Practical Font Design
What you'll learn
- 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)
Requirements
- Basic typography knowledge and experience in using fonts
- A copy of FontLab Studio 5
Description
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.
Who this course is for:
- 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
Course content
- 137 pages"Practical Font Design With FontLab 5" the book which resulted in this course
- Preview08:59
- 2 pagesTerminology of Type Metrics
- Preview06:28
- 21:06Setting up your font and adding a mask to generate your character slots
- 12:07The basics of letterspacing
- 1 pageThe letterspacing tables
- 15:28Drawing tools
- 03:49The sample font
Instructor
![David Bergsland](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 64 64"%3E%3C/svg%3E){kind=avatar}
- 3.7 Instructor Rating
- 168 Reviews
- 923 Students
- 3 Courses
- Began art & design career doing posters for my acid rock band in Minneapolis
- Earned my BFA in printmaking & painting in 1971
- Illustrated for publishers as soon as I was graduated
- Became a graphic artist in 1979 in West Virginia
- Grew into Typographer & Art Director in 1983 in Albuquerque at a large commercial printer
- Began teaching commercial printing in 1991 in a large community college in Albuquerque
- Started writing textbooks in 1994 beginning with “Printing In A Digital World”—the 1st textbook on the all-digital workflow for commercial printing
- Began designing fonts to use in my books
- Developed digital publishing degree in 1996
- Initiated on-demand publishing house for print & ebooks in 2002—which developed into a full-time effort in 2009