Transcripts
1. Intro to Font Design: Hand Drawn Fonts: Hey guys, I'm Jen. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to make your own font. We're going to take something that you hand letter and that you love, and make it into a font that you can use every day or whenever you want, this is just a really fine class to take if you've always wanted to make your own font. So let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am a designer and blogger, and I have always wanted to make a font, like it's been on my bucket list forever. Like ever since I learned about what fonts were and what typography was, I was like, man, this is really cool stuff I really want to do this, but I got this huge overwhelming burden of perfection that I felt like really helped me back from ever even considering learning how to do it. I want to teach you, in this class, that hey, making your own font should be fun and it doesn't have to be perfect. I discovered the whole hand-drawn look of fonts, this is quirky doodle defect, that people do and I was like, hey, I can draw quirky hand lettered letters and it would just be really fun to make that into my own font. So since then, I finally sat down and I just drew out all my letter forms through reverse font, I think it's last November, and now I have three published fonts that I sell or give out for free. It's been really fun and I really just want to share that skill with you. Hopefully, if you've always wanted to make a font, you can get there yourself. Today in this class, the goal is to make it easy, quick, and just something that you can sit down and do over the course of time. I also want to share with you the tips that I've learned in Illustrator and Glyphs. Let's get into the class, what you're going to be doing and then we'll go from there.
2. Project Overview: Before we dive into this class, I want to give you an overview of what we're going to be doing. The final product is going to be an all caps fonts. We're going to have letters A through Z, all caps. That will keep the project manageable and allow me to teach you quickly without having to go into too many details. First I'm going to teach you a little bit about the anatomy of typography so you know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about this piece of a letter or that piece of letter because it's not just the letter, it's like the little arms and legs and bowls and I'll get into all that in the next section. Then what we're going to do is we're going to start drawing our letter forms. This is going to be on graph paper. It's just going to be really simple, all you're going to need a scrap paper and a pen. Basically, you can have rulers and stuff if you want them too, but it's going to be pretty simple. Then from there we're going to scan in our letters, digitize them in an Illustrator. I'm going to show you some tips and tricks that I use with illustrator to make it a really fast process. Then we're going to dump them all into the Glyphs App, which is great for making your own font. It's free if you want to do free for the first 30 days, or you can do the Glyphs mini App, which is what I purchased, or they have the full suite app, which is like all the bells and whistles and is really awesome. At the end of the class, what I'm going to ask you to do is upload a screenshot of your letters so that you can share them with everybody and show off your personality and your lettering style. It's just going to be really fun and low pressure. Let's get started. I'm really excited. I hope you are too.
3. Anatomy of Typography + Key Concepts: It'll get you through what I'm talking about, a baseline or an arm or a crossbar, so you know what I'm talking about, you can follow along. Now, because this isn't all caps font, this is going to be a little bit abbreviated even more so because there are certain things like a ascenders, descenders, etc, that we're not going to cover because this is an all caps font, but if you want to learn more about fonts, just go online, Google anatomy of topography, buy a couple of books and learn more about that, but this is again just the basics. The first thing we're going to talk about is the baseline. The baseline is something that all your letters sit on, and it's the anchoring point for your letters, it's where the letters sit, they are anchored, You'll notice that the curves of the S and the O here happened to pull down lower than the baseline, that is so that they feel more anchored because otherwise they would feel like they're going to teeter-totter and fall over. The next thing is the cap height, now, that makes sense because it is the height of the caps. It is also what determines the size of a font. So whenever you say like this one is 20 points, that is the height from here to here. We're also going to have an x-height. The x-height isn't as important for this tutorial simply because we're not working with lowercase letters, but it basically is the height of an x and a font. That will give you a good guideline of where your elements of your letters are going to happen in the middle. If we were to do a full font, we would also have a descender line, which is important to keep in mind just because when we go into the grips app, wee need to set this descender line. If we had a y, it would go all the way down to the descender line. The first part is the stem. The stem is what is going to hold the letter up really. There are a few stems here. This H is a stem here, and here. This is a stem, and this is also a stem. Let's just color in the stems with orange. So these are our stems. The next parts are arms and legs. Now, mentioned arms and legs and in the shore and you're probably [inaudible] , are they really arms and legs of a letter? In fact there are. We got a leg here, this sits along the base line and we also have a leg here on the R. If you think about a person that would be a leg, we have our legs. The other important part is the crossbar, this would be a crossbar. If we had a T, the T would be a bar, we have our crossbars and our bars. Basically, they're a horizontal pieces of our letters. With the S instead of a stem, this is actually going to be our spine. In the inside of the O here, we have what is called the counter. This is the entire piece of the inside of the O here. This is stuff that we're going to punch out when we get an illustrator and we also have a piece that makes up part of this, which is called the bowl. This also occurs on the B and the P, etc. While there are a lot more words that we can use for the anatomy of typography, these are the ones that are basics. The one thing to keep in mind is that your alphabet is going to want to look similar to other letters. We have similar widths for each of the stems here and here, we have a similar width for each of the letter in general. The curves generally look similar to one another here and here. When you're designing your font, you want to make sure that the letters work well together and it doesn't look like you've come up with this letter that looks like it's out of left field. In the next video, we're going to talk about gathering materials and setting up your workspace to start sketching your letterforms.
