turn the Helvetica offer a second. I don't know. I'm pretty happy, pretty stoked. So now what sometimes happened here, like I was talking about before, is that in the execution, things don't quite line up the way that I expected them to. I find some, some glitches that didn't exist and that way especially happened with this one here. If those little glitches that we talked about in the beginning, we're anywhere in here. I might not have seen them in this sample that calligrapher showed me. But if I added more words and more type and more combinations of letters and stuff like that. They would probably jumped out at me more so than if I did that, I would have to go back in, maybe clean that particular file up and then re-upload it and then write over whatever I did before. I don't know, I'm pretty happy about what's going on here. I'm pretty stoked, so this is actually ready to go. And in fact, by the time you see this video, there should be a file in this particular chapter. You can download this one and all the other ones that I just created. If you follow it along with me, congratulations, you just created your own font. Yes, there's still one test that I need to do here. Let's see. I'm gonna go Kanri a, B, C, D, E, F, D. Oh my gosh, I can't type D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y. Am I talking like I just typed all of those in lowercase. If I go and do the same exact thing, I'm going to hit Caps Lock here because you can see these ones up here are all lowercase. These ones here are all uppercase. So if I wanted to change my letters at any moment, all I have to do is hit the shift key. Just like I said, look at how different each one of these is all at all happy with the result. If you've followed along, I hope that you're happy with the result if you have any questions about what we just did, which I anticipate happening, the comments are below, hit me up. In the meantime, the next section is gonna be dedicated to taking a font that we know and love and completely destroying it for our own benefit. See you over there. 16. Let's Talk About Fair Use: We are about ready to destroy a font for the greater good, well, at least for our own purposes. But before we go there, I want to talk about fair use. What exactly is fair use you ask, Let's look at Merriam-Webster's definition is a legal doctrine that portions of copyright materials may be used without permission of the copyright owner, provided the use is fair and reasonable, does not substantially impair the value of the materials and does not curtail the profits reasonably expected by the owner. Now how does that apply to what we're about to do? This is Helvetica bold, and this is my derivative of Helvetica bold, which I've called bleed ten. It was originally going to call this bond held yada because I knew that I was going to take my most favorite font and tweak it, but I thought better of calling it that because I thought maybe there was just a little too close to home that maybe Helvetica people, it might not take too kindly to that. Even though I have done what I believe is enough distressing, enough, messy enough of the original typeface to make it individual that nobody is going to confuse this with Helvetica. If somebody wanted to go buy Helvetica from whatever website and they solved this font right next to it. Nobody is going to look at this and ago, is it the same? It looks almost the same. Nobody's gonna do that, especially if they look at bleed 40, which is also a derivative of Helvetica, but completely totally distress. Before we go any further, I want to make sure that I'm clear about something. I'm not an attorney. I don't know anything about copyright law other than what I've learned over the 20, some odd years that I've been doing this job. This is not legal advice. If you have even the slightest question about what you're doing and if it falls within the realm of fair use or copyright infringement, then go ask an attorney who knows better. When I worked on bleed, I felt like I had created enough of a disparity between Helvetica and what I've got here to obviously make it a Fair Use situation, could the owners of Helvetica and take a look at bleed and say, You know what, This is a little too close. You're basically you're stepping on our toes here, Dave, here's a cease and desist. If I got a letter from monotype saying cease and desist, do you think I'm going to fight that? I would have every right to do so because I feel like I have created a clear-cut differentiation between Helvetica bold, which you see here, and bleed. But that doesn't necessarily stop them from taking action again because me and if they did take action against me, would I be able to afford the fight? Probably not because they have deep pockets and I don't know, I don't say that to scare you. I in fact, I'm still going to encourage you to do what you see fit to whatever typeface that you want to kind of make it your own. I'm just putting this out there is a caution to take it as far as you possibly can. And if you feel like it's still a little too close to the original, well then maybe you need to do some more tweaking. Innovation and creativity usually happens when we take something that we already know and we do something to it, we distress it, we tear it apart, we break it down, we've built it back together and make something new. That's how creativity works. That's how we come up with new stuff. Helvetica wouldn't have been a thing if not for accident. Garamond wouldn't have been a thing if not for Bodoni. It is our job as creatives to push things, to take what we see and make an interpretation. That's what we're here to do, but we're not here to step on other people's toes. And we definitely don't want to do ourselves a disfavor by getting into legal trouble. The unfortunate part here is that it is impossible for me to define where that line exists. I cannot sit here and tell you what is enough. How far do you have to go? It's one of these things that it's like I'd only know it when I see it. And I'm not gonna sit here and review everybody's version. You're just gonna have to make this call for yourself. Use good judgment. Also use extreme creativity and don't be afraid to push the envelope. That's exactly what I'm gonna do is you're gonna see in the next video. 