Typophile

advice for a beginner

andehlu

Hello,

Ive been spending the past few weeks peeking in on the forums here and have to say I am very impressed by all of you and your knowledge.

I have just saw a few clips on Youtube for the Helvetica documentary and I loved many points that were made in the interviews. The one that stuck with me most was, the choice not to choose (other faces). They chose Helvetica. I thought that was very smart and started me thinking about my own situation. I am an Art Director in London for a major client. Most of my work is done online but if I sell well I sometimes get to push the above line stuff. What I have been thinking about doing for a long time now is, to design a font for my client that would hopefully become synonymous with its brand. The brand is worked on by many designers globally I would like to take away the choice like the designers in the Helvetica documentary. I hope this doesnt make me sound like the asshole I think it does ;)

My question to everyone here is... where do I begin? I havent designed a fontface since art school in Toronto 12 yrs ago and that was on paper. Is there standard software for this? Is there any popular freeware I could begin with?

‹ Guideline for decorative lettering embellishments? For your viewing pleasure...(calligraphy attached) ›
Quincunx

Widely used software is FontLab, but that is not freeware.
I believe that FontForge is freeware (or opensource), but I don’t know if it’s any good. Others might comment on that.

Max Rabkin

FontForge is open source (which technically isn’t freeware - it’s better). You can get it at fontforge.sf.net. Some in this forum don’t like it, but it has improved a lot recently, and is always improving. I’ve never really used anything else (besides a brief and not particularly fruitful encounter with Font Creator, which isn’t free), but I like FontForge a lot.

William Berkson

It seems that almost all Pros use either Fontographer or FontLab Studio.

ferfolio

I use Fontlab, and it’s great! :)
When you need advice ore comments, upload it to typophile and we’ll give our humild opinion.

Good luck,

PS: can you tell me the link to this Helvetica documentary?

Thanx

Ferch

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I am an aspiring software, and after trying to get by with less able Font Software for a while, I’ve decided to move to Fontlab. Fontlab really gives a designer just about everything he needs to draw and output a great font, with lesser tools I was spending a lot of time jumping into Illustrator to try and get things done. Fontographer has most of the great drawing tools, but it also has a lot of nasty old bugs that won’t be fixed until Fontlab has managed to finished Fontographer 5, so I end up going to Fontlab just to stay away from those issues.

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