4. Materials Needed: In order to start drawing your font and designing your font, there are a few basic things you're going to need. Let me first say that there are a lot of extra tools, a lot of very expensive extra tools that you can get, in order to make the process easier or work based on your preferences, but they're not necessarily needed and I really don't want to show any tools that are going to hold you back from just getting started with doing this fonts. I want it to be easy and accessible and so I'm going to keep it to the basics here. Now, the things that you are going to need probably are graph paper, a ruler, pencil and an inking pen, and an eraser and pencil sharpener. Those are your very basics. Now, you don't have to go out and get a fancy graph paper notebook, I do like these just because they lay flat. I've worked with this several times, this is just a composition notebook that is graph paper. It was like $1, and the other thing you can do instead of graph paper, if you feel more comfortable with plain white paper, is just go to your printer and pull out some copy paper. You don't have to get so fancy with it. Let me explain the pencils a little bit. There are two pencils here because this is a harder lead, in a lead holder, it doesn't have to be lead holder. But if you go to the store and get a pencil that has a harder lead, this will allow you to make lighter marks that aren't as obtrusive. That when you go back with your regular 2B pencil, you can go over the lines that you want to keep. I don't even know if you can see that one to be honest, but it doesn't hurt to have two types of lead. But you can just really get started with your Number 2 pencil and just go with that. The other thing you're probably going to need is a ruler to help you draw your baseline and cap-height and x-height. This is really per preference. If you're going to be drawing on copy paper, I would certainly recommend using a ruler in order to draw your baseline and cap-height and everything, but that's up to you. The last thing you're going to need are some inking pens. This is important because when we go to digitize the letters in Illustrator, you want to be able to do this easily and quickly. It really depends on what your preferences are. But we need something that's going to be black and something that's going to be easy for the scanner to pickup. It also depends on what your letters are going to end up looking like and how much detail you want in them. If you want something that's going to be really kind of doodling, hand-drawn, I would go for a thicker marker. Otherwise you can go for a thinner marker, which will allow you to show more detail, so it's really up to you. I have in the past recommended taking photos with your iPhone or your smartphone or whatever. But the thing is, is with typography and creating your own font, you're going to want something that is squarely on your work, so that when you go to digitize it in Illustrator, you don't have to worry about your paper skewing or something like if you take a photo that's slightly off kilter, you don't have to worry about your letter skewing and everything. I recommend getting a scanner or scanning your work when you're ready for that step. Besides the physical materials you're going to need access to a Mac. You're also going to need Photoshop and Illustrator and you need to download a copy of Glyphs app at glyphs.com. They have a free version as well as the full software.
5. Getting Started: Brainstorming and Sketching: So before we move away from this space, I want to talk about setting up your paper. Because this may be your first font, we're going to keep it really simple. I want to talk about the even amounts of heights for each of your letter forms. So first, we want to draw our baseline, then we want to draw our x-height. And then we want to draw our cap height. Within this block of four, we're going to draw all our letters. So really, if you want to go ahead and get started and set this up on your graph paper, or go ahead and set it up on a blank piece of paper. There are of course, different ways to do this. Not all fonts, actually hardly any fonts have an x-height that is halfway in between the cap height and the baseline, and we're just going to keep it simple and keep it in the middle here. So when you're starting to draw your font, a good place to go is something that you already would draw. So if you are continually drawing the same style of font, that is a good place to start. Because it's something that you're going to be comfortable with and it's something that you're going to feel like you already know a little bit. If you don't draw, you can go with something that you know already, like your own handwriting. That is a great place to start. I'm going to do something that I found on my Instagram that I liked. It was, I guess, a skinny block font that I'd only done for one piece and I'm going to pull the letters from that and start to make my font. Now, I'm not using anything for reference. Really, what should happen is that this should come from your own brain. If you tend to look at a font while you're designing a font, you're going to end up pulling some things in that are maybe too much of an influence on your work. A good place to start here is just to start drawing your stems, etc. You'll find that a lot of the pieces that you end up making can be used on many pieces of other letters. I'm going to start with an R. We already know that we have our stem, our leg, and our bowl here, what's interesting is if I go to now draw the B, you can pull in the same style for the bowls of the B that you already used on the R. Now, these are going to require some tweaking, but I'm just getting started here. Another thing you can do is do a U or an O. I'm going to go with an O. So just pulling down my O to get the framework on there. Then I can say, "Oh, maybe I'll do the U now". So I'm pulling in the same width as the O and just going ahead and drawing that based on the stems from these letters and then the rounded part from the O here. Another letter that would be good to do would be an A because we have some diagonals. Just very loosey-goosey with all this, we're not trying to make anything really perfect here. I'm going to go ahead and finish