Live stream: creating a width + weight variable font in GlyphsApp (Fontathon 2024!)

yeah so let's kind of take a look at where we're at on this sort of experimental project um and where we're going um this is a font currently called animist I don't know I I love that name and I intend to use it I don't know if this is the specific font I intend to use it on um but here is the font so far um let's just look at like uh I think in the past I've had um no all right let's set up a not empty glyphs oh H nope all right let's see if I can remember how to do this oh no get out of the way this is a little like uh key Caster uh thingy so let's add a smart filter so we can look at draw glyphs and [Music] um is there just an empty thing uh no so I guess I'll just do count of paths is greater than zero that's going to get us most of the way there cool um yeah so here's kind of the font so far um yesterday I worked on numerals and I guess okay this this is a let's add a one thing to this um glyph count of components is greater than zero and then we'll have to click it again for a second any of the following are true cool these like filters in G over Robo font are so useful so I totally recommend uh using them when you have a question like what are all the glyphs that are filled in this type face so far um we can also maybe use wordom mat to display how things are looking um this just kind of picks up random words uh and I guess it is showing us that um some of our characters aren't filled out so let's do it with selected glyphs so that we um don't have so many gaps okay let's try this again where I'm at please what missed a button okay that's looking kind of better um yeah so here is the font as of now and my goal today as you probably know if you've seen the thumbnail for this um is that I'm going to make a weight and width variable version of this um I also want to start by actually making an upright version of this and I'm not going to take all the time to like edit all of the letters to be upright because there that will be a lot of um editing and just like time and maybe I'll do that later in the Stream but I want to start with trying to do something a little more informative maybe uh for people who may drop by my channel now or later wondering about variable font production so um yeah I'll basically start with a minimal character set and uh by the way just for setting some context um I normally would never start a font design in like a forward slant or in a metallic um I kind of did it because that's just how I started drawing this font I started I forget it's an old post on my uh um Instagram kind of but I basically Drew these three letters to start and I really liked kind of this like forking e crossbar and like this weird a and putting in some extra seraps uh kind of was the brief for this type base and then I wanted to expand that into more of a character set so today yeah I'll start by basically making a new font almost um not entirely I'll copy it and uh but yeah I'll be doing more of the sort of typical workflow of making a new font so uh here's my glyphs window I'm just going to I could just make a new uh um like master and gly as a Roman or upright um but I think I want to leave this one as kind of a version um that I could return to later or whatever um because I'm going to be working kind of experimentally here um this is a glyphs repo so I could like actually like make a branch and all of that um but a lot of the time doing the stupid version way can actually be more useful so we'll just kind of label it here um with the date we're moving on from it and yeah um uh variable let's see naming who knows what to do with it all right so let's close out of some tabs and let's get back to our drawn glyphs and this has a 14.04 degre slant um or italic angle and that's kind of based on I think four units up and one unit over um I first heard of that idea in the IBM Plex type face it's kind of nice um when you set your italic angle to be a specific number of units up and over so that you can kind of always count as you're moving things around it it doesn't seem like it'd be useful but it is um okay uh so we want to basically I'm just going to slope everything back by 14.04 degrees um and I could get a little more clever than that like using some rotation um often if I'm starting say a uh italic I would use some rotation and some sloping but um yeah let's see what happens if I just do that okay so that looks kind of cool on its own uh yeah let let's look at word ofat again um uh word of mat please um I don't know what this will look like but I'm suddenly really curious okay capitalize yeah make words um okay actually kind of weird and cool in a really strange way um yeah I don't know I might like uh I want to put a pin in this and come back to it because that's just kind of a weird laidback sort of thing um but yeah you know what I'm going to um I'm going to make another document just so I literally have this a great thing about font files is that they're so so small so iterating like and just saving many many documents or many many glyphs is like nothing um you know versus it wouldn't work this way if you were working on videos or something um we'll call this unsed um and let's duplicate it to make our variable basis okay all right um let's try again see if I get distracted again um let's go um what happened to the nine yeah okay I see um cool okay uh I was just reading a a chat message there and we figured it out it was that I hadn't Oh unless the what happened to the nine was a question about this backs sloping thing and in that case what happened in the nine was it is a component of the six and so I think this might be happening with the o or I don't know I guess for the O it was basically circular already um and so yeah it like didn't have like geometrically it doesn't have as much of a slant as the H even though it looks something close to right um so when you backs slope that as hard as you're backs sloping a rectangular character it looks extra backs sloped in terms of the nine it's like a uh component and so kind of uh what happened here is that that the six was sloping forward and the nine was a component of it and now but it was rep I don't know um it's basically yeah it like double slopes it sometimes when you do something weird like that this is actually so funny cuz like this uh let's bring up our like metrics boxes here all right um light and we're going to give it a a0 degree italic angle okay so it is kind of wild that this um right here is a vertical it's like an optical illusion where um it's almost vertical at least but it definitely doesn't look like it um that's that's something cool and I want to explore it more in the future but anyway for now um let's like um correct these four glyphs and um then we will kind of do this variable thing and then we can correct more glyphs let's see if I actually stick to that plan but uh we'll try it for now um interesting I think that the um italic like slope also kind of messed with things I could write a script potentially I'd have to like go look up maybe how to do that but it could be useful um or I could just since I'm going to be messing with all of this anyway I might just let's see what happens so that's 779 oh it definitely added um okay let's try this um macro panel please I'm not like the most um fluent with writing scripts and glyphs i al well I've spent more time in my life writing glyphs in robofont and I find that API a little more intuitive like how you reference things and move things around or whatever but let's figure this out uh because it won't be that hard so glyph app API well fingers crossed it won't be hard things can sometimes be hard when you don't expect them to be um so in this big document I'm gonna I'm like looking for transform oh God right this uh this transformation thing is slightly confusing sometimes I've used it before but gez all right let's let's just go through and puzzle through it and we'll get there so and by the way you don't have to like know how to do python to do script or to do type design but sometimes it can be helpful for things like this where we're trying to correct all of our glyphs and I don't know that there's much of an easier way to do it we could like we could Loop through all the glyphs and subtract a certain amount from the left side bearing and add a certain amount to the right side bearing and that might be a pretty sensible way or yeah actually a transform won't get us where we need to be well because it literally changed the um the width of the glyph when we kind of UNS sloped this um all right so I don't get caught up in the weeds here I'm gonna not do this the like smart way I'm just going to go and see what I did in the the previous thing and we'll just keep rolling uh this is an early type base so we're going to need to respace it all anyway um yeah I think this sometimes doing things the not clever way is the way to go um so like that's interesting these almost these numbers seem wrong why because they were I guess well when you skew everything you just kind of have to expect there to be weirdness but okay um the other thing let's see if this still works hey it does um I have a script that kind of will just use the vertically aligned thing um scale selected points to zero width and this uh is a script that uses some Transformations um so I guess next time I need to transform things I would actually probably go to my GitHub and pop this open and look at how I did it but the uh useful thing to note is that if I hold all my mods and then tap the space bar it kind of straightens things out and that is going to be pretty useful because I want these to be vert vertical not backs slanted I mean there's probably something cool to them being backs slanted too but I think vertical wins in this case um I also have one that can help us fix these guys uh let's see outlines scale to zero height oh it's under the period okay nice um I kind of put these together for uh working on name mono because I've got a lot of things in the italic that kind of are vertical lines so it was useful okay and yep that does a little bit um let's also kind of um clean up our paths a little bit even though this looks kind of cool in its way it's I don't I don't I don't know it's not what I want at the moment so um hold shift option we can put in our extrema points and then delete those guys and then holding uh what is this control option I can move these down and have these kind of other points these off curve points um Flex with me a little bit so that just makes things that much easier um let's put this here I'm not going to fix every letter in the alphabet here but I do want to just have like an okay basis for the font just to kind of I don't know have it look somewhat nice as we're working on our variable font here here's another point that should be a vertical extrema and yeah okay so that's looking pretty okay I would say um we'll want to correct it more later no doubt but it's kind of on the way to to looking how I think I wanted to um all right uh the N honestly is fine let's maybe make the shoulder a little thicker but yeah cool um then the D we're going to do a similar process to the a I should probably have um an O here as well that's a pretty critical