I attended a two-part workshop preceding the annual TypeCon convention last week that was for beginning or aspiring font designers. It turned out largely to be a tour of the software more than anything else - the software being TypeTool, which is a stripped-down, consumer version of FontLab. The software-centric focus of the workshop probably should not come as a surprise, as the workshop was led by FontLab’s president. I got some good pointers out of the day of experimenting, but the many questions I have about what to consider when undertaking a font design that extend beyond the tools remained unaddressed.

This lack was remedied a bit by sitting in on TypeCon’s font crit session, which was fascinating and fun.

I picked up Cabarga’s Learn FontLab Fast at the convention, too.

Oh, and here was a good tip I picked up along the way at TypeCon: capital R is a pretty good candidate for beginning a design, since only in drawing it will you have to come up with solutions for an upright stem, a round bowl, and a diagonal, the elements that together go quite a ways towards determining the character of a font.