up my font and then I'll walk you through my decisions and other pieces, and it'll be easier for me to draw it without the camera in front of my face. So what I want to do now is walk you quickly through some of my decision-making here. Now, you can see that I went ahead and do the whole font and then I got to the end and I was like, oh crap, I did something that I didn't really want to do. I looked back at my reference and I saw that I wanted to do the Y like this. That was part of what drew me to this type of font. So I went back and I was like, what can I do to make my Y really stand out here? What can I do? So I looked at the points of the W and I was like, I don't really want to do a standard W I'm going to do a W with it softer like the Y, and the same with the A. I said, I can take out this apex and make it rounded and make it fit along the same personality as the Y over here. I did the same for the M and I was thinking about doing it for the N, but I decided not to, because that would read more as a lowercase N. Then as I went through the rest of the alphabet, I'm like, okay, what else can I do to make this fit in better? I was like, you know what, I think that's actually pretty good. I think I have a softer M here instead of this one. I have a softer W instead of this one here. So we have that and that. Everything else pretty much fits in the same here. You can see where you can use some of the letters over and over again too. So the O actually ends up being a good starting point for the C, the G, the Q, the S, even the U. It just gives it a nice place to start with the rounded bottom. When I go back to ink these letters, I'll clean this up and erase some of the bits that I don't need here. But generally, this line carries over to here and it all works out together. Even this line is used here with the S giving it a good guideline of where I should end that. The other thing is, I noticed when I was drawing my Q I was like, this tail is really cute and all, but it doesn't really fit in with the rest of it. So what I'm going to probably do is go in and square that off. So it looks like the rest of the font there. After you draw your font, you want to give it a good look over and see what fits and what doesn't fit, what seems like it is going to stand out from the crowd in a bad way and redraw that. Redraw letters is necessary. I drew the Y a couple of times because I didn't really like it. Then when you ink your letters, which I'm going to show you next, is when you can really start to get these down and have them to be the way that you want them to be.
6. Inking Your Letters: Inking in your letters is an important part of this process because it's going to allow you to scan in your work and have it be digitized really easily when after you scan it. You can't really just go ahead and scan your pencil work like you might be able to do if you were using the pen tool or something in Illustrator. You really want to have a solid form that you can scan in and digitize easily. What I'm going to do is I took this piece of paper out of its notebook so that I have a flat surface and I'm just going to tape it to a pad of copy paper just so I have some cushion underneath it. I'm just going to tape it to this here so it doesn't move around so much. Then I'm going to move forward with this small tiny liner pen. It's a 0.3 in width. There are two steps to inking. The first step is outlining and then the second step is filling in. Now, while filling in can be an optional for this, I'm going to show you both and show you why you might want to fill in and why you might just want to outline your letters for speed's sake. I'm going to start with my Y here and I'm just going to go over my letters with the ink. This is a process that I've personally gotten a little better at. It's definitely a learned skill and it's something that you'll get better at with practice in terms of having a steady hand. Of course, not talking while you're doing it would help too. You want to make sure that you have a good solid outline of your letters. You can see that you can go over places where you need a guide is not necessarily going to show up in your font. I'm going to ink a couple more letters too. You can see that I'm overshooting some lines and following other lines. Your pencil lines are a good way to lay down the framework of your letters but then when you ink, you can refine some of the widths that you've created. You want to make sure to close all your whoops here so you don't have any open spaces and you'll see why in a little bit. So that's a good start. Now, what I'm going to do is fill in some letters with a thicker pen. This is the Micron graphic one. It's just a nice thick pen. Just go ahead and carefully color in your letters. The good thing about coloring in your letters is that you can really start to get a sense of where you might need to redraw a letter or where some of the thicknesses look a little off. When you're filling in your letters, you want to make sure to be very careful not to go past the outline that you've already created because that tend to muddle your letters. Before we hop into scanning and vectorizing our work, I want to talk about why you might want to outline or fill in your letters. If you're not sure about how a letter will turn out once it is filled in on the computer, you probably want to go ahead and fill it in. What I did with this R here is after I outlined it, I'm like, "You know what? I don't know if I like how that really looks." So I went ahead and filled it in and sure enough, I really just don't like how this meets here and it feels a little too chunky here. I went ahead and redrew it, outlined it with pencil and then outlined with ink, and then filled it in with marker and I ended up liking it a lot better. Just really you want to fill in letters that you're not sure about how they're going to turn out, and if you're not comfortable with being able to guess what this may look like when it is filled in, go ahead and fill in all your letters. It really just depends on your comfort level and then you can always go back and redraw letters that you're not happy with after you bring them in the Illustrator. Next what we're going to do is scan these letters and bring them into the computer.