control character so we're going to add that to this uh list of stuff H is that is there I don't know um I like little ink trappy bits so let's add one um yeah a funny thing when we have these uh character references is that I don't know yeah when you're going to a new type base maybe it can be a little bit distracting okay so let me see what happens if I just slop this forward interesting that's back to the italic what if I um do like 7.02 H okay that is funny I don't remember if I started this o normally and then sloped it by half but it kind of looks like it because it almost works exactly um like it looks like a half decent um Roman o with just that 7° tilt backwards um I do want it to be a little bit more um symmetrical than this so let's uh let's do something kind of fun here I'm going to select these option delete delete these um oops don't with that yeah okay so my theory here let's see if we can um start with a symmetrical thing we'll probably have to resize it slightly but that might get us pretty close oops um I hit uh command shift R to kind of redo the uh Strokes there this is looking oh good okay um I kind of want these to be just slightly more Square so I'm going to I think it's okay yeah if I hold control option and select points you can see that these are mirroring the movements which is kind of cool um I've also been using this fit curve thing a little bit recently a little bit more than in the past and that's kind of a cool thing sometimes can be really handy but yeah I don't know it's uh it's fine it's decent okay um yeah I'm sure I'll want to clean these up further but this is a an okay um Honda hope we don't get um copyright claimed or something but uh that's a nice word to to work with um okay so let's go and set up a another Master we'll call it um bold or why don't we do um black for fun uh now I'm going to do extra probably I don't know we'll see when we when we start drawing we can change the name um let's see if I can um copy all these things sometimes you can okay interesting sometimes glyph is super good about copying information and sometimes it's a little bit not good ah okay we're just gonna have to do it then maybe I can um can I duplicate a master that's probably faster yeah okay much better okay we're going to call this extra bold and we'll probably want to raise the x height somewhat but I don't know by what yet so we'll wait for a second um oh let's also set these icons which kind of is Handy and we'll set it to a just so we have a nice visual reference and we'll also start with um redrawing this and we can uh go between these with like um command and then the numeral I believe so let's just kind of I'm using a lot of that like scaling edit uh approach which is very very helpful here uh honestly I didn't take even a moment to draw this out by hand so probably a terrible idea but we'll get there hopefully fingers crossed I should be showing this in the background um basically I found just by observing others honestly and trying things um bold versions of type faces tend to kind of add a little bit to the outsides and more to the middle um and that kind of gets you approximately the results you maybe want um but I don't know for sure what I'm going to do um for this top part yet that's going to be an interesting sort of question to be honest and this this kind of um stroke is me trying to do something I guess trendy but I'm unsure if I'll want it there it's going to be a pain seriously to um keep this curve working well in a variable font which maybe is a fine thing to show I don't know I'll I'll potentially back out of that decision just because it might be just so painful to try to keep up but let's um let's try to be kind of aggressive here with our weight and see how far we can push it and I'm kind of from memory trying to make this um a little bit like a fat face kind of thing I guess or like a the style of like Doo um kind of stuff and we will see how that works out looks terrible so far we're on a good path um yeah definitely looking more like a black white than an extra bold that's kind of my point I guess I am trying to see how far maybe I can push this Until It Breaks um and then I might you know ultimately scale back a little bit once I have more information the one useful thing to note is that I'm like not trying to add or delete points um I'm just trying to start with the points that were in the other weight here and that allows me to um create uh middle points so or middle instances and a variable axis darn it I should have gotten the uh um show variable font tool from Mark to Mark maybe I'll do that uh sometime in the middle here oh we need to set up our values of course so let's make a weight axis okay we're going to start with a weight axis here and that's looking good and then we're going to say this one is you can either go by STEM weights or kind of CSS weights I guess we'll do stem weights um just because that makes it easy to consider things so that's 71 let's look at like the N 68 okay we'll call it 68 and you know to be honest maybe I should start the heavy version with the um n it's probably going to be a more fruitful thing to [Music] explore I'm just going to try to see what I can do if I just kind of reflect my movements okay that's kind of something maybe we have to move this up too I'm just kind of like hunting for I guess the appropriate um thing I guess this is a little fatter still maybe see if we can go one further all right yeah I think that is kind of working they're both 158 but interestingly to me this the right stem looks just like a little thinner somehow so maybe I'll Cheat It Out by a little bit and let's um kind of make those points a little smaller yeah so I feel like all of the curves kind of have to be slightly more compact here um okay now that we've got that information this is actually going to be somewhat easier I think I think this has to come up basically to reflect that n maybe we have to add a second Point here this will break the compatibility for okay wait let before I get into that let me set up the uh instances okay so shoot what was this um and I'm holding all three mod Keys uh we'll call it 58 and sure let's call it black okay uh 158 and get back to font info that's kind of cool it shows what extrapolation to weight zero would be I'll talk about that more in a second uh let's add an instance for each Master 68 158 um if we do 68 + 158 and then divide that by two we'll find the Middle Point 113 I just kind of want to get a middle point and um maybe I'll call it medium and then 113 plus 68 90 okay we'll call uh we'll add a one at 90 and we'll call that one regular can it be 0. five maybe um and then 113 this is raycast at by the way it's kind of nice uh it's like alred but the calculator is a little nicer wait uh okay 158 135.5 five all right so we'll start with this set um that kind of will give us a nice bit of information about how things are interpolating so you can see our n kind of going from our uh going from our kind of initial light instance up to our new black instance and this is telling me that the contrast has actually I accidentally kind of made the connection a little thinner here in appearance than it was in the light so I just kind of wanted to adjust that slightly um all right our a is going to look how do people handle this bit of the a it's actually a real mystery to me let's um make a layer here and let's try [Music] something like um this I don't know if I like this much it's definitely like a new move that isn't happening in the uh regular or the light rather but we don't have like a ball terminal so we can't just like increase the size of the ball terminal this spiky thing does kind of put us into a bit of a corner um which in that I mean that'll happen in the capital S as well and the E I don't know I'll have to figure it out sooner or later um for now maybe let's make it later um yeah so anyway uh let's add a point here and you can see that as soon as I add a point the points are no longer compatible between these um I can do this better by view U Master compatibility and it's basically okay if I delete this point you can see um that every one of these points relates to every one of those points in a pretty particular order um because it came from it and I just moved them around if I move the start point to a new spot then this is going to be all crisscross and not working out usually you can make glyphs autofix that if there's the same number of points with command shift R but that totally didn't work uh you have to do it often to both uh layers or sources or Masters and then it kind of applies the same her istic which is something like the bottommost point uh becomes the start point and the outer points uh go counterclockwise okay so getting back to what I was trying to do here let's add a point here so that let's make these both smooth so that we can do something like this and then this specific move probably won't work so well in an italic just CU these points will be really close together but we might solve that at another point I don't know okay uh let me read the comments um hey Fay thanks for showing up hey Lauren um could I ask what CX means in the transformation section I tried to see the guide book but still didn't understand uh that's kind of probably a question from a few minutes ago um uh I don't know um it is kind of a slightly confusing thing last time I wanted to figure it out um I basically uh went through the Forum a lot and found some partial answers and then kind of played around with it I would guess that CX maybe means like Contour x uh potentially hard to say for sure um could be component X I don't know changing the an to a specific letter uh yeah um could you lose the little dip on the top as it becomes a black weight I'm not sure if I'm saying your name right salky but do you mean in the a or the N um do you mean this little dip here uh because possibly yeah that could be one way um yeah uh that that could be a thing let's let's give it a try um or maybe we could make it smaller or something this type face is kind of all about these like added syrups so I guess that's kind of the thing I'm I want to keep in a way but uh yeah probably making it smaller is sensible and certainly to make it lighter that could increase um so I think that's a pretty good um move even if we keep it slightly subtle potentially um we could also let's make this like I think we just kind of have to um make this get more weight maybe it could be like that's kind of interesting huh I don't know but that's kind of cool that kind of starts to get us there which is interesting um well I don't hate it uh let's work with it for now and we might try other things later all right um promise I I promised like a variable fonts tutorial and then I take an hour uh trying to change my a okay this one should be faster we just trying to go kind of fast yeah it's about right maybe well if I compare it to the end it needs maybe a little more yeah ends and O's are sort of hard uh to really feel like confident about that white relationship but it's a start Let's uh go to our letter D and in the background I'm going to throw in the O I don't know why my menu showed up way over on this screen but we're adding a component let's um let's go to