Typophile

About the whole process of creating a typeface with a brief explanation

Doğu Kaya0 votes

So I've been working on typeface design beside my design studies. But I always had the question "what is the real process of type design from the beginning to the end"

Can someone explain the order of all these to do list .

• A-Z a-z characters (I always use Adobe Illustrator to draw these forms but I don't even know what professionals do. Should I start in Illustrator or directly work in Fontlab to draw first characters? Why?)
• Numbers and then punctuation glyphs
• Accent characters
• Adjusting Metrics
• Creating kerning groups (I have some knowledge about it)
• Kerning (I have some knowledge about it)
• Hinting (I actually have no idea)

Second question:
Are there some nicely explained tutorials about the understanding kerning and hinting process?
Or extract the optical kerning data from illustrator which looks alright to me for now.

Typefaces i'm working on

Bert Vanderveen0 votes

I think you could benefit from taking a look here:

https://www.glyphsapp.com/glyphs-mini

And don’t forget to explore the rest of the site, there are some nice video's about the process of typedesign.

erwindenissen0 votes

There are many ways to make a font, and your approach seems just fine. It is not uncommon to have several iterations, but better focus on design first.

Some people start with sketches which they convert to a font and then refine it with a professional font editor. It seems you've already made a pretty basic set of glyphs in AI so, you can immediately import them into your font editor. If you need changes to your glyphs, either do it in your font editor or copy-and-paste them back into AI.

Let your font editor generate the accented characters. Adjusting metrics is one of them most important things, but don't spent to much time on it until you are satisfied with your basic character set. FontCreator has optical metrics which generates excellent metrics.

When you are satisfied with your character set, and with the metrics, then kerning is next. Also decide what OpenType layout features you want to include.

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