7. Digitizing Part 1: Preparing in Photoshop, Tracing in Illustrator: Guys, we have our scan that has been scanned and all the pencil marks has been erased because we don't want to have these scraggly marks. It'll be really hard to vectorize them an Illustrator, so it's just easier to do on paper. Now in Photoshop, what we're going to do is adjust the contrast so we have a really high contrast drawing and we're also going to clean up some dude adds that have happened here. First let's do the contrast. I'm going to zoom into part of my drawings. I can really tell what's going on. Then I'm going to hit Command L to adjust the levels. We have our levels pallet up, click the white eye dropper tool, and click on the widest part where you want your whitest part of your drawing to be. Now because we're actually on graph paper, I'm going to click on the grid, which will make the grid disappear, which is pretty awesome. Now, click on the black eye dropper tool and click somewhere on your letters where you want your blackest part of your drawing to be and that looks pretty awesome. You can see how quickly everything starts to pop and it looks really good. Now I'm just going to go through here and look for potential issues that'll be a lot easier to clean up in Photoshop and it will in Illustrator. Here's a perfect example where this line here of the E has overextended. I'm going to hit E for eraser. That's ironic there is an E and just clean that up and it's going to serve through everything else to see where there's going to be issues here. Here's another great example of the end where these don't meet and these don't meet. I'm just going to hit the B tool for brush and make sure I have a black color here so I can color this in and just a little bit of tweaking because we don't want to have that be an open piece of redrawing when we go to bring it in Illustrator. That's look great. It can just serve through the rest of this and make sure we have everything that's closed up to draw what we need to draw, erase what we need to erase. You only need to worry about erasing on the exterior part of your letters because what that's going to do is just everything in the middle here is going to be filled in with Illustrator. Here's another place where it needs to be cleaned up. Looks good. This can be cleaned up a little bit. Once everything looks pretty good, we're going to hit Command zero to zoom out and see everything. Now I'm going to hit over to Illustrator and we can set up our workspace so we will be able to do this digitizing really easily. Go ahead and go to window and we're going to open image trace. Then we're going to open a line, pathfinder and layers. These are the things that we're going to need in Illustrator. You can arrange these how you want to. I'm just going to dock some of these things over to the right by clicking and dragging on here. It's pretty easy to snap these and there we go. I'm also going to hit Command N for new document while I'm in here, we want 1000 by 1000 pixels. That looks great. Now we're ready to go. Go back into Photoshop and let's start with A because it sounds like a good place to start. I'm going to hit M for the marquee tool to drag and select your letter. Command C for copy, go back in Illustrator and hit Command V for Paste. Now you can zoom in here too, so you can see what is going on. Now, we're going to open our image trace here and make sure the advanced file is open. Now because you probably won't have any presets in here or maybe you will. I actually have a skill share preset, but I'll pretend it's not there. Here, click on the black and white logo and you can see that looks pretty good. I'm going to do some slight tweaking to make sure that we have a smooth drawling, but we don't have any holes and we don't have any weird jaggedy edges like this going on. I'm just going to adjust this here. Wait till it looks pretty good. You can go ahead and save your new preset so you can have it be new font. Then you're set to go, hit "Expand" at the top. This is going to change these all in the paths 90 to ungroup this twice, you can hit Command Shift G twice as a shortcut tool, and then click away with your selection tool. Click back and you can see that it only has the outside of this part selected here. So just delete that, delete the inner part, and now you're good to go. So from here we just need to mush this all into one letter. With your selection tool, drag and select everything. Go to pathfinder and then just click the "Unite tool." This is going to change this all into one block of a letter. You can see it. Let's change the color to black. Click "Okay." Now what you didn't do is go back into Photoshop, find your next letter that you want to do. Draw a box around it with the Marquee Tool, copy, go back in Illustrator paste and image trace and now you have your new font preset, which looks pretty good, but you might need to do some tweaks. Actually that looks pretty well, close here. Play around with it till it looks good. Hit expand ungroup twice. Get rid of these extra dude adds, highlight everything, and then mush all together with the unite tool, change to black. Awesome. What I'm going to do is vectorize all of my letters here, so they're all separate pieces and then we're going to come back and clean these up. Now that I have all my letters vectorized from the image trace palate, when I'm going to do, I've arranged them in an order so I can see if I've missed anything and if you have a keen eye, you've probably already noticed that I forgot to draw and F altogether. I actually did that on purpose because what you can do is easily create a letter based on the letters you already have. So I'm going to click on my E, copy paste into place and just move the duplicate over and zoom in. Now I'm going to just slice this little extra leg off so I haven't F. I'm going to use the scissors tool and then just do a quick snip. Now we have two pieces. Delete this piece and I'm going to smooth this out a little bit because it's not connected, depend tool and just drop that in there. Now we have an F. There are a couple of things that we need to do here. The first is we need to smooth things out. If you don't have this setup already, I'm going to recommend that you do this. Go to edit keyboard shortcuts, find the smooth tool by clicking here and typing and smooth and then you're going to probably not have a shortcut here. I'm going to pretend like I don't have a shortcut. You click on shortcut and then hit Shift S. That's what you want