the background and also add in an n and see where that gets us it might work and it might not let me turn off a few layers I don't want Master compatibility I don't even want metric for a second let's delete this guy okay so now I can more clearly see just my n and O and that should maybe help us in uh by the way I'm not sure if this is the way to do but uh we'll find out it at least gives us the same vertical thickness and the same horizontal uh approximate um one thing I'm noticing actually is that my counter space of my o is way bigger than my counter space of my n is that a problem cuz the two look maybe about um yeah the end does look a little more condensed just by a little bit so so why don't we um that looks better to me this is looking a little too Square somehow okay still don't like the a but uh why well it's not as it's not as thick just yet by any means so let's uh adjust that well did I make a new font accidentally y okay I feel like the n and a look to be about a similar kind of uh width I don't know I'm sure I'll want to revise that a little bit but um it's okay um I do think I need to take in the spacing a little bit so I can better match kind of the o uh I don't know we'll figure that out more in a second um okay but uh let's continue this d a little further kind of trying to make this d a blend of the o n and a I don't know I guess this type face is somewhere between like a transitional where there's like a calligraphic flat nib thing and then a um expansion sort of Doo style um maybe I'm still figuring that out a bit this is why maybe starting with the Roman is something is usually a practical approach I I would have maybe had a clear answer on that if I started with the Roman rather I would have been the italic but I guess I when I started this type face I was also trying to figure out how to get better at drawing italics um so in a way it was an exercise in that and uh I needed to figure it out more at that point than how to make a new style even I don't know okay this is kind of kind of something let's uh make our capital N thicker and then we will move on I guess I could just make the one side thicker has to be kind of at least as thick as the lowercase n but probably a little more typically okay we'll give it 20 units more and see how that feels okay rather than doing that I'm going to just kind of flip this let's get our metric back okay I think it does because I haven't expanded the width at all it does look a little maybe yeah I kind of want it to appear about the same uh overall rectangular isness as the light and that means that the total width has to extend by just a little bit all right uh that feels fine okay so let's get it back here we have our light and bold and if we um well I guess we might as well try to export a variable font right now just to see um let me check how many incompatible glyphs I have oh apparently I see I didn't yet get this one so let me do that okay now I think it should be compatible and um let me look at the chat for a second uh the a about 30 seconds behind I think you're right really exaggerate between become yeah yeah that's true it is hard to do your own thing at this stage and not look for answers Elsewhere for sure um and sometimes looking for answers elsewhere I think is fine um it depends I I guess but yeah I think references are pretty much fine um you don't want to copy anything but sometimes people have solved the problem and it's worth looking how other people have solved the problem um if you were working on a bridge you wouldn't try to like reinvent every like way you weld or join metal or whatever so I don't know or if you're working on a website you'll look up ways to code certain things so you don't always have to just like explore on your own but also it can be pretty good to explore on your own and kind of see how things are where you what you can come up with like out of experimentation does there's a lot of use to that too so it is a balance I don't know I think it's best to explore to try to find something interesting on your own in something like the a where you probably know how to make an okay a and it's just a matter of like finding that solution whereas if you're trying to make like a Yen symbol or some symbol that you're not as familiar with using it's kind of just like a responsibility to go look up how other people um deal with it basically because you don't want to get too inventive on like things that you're not personally familiar with I'm just kind of straightening out these stems because they bug me being not perfectly vertical okay all right so let's see um you can uh you know there are lots of tools to build fonts I tend to prefer um shoot Let's uh make a new export I tend to prefer uh font make often um but let me see uh where I'm just going through my file system here okay I like font mic but the glyphs export can be really useful for just like design in progress stuff there's a recently a font make plugin for glyphs which I still haven't tested but really want to um wow it was it was fall of 22 when I was last working on this uh kind of seriously for that um funathon okay let's uh oh no what interesting too many inflections why is it complaining oh oh come on glyphs it's fine that's an obnoxious complaint I think that font make could actually build this let's look for um damn all right let's uh let me Google this um font make plugin cph set maybe it's not like a really publicized thing just yet I don't know okay well um I don't want to fix this but I guess I have to um I don't want to fix it because I feel like I shouldn't have to um these can interpolate but apparently G doesn't feel like it it'll probably complain the f as well so we'll add um wow this app is looking pretty funky it's cool in a way pretty funny all right um oh and I'll probably have to copy these uh adjustments to the other source so that it doesn't complain all right let's try it again ah um by the way I didn't explain what an inflection point is um so let me explain that real quick how many variations okay we probably don't have too many to clean up which is good um an inflection is where curves go in multip directions rather than just one so that is to say um let me draw this out this is a basic cubic bezier curve um and it curves in One Direction like if you were in a car and making this turn you would move the steering wheel and you'd go around the bend uh an inflected curve is sort of like something that happens sometimes in the spine of the s for instance um where it's curving in both directions and because cubic beas have mathematical limitations um there's not as much control in the middle of that curve as if you had two segments to this path and furthermore if it's being converted to ttf Curves which are a slightly different type they're quadratic curves rather than cubic curves um they have even more limitations than cubics and I guess whatever way glyphs is using um honestly I'm just going to delete this glyph uh whatever way glyphs is using to convert to ttf maybe isn't as um accommodating as the library that font make uses to convert to ttf so yeah we'll see how many glyphs I have to correct and if it's like too many more more I might um maybe it worked now if it's too many more I might uh figure out the font make thing but it looks like it did cool so I'm going to open it with font goggles this is a nice app and let's check out how we're doing fingers crossed Moment of Truth hell yeah all right we have our basic weight access and that's always an exciting moment like when I'm making fonts one moment that's exciting to me is typing out something in the font um because that's the magic of fonts but then um hone ad sounds like a dirty word or something I don't know but uh yeah the other point that's really exciting to me is making it variable okay um now that we've got that let's let's add in our width axis so hey it only took me an hour to to draw five letters isn't typed it fun um so okay so to add in a second axis we basically need two more Masters and I was actually diagramming this out um for somebody who asked me about this the other day so let me kind of try to share that diagram real fast and that will explain sort of where I'm going with this um okay so here I'm using uh Myriad variable from Adobe this is an illustrator okay it's having trouble sizing so this is a basic width and weight variable font I don't know uh basic in that it's not a humongous range in either direction but it is is a clear range um and I was just kind of explaining that a design space is all of the area that it is possible to interpolate within a font um so that's a really important Concept in making fonts in general and variable fonts in particular and when you're building a variable font it doesn't allow you to do extrapolation which is where basically if you have these two drawings extrapolation is not scaling between them but scaling Beyond them and it doesn't allow that because it's usually not super very controlled um so basically the minimum number of Masters you need for weight and width axis is four where one axis is the weight axis like we've been exploring and then the other axis is the width axis um like we're about to start exploring um often you might have say a normal width that you start with and there's the weight axis and then you have an extended version and a condensed version so that would require basically six Masters or sources um in variable fonts and I won't really try to get into this too far you can technically have two axes uh in an arrangement like this or even actually I think in an arrangement with three yeah I didn't do this in the best possible way um you can sometimes do it like this where um let's go to the you could have your default source and then a width axis and your default source and a weight axis and actually the way variable fonts work is that you can scale to here and then add add in the changes that scale to here and you can basically get um a sort of approximation so it's almost like extrapolation but it's really the adding up of the changes that take you to here and the changes that take you to here so usually it looks like crap uh if you're trying to do something really precise like um let's make these is low opacity if you're trying to do something really precise um like a width and weight axis this usually is not going to work for you wait no it would be even one more um wait what am I even thinking uh width extended yeah weight diminished um but anyway yeah that's a like this technique is more useful if you want an axis that changes like crossbar height or something that's really isolated and specific and would change exactly the same between different uh sources so if your crossbar height is changing maybe you're always moving every crossbar down by 20 units something like that uh and that uh can work um but a lot of things wouldn't that's a long well actually that's kind of a brief explanation of why we're about to create two more Masters to create a width axis all right um so can I duplicate these both at the same time looks like it cool all right um so we're going to call this condensed light and condensed black and I'm going to say these are the normal width so I'm going to give them a width number of 100 and I'm going to say