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Creating a font for my new (monthly logo)

Sunday, August 10th, 2008

My weekly logo iterations have been a bit slow due to being away and some busy weeks so they have almost turned into a monthly affair which is a shame. Maybe weekly logos was a bit pushing it.

Anyway for this logo I decided in a moment of madness yesterday morning that I would create my own typeface with no consideration for how long it would take. It has know turned into a lot bigger project than I imagined but has been a great learning curve so I thought I would write about it so anyone reading could get some benefit from it.

I wanted the font to be very blocky with paint drips, looking at only capital letters but have now decided to do lower case as well but I will update the font over time to contain this and more glyphs. So I had my idea, time to crack open the sketch book out and draw the letters in…

You have two options now, draw your fonts straight into FontLab or take the route I did and scan them in and trace them in illustrator. Smart guides are now your best friend! Trace all you letters, setting up any guides you need to, don’t worry about sizing at this point as you’ll get this ready before you import them into FontLab. Make sure you are using smart guides to set up with your guides as this make life a lot easier when dropping them into FontLab.

For part two we’ll move onto getting the all important vertical metric measures: baseline, descender, x-height, caps-height, and ascender. Look out for it later this week…