your smooth tool to be. Shift S is probably already assigned to something else, but if it asks you, just override it and then click "Okay." Yes, I do. Now you have your smooth tool ready. You have your selection tool ready. Just zoom into your letters so you can see them. Now, generally, the less points along the path, the better. What the smooth tool is going to allow us to do is to smooth out some of these points and get rid of them so they look better. We're just going to go through hit Shift S. Take our smooth tool, I'm using my mouse and click and drag along the line. You can see that got rid of all those points in general and it looks smoother. Here's another great example. I'm going to zoom in really close here. There's this little weird jaggedy thing going on here. I'm going to hit P for pen tool. Just hover over that extra anchor point and wait until it turns into a minus sign. Click the minus sign and you can see that our jaggy thing has gone, which is awesome. Zoom out using Command negative, pen around using the mouse. This is another place where we need to smooth, go ahead and select it with the V tool, Shift S for smooth, and then smooth that out. Really what we're going to do is just go through each letter and give it a once-over to see where it needs some cleaning up. It doesn't need to be perfect. Again, this is a hand-drawn font, so you just need it to look nice, but not super perfect. When I made this F, I actually want this to be not a straight point. So I'm going to zoom in, hit Shift C for this anchor selector, and then wait until this pops up over the anchor point and then a click and drag and let it go. So it has a softer angle. Zoom out a little bit here. The G needs some works smooth that out too. This is a great example of where I need to go in with the direct selection tool because there's some weirdness going on with the bottom of the eyes just really weird looking. I'm going to zoom in real close here, hit A for the direct selection tool. Click on this anchor point that needs to be dragged out, drag it out. Hit Shift S to smooth out these lines here and zoom out to see if that looks better. That generally looks better. Keep going. This is really weird looking. So I'm going to hit smooth and smooth this out along here. That looks much better. Super awesome. Smooth that out too. You see this is just a really a rhythmic process of going through each letter and finessing them enough so that they look good without looking too mechanical. That's okay. This is a little weird looking. Look at all those anchor points there let's smooth that out. Smooth this out. Get a good flow going here. Now, if you're used to the pen tool at all and you see all these crazy anchor points and handles just ignore that. This is a little bit of a different process than using the pen tool. Here's a weirdness going on here. I'm going to go with the pen tool, delete that now I have a nice flat area along the baseline there. I like how this is a little wonky, but I'm going to send a smooth that inside part out. You're basically just going back and forth with the selection tool and the smooth tool that's V and Shift S. Just get all your letters go on here. I know this is tedious to watch me do this, but when you're doing it, you will understand why I'm going so quickly. If you have a Wacom tablet, you can certainly use that and yes, I said Wacom that's actually how it's pronounced. I didn't know that until recently myself. But yeah, so if you have a Wacom tablet, feel free to use that, but I'm just using my mouse. You don't need super fancy tools to make this happen. There's a lot of stuff going on here. Let's smooth this out. I also really don't like how this turned out, so I'm going to come back to that in a second. I'm just going to finish smoothing out the Z. Let's move to bottom part here. The Y looks a little weird, like this part is really fat and I don't want how that looks. I'm gonna zoom in so I can see everything. Hit V. Click on here, click A and then drag this anchor point down. I really want this to be the same with thickness throughout the entire letter. I'm just going to do a little bit of anchor point finessing here. Whoops and that happens sometimes. Let me see, that looks much better, going to smooth this out. This will takes practice and it's really just hit and miss. Do what works for you and if you don't like how things turn out, just undo it and do it again. It's really just a matter of practice and going over your letters until they look good to you. This is our quirky little set of letters that I got here. Now, the next step is going to be setting up our Illustrator file to transfer our files, and then setting up our glyphs file and dropping them in there. Then we're almost done, guys. So I hope you're hanging in there.
8. Digitizing Part 2: Setting up Illustrator File, Pasting into Glyphs App: To pick up where we left off, we plopped our letters into Illustrator and image traced all of them, so now they're all individual pieces and smooth out some of the weird parts and fixed some anchor points where needed. There are still some things that need to be done, but we're actually going to do some organization before we happen to anymore letter finessing. For those of you who like to organize, this is going to be an awesome part for you. For those of you who don't like to organize, you might find it a little tedious, but ultimately it will save you a ton of time when you're moving these letters into Glyphs App. When we started, we started with a 1000 pixel by 1000 pixel document, and you're like, why is it so big if the letters are so tiny? But the deal is, we need to set up a grid which will help us organize our letters as I mentioned. In order to do that, we need to go up to Illustrator, Preferences, Guides & Grid, and we need to create a gridline every 100 pixels and each grid box needs to have four subdivisions. This will allow us to lay out our font like we did on our original graph paper. Go ahead and click ''Okay.'' Then to toggle the view of the grid, you need to hit Command quotation marks, and it's easy to remember if you think about quotation marks being two ticks next to each other. All these are like all these ticks. From here, each hard block of grid is going to be the basic outline for your letter. I'm going to start dragging and dropping these in here. It's not going to be perfect, but we'll go back and resize as needed. If I zoom into this section, you can see that overall, the letters are not reaching the cap height