these are this should be based on like the same 100 as the normal width it's kind of an approximate number uh I'll call it 60 and I this is a total guess and that's fine for now um I just don't even know how uh condensed this design will go um and it will take some exploration for sure to get there but for now let's um duplicate these oh dang it I can't duplicate them that's pretty annoying um we'll add instance for each Master okay so now we've got condensed light okay we can remove these because we already had them oh and can I change this okay that's pretty nice I could change those all at once um let's add like a middle middle as well so add instance um so let's actually call these narrow in fact and then the condensed can be in the middle we'll call this [Music] narrow and what is our weight here 113 and then this will be between 60 and 100 which would be 80 cool so now let's uh start with our o that's going to be kind of the easiest one show all instances and let's get over to our narrow uh light all right that's pretty narrow let's go one more why not [Music] um I don't know how box see this will have to be but that looks kind of cool so we'll roll with it for now I'm going to set this to be equal because um equal to the other side basically that's kind of Handy um let's also try to vary this one okay this is where it's going to start to get fun I think hopefully not that it hasn't been fun but might get more fun now that we're drawing something a little more weird okay and I'll probably have to reduce the spacing a good deal more but uh Let's do let's reduce this for a second okay so now this will be a little harder and a really big difficult question to answer in making like a narrow black is that if you don't reduce the the weight it suddenly becomes a lot more dense on the page and it looks Bolder because there's not as much wide space as the boldest thing that you're coming from so basically let's reduce the stem width by just a little bit and we will have to experiment I think to figure out what's the right amount but uh that's start I guess um all right and then let's do that over here and I'm holding down this like uh control option A lot uh in this process because it saves me a lot of work because it kind of automatically gets things closer to what I want it scales the curves okay kind of make that a smooth point and I'm taking in the other side bearing by a little bit okay so I want the end to have less side bearing because I want the kind of inner spacing to be about um equivalent to the counter spacing so that's kind of the rough goal of basic spacing so here I kind of see this as a display font because it gets quite contrasty and to me this at a large size feels approximately equal in presence to the counter space and likewise for here this is equal to this is um I often go back and forth a lot on like what feels right in a font but that's kind of the general goal um this has to come in by a lot okay and this is feeling that feels better this was just feeling a lot thicker than let's do it here I'm just going to try to match the counter space and then I'll figure out how this gets in the middle let's add add a guide to those two and then we can see how it lines up in the middle which kind of cool and in fact we could do that here too cool so these are all centered which makes sense because we came from a transformed reflected thingy okay so then let's get this counter to match as well that was too much well something like that okay nice uh looking at the comments again um is there anything you would suggest not to put into a variable axis I'm working towards a variable weight and x height and I'm not sure if it's a great idea um the variable x height could be a cool idea um when I'm thinking about what to make into a variable Axis or what not to I guess it becomes a bit of like a product design or ux design question like what's the point of putting in an x height um some fonts I could imagine they're being a really important use case so like one challenge of a width axis is that actually um once you start to so let's uh basically the exite looks weird in withth axes because a really tall exite in a wide font will look kind of normal in a narrow font or an a normal x height in a condensed font will look um I don't know it like it like plays tricks on your mind um let me just demonstrate it rather than trying to uh talk through it all and that will be easier but that is all to say in and with font I could imagine an x height change being pretty useful because maybe a graphic designer would want to play with that um and it's easy to have an opinion on whether an x height looks right across a width axis and there's kind of the very the two separate ideas where you could keep it consistent or you could keep it optically consistent against the capitals um if it's just a weight AIS font uh I can't think of a specific case where an x height would be really useful um I mean you would tend to change x height for like a smaller Optical size but there's other changes you would add there like extra letter spacing um and maybe changing descender and Ascender Heights so I'm a fan of like the optical size axis um an exite access is maybe a little too in the weeds and maybe the best case to do that is actually as a design stage figuring out the ideal proportions for the tight face or for potentially a logo or word Mark or something um but I don't think very many users actually want necessarily to dial in the exite of a fine then again maybe dialing the dialing in the exite would make it easier to pair with other fonts so maybe you match the cap height with your font size and then you could really specifically control the x height and so that is a thing you could Market it as like better pairing with any font um but in that case I would still think like that you would want to maybe ship other parametric axes like that's the name David berlo has kind of coined I think for axes that are very specific like xite or things like contrast um or like changing just these Strokes or just these Strokes vertical versus horizontal um yeah I don't know so I hope that answers the question there um but yeah I basically think think like what access will sell the font is the basic um way I think about it I guess or you know and selling the font maybe it's an open source project like um you're still basically trying to make things what what axis is worth the time I guess is another way to put it like what will people say and think I want to use that font because it has this access so that's the way I I would maybe think about it all right so [Music] um and I'm just kind of counting to myself as I make some of these changes I think we can go even more condensed than that um and then control command M we'll update the side bearings that looks about right to me maybe something like that oh geez that o looks so much more narrow um why maybe it needs to be just a little wider and probably a little more rectangular could help it kind of have a bit of presence I don't know that becomes a tension because I want to um have the O sort of optically look about the same width as the end but also sort of optically match the counter space I don't know when you go to extremes like weight or width extremes or both weight and width extremes like the rules of the universe that you would typically be able to follow kind of go weird and I I'm like semi- quoting something djr said once but um yeah it's it's definitely a little hard and I'll probably end up having to mess with it a lot more to get something that feels right okay but let's manipulate this [Music] one let's go narrower and probably instead of showing all instances I should just be showing what's here and I could even do this spacing thing where it's like something like that it's like that there we go um the N has too much space on the should have a little less space on its right side so actually let's do this all right so we want to match the inner proportion of this and that and then secondarily we want the N to look like it's basically in the middle of that so we're honestly a little closer one thing I like to do is if you hold uh control and command then you can space it within its boundaries and um kind of find the offset that feels appropriate so here looks like maybe nine on the left side and three on the right side is about right o should basically be matching um on left and right sides if it's a symmetrical o uh which is mostly usually the case but maybe not always all right so that feels about right maybe this doesn't need such wide SFS and maybe it can come in just like a little more cool I know all right so um yeah I mean I guess we don't have many uh letters yet but we could see how this relates variably or we could make more letters let's um let's do the a at least so let's just go for it and basically going to be scooching it in and trying to match the approximate counter space god this becomes such a huge problem kind of um maybe yeah something you don't think about is that um fat faces very frequently have uh very frequently have ball terminals that fill in this space really nicely um I don't know let's uh let's fix this first and then we can do the other part so this is an interesting case where if we just set it to be um as it is it might have a kink that happens especially on this guy I'm not explaining this well I'll just edit it approximately how I want it to be and then if it causes a think um I'll look at that and try to explain what happened and how we can fix it wait sometimes this works sometimes it doesn't or rather it always it often works but it's not always exactly as I expect it to be okay um all right uh somebody else asked a question by the way that I didn't answer hey how unselected handles move at the same time that selected handles for example when you modified the o oh yeah thanks for asking again um that is one of the most important parts of uh working on in glyphs or robofont this is the case in either time but scaling edits are a really really really useful tool um there's other terms for them font lab calls it the power nudge and it's actually even more uh like one level more complex or maybe better I haven't got a lot of experience with it but basically all right if we're trying to make this an extended o if I just hold shift and then nudge it with an arrow key the curve here gets totally messed up um just because these are staying the same the actual curve we want is something more like this where it kind of keeps a certain relationship so let's uh try that again and we'll use control option when we're moving this and you can see that it's scaling this so it keeps kind of a sort of Rel relationship that's sort of a lot closer to what we had designed originally um and it makes this kind of manipulation um so much faster and it's not exactly what I would want for the uh for an extended version of this but it's way closer than I could get if I didn't do that um so again like let's let's do this thing without um without any scaling edits and see where it gets us oops uh so we move that all the way out here and this all the way out here something like that um so let me add a guide just so I know that I'm actually in the middle here and I'll do that here too you can really see the