17. Reinventing a Classic Typeface: Are you ready to destroy a font? Let's go tear somebody else's stuff apart and put it back together and make something cool. I hoped you want to do that because that's what this video is about and that's what I'm gonna do. This is obviously the second font that we're gonna be creating. And this one will be a little bit shorter because the process is almost identical except for I'm gonna show you kind of what I'm doing to the font. I'm working with my font. You can work whatever font you want to, but let's just show you what we got going on here. If you take a look at the screen, you will see everybody's favorite Ding bats. Well, I don't know if they have everybody's favorite, but it pretty much everybody knows these Ding beds. They've had them on their computers since the beginning of computer time. These are just typed in here and convert it to curves. There's nothing fancy going on here. The only thing that I did here that I probably should've done differently and I will probably have to go back and change is I didn't create enough space between all these because once I get into true destruction mode, you're gonna notice that things are a little bit tight. I want it to have some space there so that these things don't bleed together and create one bleeds to the next. And then there's a cut line. And we don't want to cut line, we want, you'll see what I mean in a minute. But if you're gonna do something like this, just make sure no matter what typeface you use, just make sure that you give it a little bit of breathing room between all of your characters. Now I've already gone through and mess with this a little bit. So I'm not gonna go through the whole process. I will say that again, I'm using Affinity Photo for this particular project. You can use whatever app you choose. You can use Illustrator to do the tweaking. You can use Photoshop to do the tweaking. You can use whatever, whatever app you feel is best you could use, go back into procreate and do the same thing. What matters is how much you alter it. And we talked about this in the last video, but we really want to make sure that we're doing enough of a distortion here, enough of a reinvention that it doesn't just automatically feel like, oh, I just threw a filter on top of Dean Betts. This was the first iteration I did just to show you guys what I'm talking about. And essentially you just put some pixelation in a little bit of Gaussian Blur and then through a threshold on there, when I click this off and on, it's obviously distorted, but it's not so distorted that it wouldn't raise some red flags over it. The zap family or whoever again, whoever happens to own the typeface anymore, That's not fair use. So if you're going to do something like what we're doing here, you need to push it, revisiting our good friend David Carson again, you're going to want to do stuff and I have to look at the book at the same time, but you're going to want to do stuff that really takes it to the next level. So you either add some pieces like this, take the E and make a smaller II, maybe mate, reverse out an e and make a white II on top of a, a black film over here. Look at this, this union right here. Look at that, like that. That's distortion. That's enough of a distortion. I don't know what typeface I've in fact, I would guess that's probably Helvetica bold or black right there. And he's done enough of a distortion to people to know that that's not so he could create a typeface side of that. In fact, some of these, I think he did create a typeface out of them. Another option would be to take your letters into an app like whatever, Photoshop or Procreate or whatever, and then redraw them with the pen tool like he's done here. And then obviously he took this and he probably distorted it against some more within the app, twisted and turned it in, whatever it did that. Now these are just graphical treatments. But we need to think this way when we're talking about what we're building here. When I built my bleed typeface, especially bleed, bleed 30, bleed 40, I really pushed it. If you look at this, you'll see that it does look like Helvetica. If you dropped Helvetica on here, you would see the correlation. You would see that they are, obviously it was a derivative of that, but all of my corners on every letter around it. And then of course with this one, it's just got all of these different elements that just add to what was already there. But it took some stuff away, added some stuff to it, and just get distressed it and tore it apart. I did as much as I could to separate myself from the original typeface yet still wanted to have a little touch of it. I wanted people to recognize it and then understand what I tried to do too. So although this one