line. What I'm going to do is select all by hitting "Command A," hitting" E" first scale, and then I'm going to just scale these up a little bit so that they all are the same height. You want to try and not scale them individually because that'll change some of the thicknesses in some and not in others. You want to get a general sense of how these are going to look altogether. Just go ahead and keep scaling them up, moving them as needed. Make sure to hold down Shift when you're scaling these or else they'll get a little wonky, and those skew weird. You don't want that to happen because that would be sad, and that looks pretty good. It's okay if they overshoot the baseline a little bit. You can see how like the A here, if I zoom all the way in, is shooting a little past the baseline, that's okay because it's going to just sit nicely on that baseline and nicely and anchored because since this is hand letter, you have some irregularities. Now, I'm just going to go through and remember that this is my baseline. Remember this is my Cap Height line and adjust these letters have that they're centered in the box. This is their dark gray box area, and make sure they look pretty regular. When you're working with your curved bottom letters, you make sure that they hang lower than the baseline, so they're more anchored. If you went to a letter that you'd rather nudge instead of clicking and dragging, you can just use your arrow keys to move them around. Each letter is now in its own little box area. Everything looks pretty good. I'm going to go in and adjust some of these things like this is a little thick here. I'm going to hit my a Direct Selection Tool and drag these couple of paths down until I get it to where I like it, and you can give it once over for your letters and see how they look. You can choose to tweak them as much as you want, or as little as you want. Remember, this is your phone. Great, so that's looking really good. Now what we're going to do is draw an a 100 by a 100 pixel box around each of these letters. Now, because this is an 1000 by 1000 pixel box and there are now 10 subdivisions with each one having four subdivisions, these are each a 100 by a 100 pixels perfectly. We're going to draw our box by clicking the ''Rectangle Tool'' or hitting ''Enter'' on your keyboard. Go ahead and click randomly on a spot, and you can type in your values here. If it's something else, just type into a 100 by a 100. Click ''Okay,'' and now you have your bounding box. I'm just going to switch these colors, the fill and stroke so that you can see the outline of this. The next thing we need to do is move this box so it's perfectly at the 0,0 coordinate point, which is the top left corner of the art board. What we need to do is go to Window and then open transform. We have this box here that we can perfectly align things. You can see the coordinates of it now, and we need that to be 0 and 0, and you can see that it automatically moves this entire thing. Now, it's saying that the width and height are 101 pixels. It's because we have a stroke declared someone or get rid of the stroke and we don't need that anymore, and now adjust my coordinates again, so it's 0,0. The width and height are both a 100 pixels and that's perfect. Now, what we need to do is duplicate this so that each letter is surrounded by this, a 100 by a 100 pixel box. In order to do that, we're going to open up our Move Tool, which is available by the shortcut Command Shift M. If you're not sure where that is, just go to Object, Transform, and Move. But I'm going to use the shortcut Command Shift M, and we're going to have our preview checked. Basically because I want to move this along the horizontal axis at a 100 pixels each, you can see, oops, I'm sorry. I have the reverse. A 100 and 0, which will move it over to the right one block. Basically, we want a 100 pixel block and I want to copy it instead of just moving it. I'm going to click copy instead. Now, you see you have one box here and one box here. Now, we don't have to do this for every letter. Luckily, you can just hit Command D to duplicate your action. Just keep hitting Command D over and over until you've reached the end of your row. Now, if you zoom out and then carefully with the Selection Tool, select your boxes. This way, you can move again. You can go Command Shift M, and now we're going to be moving it 0 horizontally and a 100 vertically, which will move it down. You again hit ''Copy'' and then hit ''Command D'' again, and now all your letters are now surrounded. You can get rid of these extra boxes here. Now, what we need to do is group each letter with its bounding box. In order to do that, use the Selection Tool. Draw a box around it and then hit ''Command G'' to group it. Just keep doing that for all your letters. To select two things, when I'm in the center here, you can either lock these exterior layers or I'd just like to click and hover Hit ''Shift'' for click and then group them that way. Now that all your letters are perfectly bounded by a 100 by a 100 pixel box. You can easily move these around and not worry about them getting smushed or something. We're going to just select all of them by hitting ''Command A,'' and then we're going to move all of them to this top-left position. Now, we're going to use our aligned palette, which is why we opened it earlier. We went to align them all to the left. Click on the ''Horizontal Align Left'' button and then click on the ''Vertical Align Top'' button, and now they're all almost to this one square. Before we do anything here, we're going to go to our layers palette, and we're going to release these auto layers and click sequence. Now, you can see they're all different colors in it actually looks pretty cool I think, but we're going to see them all in our different layers here, which I'll make it really great for transferring over eclipse. Before we do anything else, we also want to make these 1000 by 1000 pixels. Inner transform palette, we just want to change all of these widths and heights to a 100 or a 1000 pixels wide, so 1000 by 1000. It'll automatically update. You want it to fit within 1000 by 1000. If you have any letters that extend higher than the cap height, you can just ignore that and make sure that it fits within 1000 by 1000. I'm just going to zoom out, hit ''Command A'' for all. I'm going to move these up negative 750 pixels, and what that'll do is when we copy and paste them in the Glyphs, it'll make it so that they transfer and they're in the right place. Changes to be