difference right like um um yeah basically this one is entirely too pointy at the top and bottom and this one is looking closer to what I would want uh you know I would still go in here and do the second trick again actually holding the same control option and I want to reflect this change across the um other side of the smooth curve so if I hold control and option as I change that it changes the this other side as well in kind of a mirrored change so that as well helps me get a lot closer to the change I want and then I don't have to like do a ton of like measuring and fiddling or like copying of Curves around so yeah that's a great question and that's something I'm doing a lot as I'm working on all of this okay um hopefully that answered the question if it didn't let me know hey Sandro um thanks for popping by uh really good to see you um how did you make the red line for alignments um I see uh let me get that back again so in glyphs if you select any two points and right click and add guide it adds a guide and the guide has a little excuse me that is centered right in the middle and so I can kind of use that for alignments where if I want to make sure these are aligned in the middle of these um I can right click and add a guide and then when you've selected any two points it'll create like a bounding box that you can use to control the segment you've got or whatever you selected so you can use that bounding box that is currently stretched across here and use those two concepts together where that allows me to see if it's aligned or not so I think that's what you were asking uh and let me know if it wasn't um smart show Plum lines so you don't have to do with guidelines oh that sounds cool I should give that a shot sometime um why not now uh let's if it's in the plug-in manager I'll try it yeah there's like a a ton of really handy um plugins Plum line okay oh Mark to Mark nice all right he is a very cool guy oh God I have to restart glitch uh cancel let me save this and now I'll try to do it um it's opening up [Music] again and open recent spiky serifs which one was I in okay cool we're back um so let me see if how the smart Plum lines work uh it's probably under review show smart Plum lines oh does it just know well that's tight okay great suggestion uh I will leave this on for a bit and see how I like it um okay it's just mash the mods and press P to see it or not very cool okay thanks for the tip that's really nice um oh these red lines aha yeah those are just Global guidelines um so you can click any guideline let's get get rid of these Plum lines uh and maybe if I right click it it will be how do I make it Global honestly it's been a bit since I've um that's so funny I'm might have added it in the if somebody knows just say it uh in the comments but um I'd have to search it I I might have added it in like um oh okay you right click and say make Global guide and then that guide will appear in every other letter until you delete it and so yeah I was doing it for kind of aligning my SFS uh yeah in the last round of work and that was kind of a handy thing thanks for asking okay so let's see um oh yeah here's a spot where I'm using an inflected curve because it's kind of the simplest way to get this curve in a way that will interpolate easily I don't know I'm I'm still unsure about this specific thing we'll roll with it uh let's do our last letter and then we'll export to a variable font and see it in action okay so now we've got our uh guys in the background let's try to meet them oh God clearly hadn't grabbed a couple kind of funny sometimes this doesn't work exactly as I expected to oh well we'll just fix it and uh we'll match the end for now turn off the metrics for a second it's a little easier to see okay we're approximately there and uh let's just kind of I don't want to like set the right side of the D to exactly match the end because doesn't come in right here at the xite so it would look a little bit wrong for now I'll match it to the left side of the O though and then I'll probably adjust it by a little bit oh I hadn't changed this a yet so let's also do that okay all right we're almost there I think maybe W really hope my video doesn't get banned for using a trademark name as a test word um we'll see I don't think it would but I don't know how YouTube works okay all right uh it's approximately fine there and approximately fine there okay and let's check if everything's compatible incompatible oh I guess the a is so we'll do this uh let's Show Master [Music] compatibility I just kind of go through my my layers and hit that command shift R thing in each of them and now it looks like it's probably compatible just kind of taking us sec to make hopefully decent spacing all right um let's uh I often try to give it a sort of very basic timestamped name adjustment in case I'm going over to illustrator and like trying the thing um but we'll just test it in font goggles again real quickly okay and then let's see here we are so we've got our weight and we've got our width and there's the isues for sure the d looks not fixed yet um but yeah pretty fun and in fact let's um let's install it and uh try it in illustrator real fast just to have a little more fun with it um I swear there's some way to test install it I always forget how glyph does that specifically I'll just drag it into my um font uh and that's the way I test install a lot of things so here I put my fonts in the sidebar and now let's uh update our diagram here and see uh hopefully we might be able to make it work um animist uhit it doesn't allow us to um that's an annoying thing to me where it doesn't allow you to like uh update a font and sort of keep to its General oh well all right so uh what and let's make these heavy kaboom and yeah um yeah it is interesting I feel like uh you can kind of see here that indeed as you go narrower um it kind of looks like a bit of a thicker weight just because there's more black figure space in the area so like um let's try just like a better comparison here so like um I wonder um we could probably get better words um let's uh draw glyphs let's go here it'll be more obvious maybe word ofat will give us more words oh there's not very many words but there's a few um okay I hope none of these words are questionable I don't know but um word of man just picks from the entire dictionary so uh sometimes you can get words that you wouldn't necessarily say in po company but yeah basically this is interesting that this one looks like I would say a regular weight and this one maybe looks like a light weight and if we change this to the boulder style let's um let's go like partway up I should really map this weight axis um to something more practical but for now we'll just do it yeah this really reveals it where this really looks like a black weight or an ultra weight and this just kind of looks like a very bold weight um so since I'm really early in the family I would probably just increase the weight of this guy um because I do want it to be somewhat extreme um and then I would probably decrease the weight of this and yeah that would probably be the way I would go um potentially I would try to decrease the weight of both of these things this line is really showing me that my curve still still have too much side bearings I feel like um probably or maybe the D is just really off centered um yeah that's definitely part of it um we'll try that uh yeah basically it has way too much space Oh what if I I see so this is an issue where I don't actually want it to be referencing that yeah that's somewhat better um one thing I kind of like to do is I've got a script where I just have um let's see make tab with spacing string for selected glyphs this really shows me that I should also work on the control character for o um so that I can actually do some basic spacing here wonder what would happen uh okay I've got just over an hour left I'll probably take a pause really soon let me do this o and then I'll take a pause um let's copy that to a layer and I just want to see how well this works I don't actually know how well it will work but sometimes this sort of thing is pretty good and sometimes it's not all right so we'll scale this up from the lowercase to the uppercase match it bounds okay that's pretty much matching and obviously it's way too heavy right now but then we can just do it again for the interior and it's about right so that's kind of fun let's show those plum lines again but wait so this shows the plum lines but does it really show me if these are centered I guess maybe I could do this and then it would okay that's pretty good so it I guess H I don't know I'm suddenly confused if that is a useful thing or not I'm sure there's a useful thing otherwise it might not exist anyway but uh all right um let me turn off Master compatibility okay um that's somewhere in the ballpark all right let's copy this again and make our light I see oh okay I've just realized the usefulness of the plum line the plum line is showing us yeah the exact middle point so that's what we make meet up that's cool okay I get it that's a nice feature um we have to I think make it a little more rectangular and it needs to be slightly narrower okay so now uh wait no wait wait wait wait we still have this guy all right uh that still I can't decide if that's that looks about right I don't know hard to say for sure but uh yeah so now we've got I think all four of our Mastery layers have roughly the correct o um and that makes it somewhat easier to do all these spacing strings so we've got like the basic spacing string for the letter H and the A and the D and sometimes you just you're going to need turning so like I think this combination would pretty much need turning okay um yeah well uh then okay does do we get any more word of mat words if we um do these a few more that's cool okay um well I need a bathroom break and then I'll come back and figure out I guess what to do from here if you have ideas of what you might think would be cool to see from here I am interested um so let me know what you think I guess I could just keep jamming on the uh the character set would be the obvious thing anyway uh BRB wait no these look hilariously bad that's kind of perfect for uh fonton I would say how long will the break be good question um I don't know uh five minutes to 10 minutes depends if I find a good YouTube video uh five minutes uh and I'll be back thanks uh [Music] 12 it looks hilarious um which is the all right well that one doesn't look hilariously bad at least I'm going to give myself one extra minute for for for for for for [Music] for for no it'll just be and we are back um okay uh let me read the comments again just so I can get back into the flow of it um okay good question about merged shapes bowls and such it depends um oh yeah that's a good question about the slack Discord Community there's like a robo font uh Discord that's pretty good um there's a future fonts Discord for people who are on future fonts which I've enjoyed I don't know if there are others there might be um but I don't really know of them um yeah um I see you're working with merge shapes bowls and such yeah do you find it easier for drawing purposes or is it for the variable export uh a little bit of both like it really