Practical Font Design
- 5.5 hours on-demand video
- 2 articles
- 5 downloadable resources
- Full lifetime access
- Access on mobile and TV
- Certificate of Completion
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Try Udemy for Business- By the end of the course, you will have the knowledge to develop the skills to produce your first professional quality font.
- You will set all the font metrics
- You will develop a special glyph used to keep the font consistent
- You will design the caps, lowercase, numbers, and accents
- You will add the accents characters
- You will produce the rest of the characters in a 256 character font
- You will add OpenType feature sets for small caps, oldstyle figures, lining figures, small cap figures and more
- You will professionally letterspace the font
- You will kern the font
- You will generate the font for your use and for sale (if you desire)
- Basic typography knowledge and experience in using fonts
- A copy of FontLab Studio 5
This course will introduce you to the basics of font design using the leading software, FontLab Studio 5.
This is not a design class, but a production class. This is a practical method shared by a font designer with 35 years experience in typography and font design. Included is a sample font to get you started, discussions of concepts, and many practical demonstrations of the process of creating a font.
If you have been wanting to design your own font, this course will give you a basic production procedure you can build into a workflow that fits your working style.
The course materials will serve as a visual reference to complement the content of David's popular book, Practical Font Design Third Edition Plus. A downloadable PDF copy of the book is included with the course, plus a sample font you can use to start your new fonts. He will show you how to use the sample font.
You can complete the course in a week or two, but the production of your first font will take several months up to nearly a year to complete.
The course materials will remain a reference as you progress in your craft of font design.
- The course is developed for graphic designers and typographers who are experienced in producing professional typography by using professional software like Adobe's Creative Cloud (or Suite) and/or QuarkXpress
This book is supplemental materials. The lectures contain the newest techniques.
The popularity of this book is what brought this course into being. The idea of sharing practical production techniques had never been done before in font design.There's no intellectualizing or high concept discussion here. This course is about how to produce a font quickly and efficiently. The design problems are only hinted and are completely up to the individual designer. There is an explanation of font categories, and a lot about readability. But again, that has to do with practicalities and not aesthetics.
The PDF is set up in spreads so you can read it like a book. Normally $10, it's included with this course.
An intro giving you a little of my background, showing you briefly some of my font designs, and describing the focus of the course and for whom it is designed.
This PDF defines vertical font metrics using an image from the supplementary book. I'll be using these terms, and assuming that you understand them, as we go through the course. One of the main surprises for many new font designers is the concept of optical alignment zones. This will show you what to look for.
This is a basic 10-step guide to the process of designing a font presenting the idea of working on the font as a whole and efficiently moving toward the finished font.
This lecture breaks down the complexity of letterspacing into a concrete method which quickly trains your eye. The result is that you will be able to enter the sidebearings as you draw the characters, and you will have good letterspacing at the same time as you finsh drawing all the characters.
Here we check the letterspacing using the Metrics panel. My method gets us pretty close, but I left some pretty severe mistakes in my sample font so you can see how easy it is to fix the letterspacing even if you seemingly mess it up. You will learn how to do this quickly.
At this point, we add all of the accented characters necessary for the various languages supported by the basic 8-bit font. This is what Windows calls the Upper ASCII characters. There are more than this, but we can add the accented characters very quickly and efficiently—over 60 characters in a couple of minutes.