negative 750 pixels on the transform for the y-value. Hit ''Enter'' and see they all moved up. They all sit nicely, and now this top edge of the art board is your baseline. Now, we want to go ahead and open our Glyphs App. The screen may come up blank, so you just go to File, New. To set this up, you want to go ahead and go to your Font Info. You can do that by going to File, Font Info or hitting ''Command I'', and we just want to do some quick things here. The unit per Em is 1000 and the Ascender is 750, Cap Height is 500, x-Height is 250, and the Descender is negative 250. Now, the deal with this is your fonts are not always going to be like this because we designed our font on a four by four grid. That's going to be our Descender, x-Height, Ascender, Cap Height, etc. You can go ahead and name your font now. If you haven't thought of a name yet, just leave it as new Font. I'm just going to name this French Press for now. I'm sure that there are a million font, same French Press, but that's fine. Go ahead and type your name here, your URL. You don't have URL, doesn't matter, just leave it blank. Version 1, everything else is all set up. We have this all set up. Go ahead and click the X on this tab, and now you're in your font viewer. Because we're not going to be using these Glyphs, you can actually click and select all of these by hitting ''Shift.'' Coursework now, there we go, and then hitting the minus symbol for deletion. Great. Now, we want to select all the letters and make sure that they are also 1000 pixels wide. If you hit ''Command A'', you can change the width to be a 1000. These are all going to be adjusted once we paste them in here, but we want to make sure that they're all the same. That when we go ahead and drop this to glyphs that they all fit within the bounding box. Now, let's get started moving each of these letters over. I'm going to make this a lot easier by squishing my glyphs window over to the right and moving my Illustrator window over to the left. That'll make it a lot faster for me to just drag and drop, and copy and paste in here. Again to view one letter, hold down Option and then toggle the visibility of that letter. With the Selection Tool, select your letter, hit ''Command C'' for copy. Go into Glyphs, double-click on the letter that you want to paste in. Well, it's really small. Zoom in here with the Command plus for zoom and then Command V for paste. Before you do anything here, you actually want to delete the bounding box that you drew or else when you go back to view your font, you're going to see that the letters punched out along this weird box. The box is just there to make it easy to copy and paste over new glyphs. Double-click on this box so it turns purple and then hit ''Delete.'' Then if you X out of your A, you can see that the A is starting to form here. Now, just toggle the visibility between each letter and paste them into cliffs. Make sure to delete your bounding box. You can quickly close this by hitting ''Command W.'' I've gone ahead and paste it in my last letter here. In the next video, we're going to work with spacing and kerning. We're going to fix all the spacing that happens on the left and the right of these letters, because we pasted them in at a 1000 by 1000 pixels. We want something that's obviously going to be closer to the letters so that they don't look so spaced out and weird. Now you have your whole letters, all of your letters pasted in. In the next video, again, we're going to work with spacing, kerning, and then exporting.
9. Digitizing Part 3: Creating Your Font in Glyphs!: Alright guys, so now we're in Glyphs app and we have all of our letters dumped in here. What we need to do is fix the spacing so that they won't be super spaced out when we typed them out in a real font setting. So a good place to start with all caps font is H and O, and then we can transfer those left side bearings and right-side bearings, which are really just fancy terms for left spacing and right spacing onto the different letters. So I'm going to start with H by double-clicking on the H. You come up to this view where it has all the anchor points and everything. You can hit T for text or just go ahead and click on this View here. That way, you can see what the letter actually looks like. Now from here, what we want to do is type in a bunch of capital Hs and Os to see what it looks like. You can change the point size so you can view it a little better. Before we get started with this, we actually need to change something in our System Preferences for our Mac. So go up to Apple and then go to System Preferences, then go to Keyboard, Shortcuts and display Machine Control. So we actually need to turn off these settings for spaces. I don't actually use them myself, but if you need to change the shortcut, you can do that. I'm just going to go ahead and turn these off. You'll see why in a minute. So go ahead and quit out of System Preferences. So to change the left-side bearing and right-side bearing of everything, what we need to do is actually start with the O. Now, Glyphs recommends using a third of the counter width of the O. So the counter, if you remember is the space inside of the O and you might be like, "Well, how do I figure that out?" Go back into Illustrator. Look at your O, toggle off visibility of your last letter and go on to O. You can get an exact measurement of this, but you can also do a quick visual calculation. So you know each of these bigger boxes or a 100 pixels wide. So we've got about 225, let's say 240 pixel wide counter. So we're going to go back in here, and 240 divided by three, which is a third of 240 is 80. So what we're going to do is with the O, we're going to change the left side bearing to be 80. Then we have 80, just hit "Enter." Now it's recommended for the Hs, we take 1.5 times the amount of the spacing that we used for the O. So that would be 120. I'm going to change these to be 120 for the H then 120 again. So you can see that's looking pretty good. You can type this O H O H O H O over and over and over again. So you see how that looks. That looks pretty good. If you're typing in here and you're like, "Why isn't this working?" You're trying H and O, H and O, just remember that we're only doing capitals. So you want to make sure you have shift held down so you can see your letters here. From here, what we can do is start to assign the left side bearing and right-side bearing of the H and the O to the other letters. Now, because a lot of these letters either have a square outline or