Nodes and Curves

Icons depicting a plane in a circle, a series of six inward pointing open arrowheads, two hands with palms facing together, a set of wild eyes, and two opposing arrows directed at a 45 degree angle along with a squiggly shape with its vector handles exposed
Under the hood of some recent work, modified for everyone’s safety.

I’ve been splitting many hours between Adobe Illustrator and Glyphs over the last several weeks and increasingly I find myself reaching for it first because of its simpler, smarter vector drawing capabilities. Sure, it’s made for drawing letters but at the same time — a vector path is a vector path, right?

Of particular note for me is Glyphs’ ability for selecting and numerically manipulating control points, smarter path offset capabilities, non-destructive corner components, and powerful stroke terminations. Even Figma is better at that last one than Illustrator. Add Glyphs’ robust collection of scripts and plugins like Speed Punk and suddenly it’s much easier to draw smooth curves and make smart optical adjustments.

It’s been a journey to really feel at home in Glyphs — exploring what’s involved in creating variable and color fonts along the way, but also a good reminder for me about how much I enjoy the opportunity to explore and learn. That learning of course didn’t end there either. The last week turned into a somewhat stressful crash course in Unicode, OpenType font tables, and Python scripting. In the end we got it all to work as planned — which felt like a bit of a minor miracle actually.

And now it’s on to refinements, fixes, additions and whatever comes next. Oh, and I guess to see how people react to the thing a lot of smart people have been working on when it drops in a few short days.