depends I don't always draw with merged shapes um so let let me like uh let me answer that in a better way um Roman okay so here's my family Lang Roman and um like let's see how many merged shapes I'm using uh um I've left this as like an overlap to make it easy to move up and down and to make it really easy to like keep these together on this side um it's a good question whether I should do that in the a in this spiky sah font I haven't done it here because this is smooth and when I have a smooth connection I don't want there to be some sort of a clever bit here so like let's see we just to explain what we could do we could say reconnect nodes and then here we have a thing we could move kind of independently right and it's still pretty much smooth but even though that works pretty well in like a static font where overlaps get removed on export this overlap will remain here in a variable font and I found that in certain cases when a font is rendered and there's anti-aliasing going on so like pixels are partially lit up or whatever to better represent that curve um there can be some sort of like doubling or sort of visible uh little kind of blip here where it sort of doubled up gray values and I really don't like seeing that um so that's why I avoid exterior overlap points um even if if I'm doing a lot of interior overlap so in other plac I might do interior overlap uh maybe I have it in like a w or something not here um yeah to be honest I do often avoid overlap because it's I don't know I'll use overlap early on a lot to as I'm like figuring out the relative weights of everything but then if I'm doing especially ink traps um I like to remove overlap kind of where sensible I guess it depends I don't know uh I try not to use too much overlap like I feel like some people and early on in glyphs I tried to get really clever using like components for every siif and like for every corner and there are things like that that can be useful but I've learned that a lot of the best type designers just draw the thing they want um rather than trying to get super clever about making it really adaptable because the more you use Corner components and things the more chances there are to like have glitches where your curves don't quite meet up or um yeah where things just like have a little imperfection um that can pop up in the build or something and if you can avoid that by just drawing the thing a lot of the times it's better to do that also with just drawing the thing it gives you more of a chance to sort of optically match things like stroke weights and um even if that includes a little bit of imperfection sometimes that's not a terrible thing kind of depends but uh yeah some people like deliberately don't even try to make their SFS the same length exactly like they'll try to introduce slight variation or just allow there to be slight variation um to keep things looking more lively yeah it depends I don't know I think there's some room for keeping things really consistent as well I think that's like a cool thing that digital tools allow um and certainly if you were making a huge character set like a Chinese font um you would definitely be doing all sorts of things with components and smart components and um you'd want to you'd have to make the system more efficient but in a Latin font you're only drawing relatively few glyphs like 50 or 60 per master and it's a lot of work obviously but like it's not that much work where it's super essential to have Corner components I don't know potentially early on in the design you could be clever with Corner components and obviously I'm not the be all end all of the answer to that question um I bet if you're watching and you're really familiar with a lot of cool things glyphs does I appreciate hearing that in the comments actually cuz I learn things that are useful a lot of the time um like that Plum lines tip is great um but yeah I don't know sometimes just doing things the manual way is the right and most efficient in the long run it depends um especially when you're more comfortable with moving and manipulating Vector curves as happens once you draw with them enough um it's pretty fast to like edit a lower case or whatever um um so it depends all right it's 03 not 04 good point um I did start one minute early um any F tips to get onto future fonts as a seasoned veteran asks Brian Fusion uh are you saying I'm a season veteran or for a season veteran um the answer is it kind of depends um like many service is early on they were trying to onboard as many people as possible and then once they had a sufficient base they've kind of gotten more slow and selective about who they on board basically they want to find designs that are original and in particular original in within their Library um and also they try to go for like diverse um contributors so um they want to encourage people from places other than say New York City um to uh submit fonts and stuff um and especially with scripts other than Latin um but yeah it so I guess if you really wanted to um get on variable uh future fonts like come up with a weird cool design and make it really good and uh yeah and then just like reach out to their email um I don't know what it is at the moment but I know they have a page about submitting for the first time um you can also reach out to me and show me the design and if I love it I would maybe advocate for it but um depends I guess like I could also just give you feedback um which depending on the font or on your expertise and experience level um sometimes you just need like reps to to get better at the thing uh and it depends um another question I stopped using Corner components since I would have to decompose and manually adjust every character when finalized yeah right yeah so sometimes if you're being clever about something in the end you have to fix it all anyway so sometimes it's useful to just do things the hard way at first and you can save time um but it depends I don't know uh yeah basically if you know what you want to [Music] do you can be really fast at drawing in vectors um and that's kind of in multiple levels like if you have a vision for what you want the outlines to be like if you've drawn them by pencil and hand a lot you can get there kind of quickly um in vectors and pretty quickly improve on what you had drawn um or it's also at the very small level where if you know what you want a curve to look like it's pretty fast to get there uh with a vector but it takes practice to sort of visualize that and then get there um so if you've ever done a sport you know like basketball say um it's pretty clear like the objective is to get the ball into the hoop um but then you kind of need some muscle memory and technique to like know how to do that from different points on the court or moving or whatever else uh yeah I don't know I'm not much of a basketball player but I was trying not to make a skateboarding analogy so there it is um Let's Straighten these things out okay I guess I'm currently here so I don't need to say I'm I'll be back but uh you get it I don't know will this be right let's see um sure these Plum lines might be helpful in this case okay I should probably fix the c and e uh if you have a thought about what you'd like me to work on at this moment um pop it in the comments and I will consider it because I've kind of done the demo that I came here wanting to do which is this kind of demonstration about how to get there okay actually I do have one more thing I wanted to include in that uh before I start fiddling with this much more um the last thing you you really want to make sure that you've got going in a weight and width variable font is and this is true for any registered variable axis which is to say let me find this uh Microsoft open type variable AES um there's five kind of original variable font axes and they have a valid numeric range that you should align to and the like scale interpretation and this is um sort of you know if you don't align to this then it's still useful in illustrator but like it wouldn't be very useful on the web in CSS where people expect that 400 is a regular um 700 is a bold Etc so let's plug these in um to our uh I wish there were a faster way to do this I really like the glyphs approach in some sense but in another sense I'm not the biggest fan of it but uh let's see okay um because it's I wish it were easier to like copy in the values um I like oh well I do really enjoy this visualization it's super sck um but I forget everything okay so anyway let me go back and look at um what I've got going so 68 is 300 we'll start with that um 68 is 300 I think this is just like an input output sort of thing and 158 is we'll set it as the black weight 900 um um and that might be about enough um we don't need to change our width because we started with the kind of valid scale for that that people would expect to see in CSS um I should actually do uh you know what I'm going to call this extra bold and set it at 800 because I don't think it's quite actually black yet I don't know uh uh maybe I should be making it a black rather than uh whatever for uh I don't know for now I'll just set it to extra bold or the other thing is we could set it to Black and then I could add another extra bold in there maybe I'll do that because that is what I would probably intend to do in the future if I if slash when I keep pushing this fine to release um so let's add an extra bold wait let's um oh dang it but then I'd have to um I have to think about what the stem width is that I want which is oh man I I'm sure there's a good way to do this I've written Python scripts in the past and haven't I don't know where I would find that at the moment basically you need to divide up um the range and then you can figure out how to do that um I don't want to go through the mental thinking at the moment um because I few things make me feel as stupid as coding live sometimes if I'm like I'm able to get what I want right away um which is you know often code does take a bit of bumbling around to figure out the thing again um but anyway we'll just go between these two we'll start with that so uh 135.5 + 158 um divided by 2 is 14675 all right we'll see if this works reasonably well okay um so let's get back to our uh at least we should put regular and bold in there so 90.5 and 135.5 is it this why are these out of order uh that's so annoying okay whatever should be 700 okay well we'll start with that uh was it 90.5 or did I literally forget in the space of two seconds okay I was right all right so let's export this again just to show how that looks um okay here we have it let's put that up top and fonts and then let's go back to illustrator and let's update these well I don't want to update those let's go here um here okay so now uh oh wait did that not work why uh that's funny access mappings I would imagine they should work um external coordinates am I doing this wrong I don't think so well uh yeah I mean I would normally I don't know this is the kind of thing that I'll have to go on the Forum and figure out that's so strange I mean I am making some assumptions about how it should work so I've probably just missed some incredibly obvious simple step um but yeah this should be in my head at least the intent is that this