The Letter K a Walkthrough with Glyphs Mini: Building a Font Face
We all need a hobby, a thing to do as we unwind from a long and sometimes stressful day. Come join me as I rediscover something that I used to do many years ago but never completed and hope to do, create my own font face. In this series I am using the tool https://glyphsapp.com/buy and toggling back and forth between this tool and https://fontforge.org/en-US/ and creating my own font face discovering and sharing technique’s along the way.
The letter K:
I this video we’ve already made it up to the letter K. No you haven’t missed anything this is the first letter in the video series, it took me a while to get comfortable video recording myself creating letters.
I am using https://www.screen.studio/ to do the screen recordings for these blog recordings and my setup is a Mac Studio. As I mentioned I am using FontForge as well, as of the recording and writing of this I am still in the demo of the Glyphs mini.
I am finding that its fairly easy to use and FontForge also fairly intuitive however to be honest the use of both tools fairly similar. The only issue that is making me lean towards Glyphs mini is that with FontForge when you add a reference file for tracing the font items you get an annoying popup error each time you trace over it even when its on the background layer.
https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/issues/5437 report but its gone mostly unaddressed. If the bug is fixed I will come back and update this blog post for sure. So far the creation of the font face has been going well but I have a new found appreciation for the font creators out there. Not so much for the actual font letter creation but for the tedious nature for the leading, spacing, kerning and otherwise pleasing nature of how fonts appear on the printed page that you tend to take for granted.
I feel like I am a particularly picky person which I feel makes me well suited as a designer and when you are used to looking at things around you that do not give you that anxious feeling and then you try to create that thing and it gives you tose emotions and when you realize the effort it takes to subside those feelings to make the font perfect on the printed page its then you realize that typography is hard work.
Its a real job, its not a hobby, while I am taking it up as such for now I am not meaning to trivialize it as something thats meant to be, its a serious occupation and I really do admire those that are masters of the craft.