here is fairly well distressed and probably about as distressed as bleed ten I believe this one is just a little bit to like these icons are just two identifiable, especially when you get into these stars and these bullets or whatever. Some of these are just two recognizable as adapting vets. And so we needed to push it a little bit further. So the first thing I did is I took what I'd made and then I threw a crazy amount of blur on top of it and just use the Gaussian blur there. And then on top of that, I threw a little bit of a half toning. And then on top of that, I throw a threshold and came up with this full disclosure. I don't know if I'm a 100% where I want to be just yet. I mean, of course I'm gonna have to redo this because like I said before, some of these are so tight onto each other like here, this is not going to serve my purposes to well, we need to do some separation so that there's a clear delineation between all of these icons. I mean, maybe this works. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you're looking at and this is going like, why would you want that as a bed so it doesn't look like any it looks like a hot mess. And the answer to that is I'm not looking at this as being a typeface. I'm not looking at these being little icons that are going to represent the exact same thing that Dean Betts is going to represent. What I'm looking at this as is. These are gonna be elements that will be dropped into a page. So maybe you'll type all of these and you'll squeeze them together and you'll lay them on top of each other and they'll create texture, you know, anything about me and what I like to do tax year is a huge part of my process. Or I could also turn some of these into brushes and use those as stamps or whatever to create even more opportunity. But let's say you want to work on something other than like a ding beds. So let's say you want to work on your own Helvetica, your own future or your own Gotham, your own Dido, whatever. Here's Bodoni Bold, and here's Bodoni Bold with the exact same tree, but this one doesn't quite work. Uh, probably need to back this up quite a bit. In fact, the first thing I would do is I would go here to the Gaussian blur. Maybe reduce that down a little bit. Go here to my half tone, maybe change the direction just a tad and play with the halftone. Tighten it up or loosen it up. And again, you're starting to see kind of what I did for bleed in the first place. Just making little adjustments until I find something that looks good. And then I go to my threshold and it's pretty intense. So I'm going to be put up a little bit. And just for our purposes, let's just say this is what I wanted. It looks like a weathered and torn Bodoni that been sitting on maybe a crate or a or some sort of signage on the side of a window that's been there for too long. Maybe this is also another secondary option for me. I can take this same font layer, change the font to anything I want. In fact, let's just change it to something else. Let's go Zap fino. I mean, look at that. How bananas, nuts that I could do that if I wanted. It's totally up to me and it's totally up to you. Do whatever you want. Just make sure you take it far enough. Let push it, push it real good. That was a little uncomfortable. Moving on. I did all the tweaking to all the characters and spread them apart. And I've already dropped them into this template. This template right here is just the characters that you would see a standard keyboard plus the Shift button, right? So I'm gonna hit all the capitals and all the lowercase, and then hit all the ones and zeros and then all of the assembles that you would see, whatever you see directly on the keyboard. That's what I've included in here. The only one I couldn't find within the template actually is the arrow above the little six. I couldn't find that in the template anywhere. I know I've used it, I've seen it. I couldn't find just that one character. I figured well, okay, so I'm one character short from what? It should be here. Whatever we're going with, this is all ready to go. I've already exported this as a PDF, but I wanted to give you some thoughts on this before we move forward. The first one being, when you put these characters in here. And when I did this, I basically had to massage them and move them around because I just typed all the characters out. And again, this is not the smartest way to do this. I would definitely, again take that template yet use those gray letters, or at least at the very least, just look at the boxes on the top of these templates squares and use that. That's how you type it out your template. And then just use that as you're typing it out and then hit your hard returns for your next line and so on and so forth. I had to massage mind quite a bit. They weren't fitting the right way. These shapes are also vastly different and the spacing between kerning and tracking and whatever between these things. It wasn't lending itself to good equal spacing. So I had to tweak some of them. He didn't take me too terribly long, but it was something I'd definitely had to consider. And when I was going through this and checking it out, I noticed that some of these were a little bit too close to one edge or the other. It seems fine at first, but then I did a test and I imported it just to check it out just so I could see what was happening. And I noticed that some of them we're still hitting against the line. There's something about the transition from the template here until we upload it into