would be marking it as weight 400 possibly it's because I didn't set a map for every one of the points along the axis so it's let me try that um I wish I there was like a text based way to okay um I love graphic interfaces but sometimes you just want a text based UI as well um all right I'll set these things to oh yeah by the way if if you're wondering what the um valid value is it's right in here with the weight class okay um although the variable weight axis can go from 1 to 1,000 not just 100 to 900 as this kind of indicates um so let's do the other so we had that 113 we'll go to 500 and 135 maybe I did this in a silly way too that'll be fun to find out um 14675 will go to 800 yeah for some reason my and I can't even drag it but it is useful to see um I definitely wouldn't want this to be I mean here they are spaced out pretty much regularly I guess I just don't have a medium in there maybe I accidentally called this 600 when it should be 500 and then I don't yet have have um a demi bold or semi bold in there which would be at 600 so okay this is looking more as I would expect it to um I would still probably want to mess with these values somewhat more but okay now that I've got 300 through uh wish I could change these it just I don't it doesn't probably actually matter but it's still annoying that I can't okay oh well um let's see if we now export these wait let's um maybe it'll work this time okay crossed nope didn't work oh well um I could go look at the glyphs app tutorial and read about it um I'll just find that tutorial um variable fonts tutorial mapping I think it's in here it's command F to find access mapping and locations um well it doesn't oh you can add a value by clicking a plus that's cool okay so it looks like I was pretty much doing it right but uh yeah I don't know if well if you know what I'm missing put it in the comments but it's probably just that I have to sit here and read about it or look on the Forum or something like that but that's not very fun in a live stream so let's just uh keep editing glyphs I think um let me check on the comments one more time what was 100% expecting a skate analogy yeah um Vector curves are hard to get what you want but eventually you learn to visualize the thing and then perform the maneuver uh and eventually eventually it becomes second nature um so for me I can pretty much all decently okay up a curb every time I try almost um and that's a really takes a long time to get that like precise feeling of like what movements you have to do to manipulate a board or in this case a vector curve um yeah someday please Lord I hope to have comfort with kick flips like that uh but we will find out if I can ever get there [Music] um so that's the analogy that I actually think of too often in terms of type design okay um the background e is not helping us at this moment um oh I think I missed it but if you're still there Lions type thanks for stopping by um appreciate you on the on the stream um how do you set up your Roman and italic project that has two different files I'm making one right now and it's kind of hard to draw when I have to switch between two files to see if it's consistent or not I agree that's an annoying thing um sometimes I have started by doing them in the same glyphs file and that can help with that like switching across but it also just causes issues too um like uh I think in particular when you're I can't remember I was going in the same font for a while on maybe name mono uh in the same glyphs uh project um because of mono space like the spacing should all be the same um and I especially dislike having to set the font data like the same but separately multiple times um but there's just certain things that you run into where you just realize like oh glyph isn't quite meant to do that um and I can't remember at the moment what it is it but there's yeah some sort of stumbling block um and on the Forum I think they literally say it's not really meant to have Roman and italic um styles in the same font um and I just don't remember what specific problem it was um but then how do I set it up I don't know I keep them next to one another I try to work on them kind of mostly at the same time it's kind of like working across different Master layers a little bit um you just go back and forth and try to keep them well there's kind of the two different approaches one approach is you make all the Romans first and that's pretty valid and then it's really useful for figuring out what the design is and if the italics are very similar but just sloped and maybe slightly tweaked then you can do italics in the second batch um or you can kind of keep them pretty much in the same Pace I think that makes a lot more sense for like a Sara family or something where the italic is a really specific design I don't know I think there's Arguments for both and yeah finally caught a live stream thanks for dropping by Luke um really happy to be able to make videos that uh people find useful sometimes so yeah um glad I can do a little bit of that um Mecha bl's scripts should help solve your problems that's true Mecha blue has a ton of amazing scripts um Sandro thank you for stopping by uh enjoy your epivo um yeah we have only about 30 minutes left uh so yeah to be honest it's sort of hard for me to talk for like this long um it's a little hard to know where this should go in relation to the Baseline I often have that question and I don't know that I have the perfect answer that would be a good thing to maybe ask on type drawers or something um we can start the E with this C I'd say maybe yeah no I will keep it just like separate here hi Elena thanks for dropping by um links don't show up in chat oh shoot I didn't know that actually but um yeah if there's a specific Mecha blue script um oh and you linked the font make plugin earlier I get it I saw your comment I was a little confused by that um thank you for linking that um I guess what you could do is just uh give the GitHub kind of um path basically so like is it like slash font tool SL font make or font make Das Plugin or something I don't know just give the repo path and then uh people could get there or I could get there let's uh that want a bit of an ink trap three might try adding this um yeah I'm not uh going very uh in any particularly sensible order um maybe let me do that for a second uh because it'd be nice to have like a better word ofat result in a minute here um so uh typical test word would be hand gloves or hamburger font or fish taco BG um these words try to capture most of the kind of vital shapes in a font um and once you design these letters you can keep going and design the rest of the letters in Latin um that's kind of the theory of it um so yeah a very common way to start a font design would be doing like this um you know these control characters and then a test word for instance because these allow you to space everything and then these allow you to uh kind of explore some of the oops some of the um basic shapes and then you can repeat them all so like yeah the L is a really obvious one that you need um let's see let's make it five n and then actually this can Echo the well no it shouldn't actually never mind often the L needs a little more space than the d uh right we've got our V this is pretty much okay maybe curves are a little wonky how did I do that um let's fix the S it's looking miserable um but what we can do here I think it's got the same thing going on where the Curves in the italic weren't as sloped as the rest so once we slope it halfway back it's already looking a lot closer to something that we want and then and we can set in our oops extreme points delete our angle almost extreme points and then we can start moving things around pretty well let's get over here I mean that s is pretty close to what I want perhaps um but I think maybe it's just a tad um it's it's a little hard to tell like sometimes an S will look like it's leaning forward when it's looked at isolated but then when you look at it in other things it becomes sort of more clear that it has to lean forward a little bit I sort of think that's because you're sort of spacing sort of up here and down here and this space is often more open than this that's my theory of why there's that effect but this closes off that space so maybe it has to be more uh symmetrical by itself I don't know oh well that looks kind of fine to me here's a case where I left a lot more Contours separate because I was still a little less sure about all of them let me look at the comments again uh that four thank you oh thanks for Dad uh for linking ah it's under shrift just St okay okay um GitHub let me go here uh github.com font make export plugin sick all right you know what I'm going to try it um there's no releases that's annoying but well we'll just download the zip for now wow cool it adds a tab I love that hm interesting oh and you can have command line options okay that's cool that's cool um let's uh I'm GNA try it install first let me uh fix this G and then I will be able to try the uh font make export plugin thanks for linking that um font make is just kind of a more professional tool to build fonts and it's an open sourced tool so like the huge benefit of it is that if you want to export from your same set of sources in five or 10 years even if you can't open them in glyphs app anymore like say glyphs app doesn't work on Mac at that point because maybe the company eventually goes out of business or gets bought or something um you can theoretically take your old sources and get the old version of font make and make it still work which is really important if you're spending a lot of time on something uh the other more near-term thing is that um basically um if like you find a bug or an issue you can go and report it on the GitHub see if other people are facing that thing um or if it's just something you're experiencing by yourself uh yeah so it's just it's open source software and there's some really huge advantages to working with open source software for produ two things let's bring this down a bit kind like we did with the B okay so we're getting there maybe all right um I want to do that for a second so I can let's try something uh I want to get this bow to be more symmetrical so I'm going to just start from the O scale it and I'll scale the inside and then I'll kind of clean it up if it doesn't yet feel right yeah might be about right so then let's grab this again grab that again and yeah looking something I'm pretty unsure about this kind of boot on the G this font is meant to be have too many seraps but then sometimes it has too many too many seraps but I have to figure that one out all right anyway this should be well I guess I probably have to move it into the other sources again to make it compatible you know what I'm going to simplify this G so that but I pasted it into the background um basically I remove some overlaps there so that uh can I okay there if I hide the background you can see more clearly that this is just one shape again and that'll avoid little like zigzags up here and down here okay um yeah I've got hand gloves now so that's cool um wonder will this allow me to run word mat from this View nope it expects me to be here but I can do that so which ones have