I exported my font and converted it to a. Once complete, I converted the kerning text to all caps and did the whole thing again, to pair the capital letters. The obvious ones are between V and A, but there are so many letter pairings within that example copy that I wouldn’t have thought of. Using the keyboard shortcuts ( use this tutorial) I plodded through and adjusted kerning groups for every single distance that didn’t look right to me. I visited this website, and pasted in their example kerning text. This was a massively painstaking process. With the spacing set up (accounting for wider letters like M and W) I started kerning. That is the spacing distance you should start with on the left and right side of your letters. And before starting the kerning process, you have to get your letter spacing as close as possible to how you want the file to look.Īpparently as a rule of thumb, measure the width of the counter of the letter O (the hole in the middle) and divide that by three.
There are a series of keyboard shortcuts in this app which you absolutely must master before setting out on this. With my characters in place, I went about spacing and kerning the letters. So I had to paste each character in manually and scale it up to match the guides in the app. I downloaded Glyphs Mini and watched a couple of tutorial videos, then realised I’d set up my illustrator file completely wrong.
Ian Barnard, a calligrapher pal on twitter (with my surname), recommended a program called Glyphs, which you can download for a free 30-day trial. In the morning, I completed the numbers 0 to 9 pretty quickly, and then began to actually create the font file. My pace picked up, and before bed I had managed to work up around 35 of them. I was now moving on to some of the extra glyphs, like the question mark and exclamation mark. The letters f, g, a and e were the trickiest, as they were completely new styles. I used a lot more of my ‘flourishes’ here, especially at the end of the ascenders and descenders. This was undoubtedly harder, but with my rules agreed upon, it was just a case of churning through them. With the CAPS completed, I moved on to the lowercase letters. Any aperture, which is the opening in a letter, like the cut in the letter C, or the end of any arc, like the curved end of the letter J, would be cut at an angle.
My font was very simple, but with one defining ‘flourish’, if you will.
With these rules agreed, plus a height for my crossbar (across the letter H) I started churning out my capital letters. The outside corner would have a 12mm radius, and the inside had 6mm. Most letters would be a tall block shape, but with letters like O, B and D, the edges with curves would have rounded corners. I made a decision that any letters that would usually have curves, would have a rounded corner instead.
So with this in mind (and a day off from work), I set myself a challenge… Create an entirely new font, from scratch, and submit it to Google Fonts in under 24 hours. At the beginning of the day he starts with a pile of materials, and ends up holding something that he once coveted ( this one is my favourite). I’m a huge fan of Adam Savage’s One Day Builds. By James Barnard Designing a font from scratch - and submitting it to Google Fonts in 24 hours One Day Builds