calligrapher. Something about that. Sometimes these things shift a little bit. In the backend, it's in their programming or whatever. When you put these characters in here, just make sure they are as close to center as possible. Just so you don't have to keep going back and tweaking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Another thing to keep in mind is that these characters are gonna be vectorized. They are going to lose a little bit of their edginess. I go in here and I see some of the edginess of this. I mean, this is pretty blobby. Some of this is going to maintain, but there are gonna be aspects of this that will not maintain once I get it up there because they're going to round off even though edges a little bit just something to think about if you've got some really fine detail while some of that detail is going to, It's gonna be going finally, when you export this out as a PDF or PNGs or whatever else you decided to do it you'll probably be a grayscale image that'll help you keep the file size down because when we saw in the last video, you have to have that file like I think it's under eight megabytes. This one is actually not very large because it is grayscale and because I was exporting as a digital PDF, I wasn't doing it for print or high resolution or anything like that. I just wanted to go like high-quality digital PDF. And that was perfectly fine. So jumping back over to calligrapher, I'm going to start a new font. I'm going to call this one ding blobs. I'm going to keep my letter spacing is 100% and I'm gonna bring my font size up to about 110 because I did already put this through. I'm not really worried about word spacing, so I'm gonna leave that as is not making words at a dig bed, so it doesn't really matter. Then I'm gonna go and upload my template it upload and bam, bam, bam, bam. Oh, did I forget to add or I forgot to add my details? Let's go back in and make sure you do this. Folks do not skip out on this part again, keeping it regular. I'm gonna go add my drop in my copyright Option G brings up your copyright symbol for Mac users. If you didn't know that all that information in, I don't need a description. You can put it in license in there and you wanted to look into that. Go ahead. But I'm not gonna do it and we're just gonna go ahead and hit Save. We should be good to go. I'm gonna go and build the font in Bob's is the name, hit Build, and we do our check now, this is just doing bad. So it's really difficult for me to say what's going on here. It really doesn't matter because we're not meant to be typing this out in letter forms. But here's the alphabet size comparison really This is it. I'm going to actually bring the preview up just a bit. Again, this doesn't necessarily have to be perfect. You don't necessarily have to match at 12 size two, from one font to the next to the x. So next, in fact, if you typed at 12 font in even the top most popular fonts out there, every single font is gonna be a little bit smaller, bigger because these things just don't get rendered perfectly all the time. Then they render different and every designers dip, it doesn't have to be perfect, but I'm just trying to keep it relatively the same because again, if somebody's typing in Helvetica and then they want to drop in for some reason, if they wanted to drop it in one of my goopy Ding blobs, you don't want that thing to be super tiny compared to everything else or gigantic compared to everything else. I just want to keep it close to what would be the standard. And then once it's loaded up as a font, you can go up and down in size, however big or small you want. Right-click on both of these and save these somatic my font, drag it into my font library on my right fancy font app. And then I'm gonna go find it. Blobs. Here it is. Right-click on that to activate it back over here, I've got Helvetica lined up already, but we're gonna go find Ding blobs. Ding blobs. There are she blows. Pretty small though. So let's go ahead and boom, bring up the size and just go big. And what I'm gonna do here is kind of tighten this sucker up. A whole bunch, does like that. I've got texture or you can use any single one of these, That's the x right there. I know it doesn't look like an X. That's supposed to look like an x, but that's the x. Change it to o, w or two, or V. Just little elements that I can drop into my documents at any given time. That's just one way to go about this. You're probably going to go about it a little bit different. But again, as always, if you have any questions about what we did, drop them in the comments, we'll see what we can do about answering those for you. And if you haven't following along now you have two fonts that you can use to do whatever you want with them. I hope you feel good about yourself because it's been a long journey, but fun journey. I hope. Now you have amazing opportunity and that's actually gonna be the conversation in the next section. What are we gonna do with these now? See you over there. 