we done we've done St n o d we could easily fix a lot of these others from what we've got of course um but this is what we have at the moment so I'm pretty curious to see it okay cool so that's a somewhat better representation of how this light Roman style looks which is kind of fun to see um oh and I guess we better um bring these G updates to our other master layers to make them compatible and let's check if we've got any incompatible uh okay the E better do that as well there's probably like a Plugin or some sort of script you could do to copy from one uh layer to all the others but oh well um there's a bunch of like Autos sync metrics but we'll just accept that for a moment I guess we probably have to quit G app in order for font make to work um boot it back up again how does curing work with interpolation that is a good question uh it interpolates um sort of like uh any other glyph Point interpolates based on like how close it is to any of the map MERS in the design space the king does as well so um I'll show you that in a second uh let's bring back our glyphs document um yeah I'm trying to think I could even like um let's grab our V and do a curent here it's like really intense it's overed right but uh it'll kind of show what I mean so this one has an why is it not showing it uh oh because I changed the side bearing all right let me what the heck all right let me try that again I didn't hold the right no uh let me command z a lot CU I forget what the previous value was I guess I could look at the D Maybe okay all right so I neglected to hold down the option key now we're cing all right cool so that's a really intense curent and that'll kind of show us but basically when you go from a negative 100 we'll call it uh to a zero just in the style in the middle of those it'd be 50 um yeah so it kind of works out there's like um there's interesting um gotas so like most applications don't K between different styles of a variable font because they technically treat them as different fonts so um and I don't think there's a mechanism in open type kind of for curring between say a light b and a heavy o um but yeah like on the web if you increase the weight of your o but the V stays light um you'll just lose the curing between that pair so that's something to be aware of and it it will cause problems sometimes so okay this is super cool this is really handy that you can see all these options like this I like it um for now we'll just uh let me set up my export destination to our previous testing [Music] thing and nope I draged the wrong window um okay oh God so I guess that'll be something to debug on my own time I probably don't have some like python thing set up that it expected or something of the sort um it might also I don't know that's a curious converting weight access value based on the f ah okay I think it's getting tripped up by the custom axes um which fair enough so was I so that probably indicates that I was doing something wrong let me uncheck it and see if um font make would work oh and I also wanted to add a new uh suffix nope all right that's too bad well anyway let's try to um export in the old fashioned way okay um and then let's get back to it okay here's the most recent one here are fonts I can also just open this in font goggles again um so let's uh look at this for a second if you remember I had just uh put some curring between here and basically basically it just kind of is uncaring itself like so in the middle of our weight AIS it's got a middle amount of weight or a current between 00 and current zero it's 50 at this point um yeah so that's kind of the simple answer to that question but it's a good question because there's more going on there um oh and of course we haven't like set up the other um layers for a lot of these so yeah but there's not very much time left in my stream session um yeah to be honest I feel like if you're still enjoying uh the experience of like watching some font streaming if you've got it in the background or you're just enjoying yourself watching it thank you for stopping by um let me check out the fonton website and see who's up next or it might just just be on Instagram let me see um although there is a question let me try to answer the question for a second um uh would I recommend using karon I think it can be really helpful I don't know that like basically there's um it doesn't offer as much control as a process like metrics machine does which um for instance I use metric machine 100% on name Sands but on some of the like in progress fonts I've got on future fonts I'm just using Kern on um to have pretty good kerning it's pretty good if you use it right kind of like if you follow the process they suggest um and it saves a lot of time and yeah I personally can't like most font designs don't work very well if you have zero King at all even though that's that's the way that like it's useful to make a font that way so you really pay attention to the spacing but almost allof where turns on kerning except for Microsoft Word uh so I think it's worth kerning along the way and Kern on is pretty good for that and then my current theory is kind of um I'll probably to kind of go from work in progress fonts to version 1.0 fonts I intend to do a manual curring stage where I really think it through look at like every pair that's current and make some careful judgments um but yeah I think for like an agile workflow of font design Kon is really awesome and so helpful yeah um so if you're making a quick font for like a small project um a flyer or a specific client and there's a tight timeline I think again keran can maybe be a good solution there um okay Alana is going to start in two hours um Alana had a question what are you using to show your keystrokes for the live stream yeah I'm curious if these keystrokes are showing up enough to be visible um this is an app called keyc Caster it's an open source app and I mostly like it I wish I could like make these bigger um there's another kind of flavor of the keystroke key Caster thing um yeah that can be good um Daniel thanks for commenting Atlanta is up next in two hours first time hearing about metric machine yeah metrix machine is kind of a whole other path it's really an amazing Tool uh right now I think it's an extension for robofont only used to be like a separate app um so if you're in the glyphs ecosystem then and you don't have Robo font it is quite a significant expense but it's a beautiful tool and I really appreciate all of those developers and think they're worth supporting but yeah like from a financial sense like it it is a bit hard probably to you know buy the extra font editor and then the extra extension on top of that um so it all depends on like your personal situation what makes sense um I'm sure there a really fine kerning workflow in giss um but I haven't figured it out um like other than just like going through every pair uh the nice thing about metrix machine is that it like gives you a very orderly way to set up your glyph groups and to go through pair lists and to create those pair lists and it like it just makes it uh a more logical process um even though it's still kind of painful in its ways I think of it like lifting weights or something where uh it's important for a healthy font but not particularly fun um yeah so I'm almost done streaming here I've got like three minutes left um and have a look at Kern craft for glyphs that is a good suggestion I will try to do that probably um yeah the the one other thing I was trying to think uh fonton is there a website Daniel you could probably literally tell us I have been very distracted um or busy I guess this week uh I don't know if there's a a timeline specifically it's I'm sure it's just being updated a lot through the Instagram so thank you Daniel so much for running this um looks like possibly um yeah these are all in our Uh current location so I don't know Alana is next I think and I guess in a couple hours um okay Daniel just puts the yeah it's like kind of a casual really fun thing so I appreciate it being flexible and everything um okay last question probably when you're designing for variable you have your light master and bold Master do you go back in with or ever start with a midpoint master in a larger family definitely yeah it depends on the design and how much has to be adjusted in the middle um I think of a a font as having kind of like a home base or something um like what is the sole of that font I guess or what is the core of it um so in name Sands um the middle Master there is actually the Bold um and then it goes way lighter and quite a lot heavier um but I wanted the Bold to be as perfect as possible um so that was something I specifically Drew and then I drew the extremes a lot of people would draw the regular as the default and I think a lot of the time that makes sense um certainly for your first font I feel like working with the regular as the default is really sensible um in this font here this is kind of a regular weight even though I'm calling it light I don't know I I'd have to like compare it to um I don't know other fonts Times New Roman or whatever to see how this kind of Compares against a regular regular or common regular um the time you would want to be strategic about it is like um let me pull up uh lay again if I haven't got it open right now um Roman sometimes you can add I think they're called brace layers or something um and this allows you to go from a light to a bold but still have some control in the middle so here is the regular weight I think maybe it's the medium yeah it's my regular um and right like I've added that to glyphs where just going directly from this really heavy to a very thin um the thin Strokes were just too light in the middle so I think um like e s a few glyphs have this and I might add a few more um yeah like in a recent proof I was noticing that maybe the midpoint of the G almost needs it because it gets kind of thinner to be honest maybe I could just do that um yeah but yeah so you don't always necessarily need a regular or middle master um but it's often a good idea so it just depends yeah um in like name mono I'll probably do that where I go I've been drawing it with regular to extra bold maybe and I plan to add a thin I think that's how I'm structuring it maybe I'm going regular to Black and I'll add a thin uh in that family and that is yeah like most text in use in the world is going to be in the regular weight of a font um so it makes a lot of sense to spend the most time on that one in many cases um okay well I'm done so thank you so much uh for being here um this year was a lot more uh traffic than the last time I did it so I appreciate all of you for showing up and hanging out thank you um yeah uh this recording will probably be up on my YouTube page in the future I think there's some useful stuff in here um and yeah feel free to reach out here on Instagram or email uh if you've got questions uh in the future so yeah thanks everyone and have a great rest of your weekend take care this might be the better one still kind of strange bye

Channel: ArrowType

Views: 2,417

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Id: X11kr2oQa5Y

Length: 176min 58sec (10618 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2024