A Type Designer’s Journal

Thanks to a post on Twitter from @motaitalic, I just found out about this beta version of a new font editor, Glyphs: http://schriftgestaltung.de/glyphs/about.html. (Unfortunately, it is not available for Windows.)

Very nice and simple interface! So far, I like the look and feel of it. For example, notice how the font window shows the glyphs in alphabetic order (above). You can also sort the glyphs by Unicode or older code pages, symbols, punctuation, etc. which is very handy.

The glyph window is very simple and uncluttered, and far more soothing (can I use that description?) than FontLab's interface:

Very nice, I think! It generates ("exports") fonts in .OTF and .UFO formats, so that they could be imported into FontLab to generate other formats. (Although I'm thinking that starting in 2010, I might only provide OTF fonts.)

Ok, I haven't had the time to play with this much yet, as I just downloaded it a few minutes ago. But, the good thing is that it gives FontLab some competition, so maybe they will work a little harder and faster to come out with an update to buggy FontLab Studio. In any case, give this a try and see what you think. Hey, it's free; you have nothing to lose.

Check back here for updates, as I find time to experiment more with this. Or, better yet, leave a comment with your own experiences.

UPDATE: Ok, it only took me about an hour to crash Glyphs. (I'm pretty good at breaking software.) And I wasn't able to figure out how to do some basic things (perhaps they're not implemented yet). But, I really like the interface a lot. Very elegant, especially compared to FontLab, which seems downright ugly in comparison. So, I really hope this evolves into a full-fledged, high-powered font editor, or that the people at FontLab are looking at this and getting some ideas about what an interface should look like ... or both. Would be great to have a couple competing, high-end font editors! I know it's a niche market, but I think type designers deserve to have better software than what's available at the moment. At least we could be more productive if we weren't spending so much time recovering from crashes and such. Ok, having said that, let me add that I'm very thankful to have FontLab Studio. I fired up my old copy of Fontographer recently, and couldn't believe how clunky it looked in comparison! But, even that antiquated piece of software made it possible for me to pursue a new career. So, I'm not going to gripe too much.

I have a link to this site in an earlier post about diacritics, but I just noticed that the article seems to have been updated and now has more illustrations. It looks so much nicer and is such an important resource, that I decided to give it its own post.

I can't overemphasize how important it is to carefully design diacritics, especially for those of us who are not accustomed to them in our native languages. Stop and ask yourself how you would feel about a carelessly designed letter or symbol that you use often; you would probably avoid such a font. So, my attitude now is: if I'm not willing to take the time to design a glyph with as much care as I would design an "A", for example, then it might be better to leave it out of my character set altogether. Anyway, this series of articles is an excellent resource, and a must-read for any type designer who is extending a font to include extended language support.

Diacritics: All You Need to Know to Design a Font with Correct Accents: http://diacritics.typo.cz/

Here are a couple quick sketches for my "real" (private) journal. Reminds me of my "medieval period" in my twenties when I was performing Medieval music and doing blackletter calligraphy with illuminated initials. Lots of fun, but messy (compared to digital "calligraphy"). I still like this style very much, and have often thought I would eventually design a font that would make it easy to create initials like these in two or more colors. Lots of decisions to make, though: whether to replicate the early Medieval look as closely as possible, or do a "modern" interpretation, or something in between, etc. And, of course, then I'd need to design a Medieval-style text font to go with the initials, and so on. Let me know what you think. There's no point in putting hundreds of hours into a font if nobody is interested in using it. Well, I admit I usually design fonts just for the fun of it. But, it's still nice when people buy the finished product.

By the way, speaking of journals, if you want to see how beautiful and creative a journal can be, check out Carl Jung's "Red Book", his private journal which has finally been published after being locked away in a safe deposit box for decades: Amazon.com: The Red Book (9780393065671): C. G. Jung, Sonu Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, John Peck: Books http://bit.ly/Tacv7