I discovered to much to my abject horror that CasaleTwo is too short! I don't know why I didn't notice it sooner, like maybe when I made CasaleTwo, but the entire typeface is 2 fontstruct tiles too short. So, guess what--time to make it AGAIN!
Yeah cool whatever. "Shout" is still my favo Devo album so I owe it to them to make the font as close as I can to the original logotype.
Anyway, I know I've threatened to stop the NBP collection before and then suddenly I made 10 more fonts, but I'm serious this time. I haven't made a new font since around August, about the same time I posted the last entry here. I've been caught up in other things lately and typography has sort of fallen below the radar. Instead of saying definitively that I'm closing total FontGeek Digital Type Foundry, I'll just say that it's going on indefinite hiatus.
I still get ideas every now and then, but there's "idea" and there's "spend 4 hours on Fontstruct".
So, just in case I never get back to TFG, CasaleThree is going to be a worthy stopping point. Since there's Cyrillic in Casale One, there's going to be cyrillic in CasaleThree-- also accented Latin and possibly greek. I decided to stop making Hiragana and Katakana after a Japanese typography site called one of my fonts "hard to read". I just don't know enough about the letterforms to make it legible.
I guess I should talk about why I'm not doing fonts right now.
First, I got a new job recently-- one of those 8-5 types as a receptionist. It's not all phones all the time-- I do the occasional mail-run and I take the bins to the rubbish and recycling. Basically your standard-issue office grunt.
Next is that Tumblr has absorbed my life like a sponge. I'm managing 3 blogs at the moment and none of them are about typography.
Finally, no one is making any new and compelling fonts anymore. The nearest I've gotten to being excited about using a font was with Fira Sans, the new Mozilla font. Erik Spiekermann, designer of Officina, Meta, and Unit, among others, made that one. On Fontspace, all that's showing up anymore are handwriting fonts and the occasional Fontstruct-build minimalist piece. Not to malign the designers of those fonts, but after sifting through 47 screens of nothing but barely-legible script typefaces, one gets rather bored.
I'll try to make something before CasaleThree, just to say I've done it, but after that... no more. Not for a while anyway.
Geeking out over fonts (er... typefaces)
01 December 2013
12 August 2013
New FontGeek resources: PaintFont & FontPunk
The developers of MyScriptFont have branched out into a couple new ventures.
PaintFont is sort of MyScriptFont on steroids-- several improvements here. First is the printable template: instead of the same template for each project (which was noticeably lacking in a few important punctuation marks) it's now customisable by character set. You specify what language you're planning to type in and it adds the necessary characters to the template. You can also manually add characters to the template by pressing keys on your keyboard. When you're done adding characters, print the template and start drawing.
Another noticeable difference with the template is that the cells are larger with marks for the cap height, baseline, and descent. The larger cells mean less distortion when the server-side application generates the font, plus the obvious physical space factor which allows you to draw more complex lettering or dingbats.
The quality of the generated font has also gone up. MSF had a tendency to run strokes together if they were too close. In comparison, my pen was running short of ink when I filled in the PaintFont template and the imperfections in the strokes showed right up in the final product! Also notable is the auto-correcting feature-- if you accidentally mark outside the boundary box or if your printer didn't print the template straight on and everything has a bit of a slant to it, the generator fixes the problems automatically. Gone are the days of having to edit baselines in Type!
One problem I've found is that the website's tutorial page gives you the wrong information in regards to scanner resolution. It suggests 300 dpi, but none of the templates I scanned at that resolution were able to be read by the generator. As soon as I put it up to 400 dpi, that corrected the problem. In terms of what format to scan to, I've had good results with PDF. MyScriptFont wouldn't even look at PDFs, so that's a saved step if your scanner only outputs to that format. No more converting.
Next is a tool called FontPunk. Basically what it is is an effects generator. It doesn't make new designs, it only alters existing ones. It has a number of features to make fonts more flashy, such as outlines and shadows; or more practical, such as line thickness and slanting. However, it has no way of differentiating between fonts you make yourself and fonts by a professional type foundry, meaning that every effect it can apply to your own font, it can apply to any other font on your computer. Purely in the name of scientific research, I was able to make an italicised version of Inspira Small Caps with this tool. So, it's on the honour system-- whether you observe it or not is up to you. Either way, it's another fine tool to add to the list of FontGeek resources.
PaintFont is sort of MyScriptFont on steroids-- several improvements here. First is the printable template: instead of the same template for each project (which was noticeably lacking in a few important punctuation marks) it's now customisable by character set. You specify what language you're planning to type in and it adds the necessary characters to the template. You can also manually add characters to the template by pressing keys on your keyboard. When you're done adding characters, print the template and start drawing.
Another noticeable difference with the template is that the cells are larger with marks for the cap height, baseline, and descent. The larger cells mean less distortion when the server-side application generates the font, plus the obvious physical space factor which allows you to draw more complex lettering or dingbats.
The quality of the generated font has also gone up. MSF had a tendency to run strokes together if they were too close. In comparison, my pen was running short of ink when I filled in the PaintFont template and the imperfections in the strokes showed right up in the final product! Also notable is the auto-correcting feature-- if you accidentally mark outside the boundary box or if your printer didn't print the template straight on and everything has a bit of a slant to it, the generator fixes the problems automatically. Gone are the days of having to edit baselines in Type!
One problem I've found is that the website's tutorial page gives you the wrong information in regards to scanner resolution. It suggests 300 dpi, but none of the templates I scanned at that resolution were able to be read by the generator. As soon as I put it up to 400 dpi, that corrected the problem. In terms of what format to scan to, I've had good results with PDF. MyScriptFont wouldn't even look at PDFs, so that's a saved step if your scanner only outputs to that format. No more converting.
Next is a tool called FontPunk. Basically what it is is an effects generator. It doesn't make new designs, it only alters existing ones. It has a number of features to make fonts more flashy, such as outlines and shadows; or more practical, such as line thickness and slanting. However, it has no way of differentiating between fonts you make yourself and fonts by a professional type foundry, meaning that every effect it can apply to your own font, it can apply to any other font on your computer. Purely in the name of scientific research, I was able to make an italicised version of Inspira Small Caps with this tool. So, it's on the honour system-- whether you observe it or not is up to you. Either way, it's another fine tool to add to the list of FontGeek resources.
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