18. Some Final Thoughts: It's now you've got yourself some fancy new fonts. What are you going to do with them? Well, that's a complicated question with several different types of answers. First and simplest answer is you just use them. You just use them. You do you put them to work and maybe share them with some friends if he felt inclined to spread the love around. If you do intend to maybe sell them in the future, but aren't quite there yet then what I do recommend is you start using them in your work. Calling them out, saying I made my own first font that will intrigue some people and they wonder how you did it. And then you're like, Well, hey, guess what? My friend Dave over there taught me how you don't have to do that, but i be stoked if you did regardless, just you getting out there and using your typeface, using your font and sharing it with other people will get some interest in it and maybe at least gauge how well it might sell to other people. And if you do decide to sell it, where are you going to put it? That one comes with quite a few options. There's a lot of different options out there as far as where to put it. If you wanted to be generous, you could just upload it to a site like say, 10001 fonts or duff font.com and give it away for free. And just maybe linked to people saying, Hey, make sure you just give me credit that you got it from me. You have an Etsy account and you wanted to move more into the downloads and digital goods. You could put it up on Etsy if you do want to put it up for sale, but you don't see yourself going to deepen a digital goods. You just want to sell this one thing or maybe you're too both of your things. If you've got two fonts or six fonts or however many you did end up making if you just wanted to sell just the fonts and not have to worry about a shop or Etsy or any of that stuff. You can put it up on gum road. Gum roads are really good option where you can just put it up there and people will pay you in, they'll get instant access to the download. You don't have to worry about hosting, you don't have to worry about Etsy and LSPs. It's just the fee that comes with whatever used to do gum road and people just go by that one thing and then that's it. Of course, if you've got your own website, whether it's Shopify or Squarespace or WooCommerce or wherever it is that you're hosting your stuff. You can load it up there and given all the bells and whistles and then promote it and share it to your, all the people or the world. I want to put it up on Facebook ads and share it with everybody, knock yourself out. You want to just promote it into the other different communities to do that. But at least you have an opportunity to possibly get it in the hands of other people and for a nominal fee, I mean fonts, especially the types of work creating the not meant to be big, huge packages like, like the big dog. You go and buy olive Helvetica and it's going to cost you about a couple of a 100, a $1000, maybe not that much, maybe it's just like several $100 to get all of Helvetica. We're not doing that to 1520 bucks per font. I'm sure people were willing to give it out to you. There's a lot of different options. It's just a matter of how much enterprising spirit you have within YouTube. Go and push this out into the world. Like I said, just give it away. Just be one of those people that gives your stuff away and everybody just gives you a high-five for doing cells begin to give away, as you should know by now that I have dropped bulb that the fonts are actually probably all three of the fonts now into this, into this, into this ecosystem somewhere in different places. Go get it, download it, and then if you do use it, just let me know. Let me know how you felt about it. Let me know how it worked, let me know what you've made with it. I really like to see what kind of stuff you make. Now we're done. Pat yourself on the back if you follow it along or if you're still going to go and do this later on, you have access to this to come back anytime you want, come check it out, do it all over again. And it's gonna be here for you. You are tremendous. You're amazing. You're unbelievable that you've made it this far. I'm super stoked that you are part of this. And again, I'm always inviting you to critique, to give me a little bit thoughts. I would really like to hear what you thought about the whole process, whether it was too short, too long, enough detail in certain spots. This was the first time I've ever created one of these courses. And I tried to make it fun and tried to make it light. And I know that some of these probably went on a little bit longer than they should have because devs with chatty chatter box, there's anything about this that you felt like maybe I could do a little bit different. I'm totally open to hearing your suggestions. Will I make every single one of them? Maybe, maybe not, but do appreciate when people share their thoughts or if it's just general questions on how to do a particular thing, I'll be happy to help you as much as I possibly can. I do hope you enjoyed this journey. And if you did enjoy the journey and you've got some good tidings to share, like a testimonial of sorts. Be open-minded to that. I would love to be able to share those thoughts with other people when they came around. Or if you decide that you want to share this with your friends, I'd be super stoked on that too. There's, you know, especially, especially good at goodies for the people that do that. Referrals are welcome. Sure. I'm gonna show this a little bit, but that's really just for the people who feel compelled to share. No pressure. I know I keep saying this, but thank you very much for being part of this. I really appreciate you for being here and stay tuned because I've got more things in the works coming later this year, probably sooner than you think. Maybe, maybe not. This course took me longer than I expected. So we'll see how long the next one takes things to come in the future and I hope to see you come back for more. Remember, be good today, be even better tomorrow. See you.