a circular outline, we can actually assign what we've created an an H and O to the other letters. So great place to start is with the O. There are certain letters that can definitely take these left side bearings and right side bearings. So I'm going to go into C, and instead of typing 80, I'm actually going to type the capital O here. You can see that it's automatically bringing in those left-side bearing and right-side bearing calculations. I'm going to do the same for G, type in the capital O, and type in the capital O again. Q would be a great one. Toggling between these letters. Now for the H, what I can do is find letters that have this square framework. So A would be a good place to start. So I'm just going to type in a capital H here, capital H here. Click out. So what I'm going to do is assign the same left-side bearing and right-side bearing for each of these letters based on the H and the O, and we'll come back and then start to work on testing. Now in Glyphs, what we're going to do is work with kerning pairs. No matter how we set our spacing there going to be some letters that just look weird when they're placed together. A common culprit is something like the V and something like the A, just something where when they sit together they actually are going to have a lot more space than what we originally set them out to be. As you can see, both of these have left and right side bearings of the H. But really the V has a lot of space over her, so we want to make sure these look right. So I'm going to go ahead and click into the V and type in a couple of V and A's. In order to change the kerning for these, we need to click in between the letters and then use the shortcut Control Option Shift and then left and right. The Shift is for changing these in increments of 10, which I always like to do because I feel like if you're just using the left and right, it can be a little bit too detailed. But if we do Control Option Shift left and right, you can see that these are starting to pull together. Then do the same thing for the other side. So you can see this is looking pretty good. If you're not sure where to start with kerning pairs, what you can do is actually hit Command Option F. Then this'll bring up your sample text. So you can bring up some sample things and you can see only the ones that have the capital letters. So just go ahead and click "Okay." Just scroll through here and see where some things may be spaced out a little differently. So what we need to do now is just do some final testing because we've set our spacing up pretty nicely. Our kerning pairs are going to be few and far between which is great. So just go ahead and type in some of your favorite words and see how it looks. You can toggle the point. You can get a better view of how your font is starting to look. Now, you can see that the space is really big, so go ahead and adjust that as needed. So I'm just going to keep typing words and making sure that this looks okay. This is a little funky. So I'm going to hit Control Option Shift, adjust that. You just want to think critically about the kerning pairs that you're doing. So if you're doing F and an O, you want to go back to your font and say like, are there any places where F would hit an O type letter where it would look weird and probably not. You're not going to have something that's FC, FQ, FJ, for example. So just make sure to think critically about this. Try your name, try your family's names. Whatever you want to do. O and V is a great one to consider. So you just want to keep tweaking these until you have a good set that you like. It's fun to do a stream of consciousness when you're testing needs because it really gives you a good idea of what is on your brand at all times. Once you're at a place where you feel pretty comfortable with your font and you have spaced and current these correctly and your space looks right and everything, you're ready to go. This is the really exciting part. If you haven't thought of a name for your font yet, you can go ahead and do that. You can go ahead and think about it, but I would just go ahead and name it something even if it's your name, your first name, middle name, just something unique. So go to Command I. You can change this name. I'm going to go ahead and change mine to Sunny Side Up because I just typed in something about eggs. So all this looks good. This is the big moment, guys. So we're going to File and export this font. Go ahead and choose your destination. I'm just going to go ahead on my desktop. Hit Open and then click "Next." After you've exported your font, you can go ahead and minimize Glyphs Mini. You're going to see it where you saved it to, it's my desktop. So what you need to do is right-click and then open with your Font Book. If you just double-click it now it's going to open like a static version and you don't want to do that. So just go ahead and open with Font Book and then install font. There we go. Now it's installed. If I go into Photoshop or Illustrator, I can use it as a font. Before we wrap this up, I just want to show you guys how to create a fun font preview. I'm just going to drop some texts into here, like the font name. So we got Sunny Side Up. I'm going to center that and go ahead and change that to my font. Need to highlight it first. How exciting is that? It's so fun to see your font in a real setting. I love this part of it. You get to really see all your hard work come to fruition. I'm just also going to type in all the letters, so we haven't done here. Voila, so there we have it.
10. Final Thoughts and Next Steps: I hope you guys enjoyed this class. I had so much fun teaching and I really appreciate you watching. I hope you learned some awesome tips and tricks that you can continue to use, whether you continue to make fonts or whether you're going to continue to just use Illustrator. The next steps if you choose to take them, would be to make the full suite of your font, meaning the lowercase letters and numbers and symbols. It's really fun and I hope you continue to do it. Before you go, I hope you'll upload the screenshots of your font so I can see your work and I hope we can continue to with inspire each other and just have fun with it. If you guys have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to me on my blog or Twitter or Instagram anywhere I want to be able to answer your questions so that you don't hit a roadblock and you get stuck. So that's it. Thanks again for watching and I will see you around.
Jenny Lee, Hello Brio Studio
