Notes on type, tech, & design.
A fairly common question is: “I’ve drawn a font in Adobe Illustrator. How do I make it into a font?” Back when I made my own first font (about 13 years ago, already!), I remember being surprised that Adobe didn’t just offer a font-making application as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. They make fonts and they make creative tools, right? Well, more accurately, Adobe makes money. Type design is too…
Wow, it’s been a long time since I last made a blog post. I’ve spent a lot more time making YouTube videos recently, but I just got a question via email, and it’s on a topic I’ve wanted to write about for years but never found the time for. I apologize up front for any half-baked thoughts here. I have incomplete knowledge and biases from my specific projects and opportunities. Still, this is a…
After several years of contemplation, exploration, work, and iterative releases, I have published a full Version 1 of Name Sans. I wrote and published a process article on my main website. Read it here: The Story of Name Sans
Shell scripting is a method you can use to set up font build workflows that are approachable, scalable, and repeatable. I presented a tutorial on shell scripting in a presentation at the 2021 Typographics TypeLab. The tutorial exists in a project repo at: github.com/arrowtype/typelab-2021 There is also a recorded version of the presentation on YouTube . Happy scripting!
Update: this article was original written in 2021, for Name Sans v0.5. More recently, Name Sans v1.0 was been released, along with a newer article describing Name Sans and its design process . Name Sans is a modern interpretation of the mosaic name tablets of the NYC Subway. It is currently available with discounted pre-release pricing via Future Fonts . From an outsider’s perspective, it might…
In some situations, you may need to use a font on the web, but may not be able to host it alongside your web code. In this case, you can host the font on AWS and call it in as a URL in your @font-face CSS! For example, you may wish to use a web-licensed font with a project that is openly-hosted on GitHub or with a project made on a service like CodePen or JSfiddle. If your font license allows it ,…
Type designers are lucky to have a variety of extremely-capable tools for creating new fonts. My favorite of these is the font editor RoboFont, along with its ecosystem. I covered some of the reasons I like RoboFont in my earlier post, Getting Started in Type . This post actually started as a section of that article, but I have since realized that I would like to add more extensions and more…
Ever since Underware Type started exploring what they call HOI (Higher-Order Interpolation) , I’ve been amazed by the creative possibilities of this approach to interpolation, and I’ve wanted to try it myself. For a long time, I didn’t get it. Then, I started to understand it, but felt like actually making it work would be nearly impossible (or super inefficient, at best). But, I’ve taken another…
You might think you have to spend a lot of money on a powerful Mac computer & software like Glyphs or RoboFont to get started in type design. While these things are very nice, it’s not a requirement. Instead, you can get a Chromebook for about $150 to $250, then use open-source software like FontForge. Set up Linux (beta) 🔗 Not all Chromebooks will be able to run Linux out of the box, so check…
Making zip files from folders is a very common and very handy thing to do – so often, sending someone one file beats sending a whole collection of files! But, if you’re only ever making zips on a Mac, you may not realize that you’re also zipping up a few metadata files, and that these might confuse (or at least annoy) folks on other operating systems. The Problem 🔗 I only learned this recently:…
I’ve been following CSS-Tricks for many years, so I am very excited to have finally written an article for publication on the site. TL;DR: You can do a lot more with Google Fonts URLs than you might think, especially if you’re calling in a variable font like Recursive. This article explains what is possible and shows how to craft custom Google Fonts API calls (which is a lot less scary than it…
This tutorial was made for a presentation at the 2020 Typographics TypeLab. It exists in its own repo at: github.com/arrowtype/fonttools-intro
This tutorial was made for a presentation at the 2020 Typographics TypeLab. It exists in its own repo at: github.com/arrowtype/drawbot-vscode
The Lubalin Lecture Series from Type@Cooper has been one of my favorite parts of NYC ever since I first moved here in 2014. They include thoughtful lectures from many of my favorite designers, technologists, and historians in type design. They are free to attend, professionally recorded, and posted online for anyone to watch for free. I was really honored, then, when I had the chance to deliver a…
So, you’re interested in type design, but you are still figuring out how & where to start or get to the next step. This post is a non-exhaustive attempt to share an overview of how you might learn some basics, how you can get started with font editing software, and where you might consider growing your skills after that. This post reflects my bias and (some of) my personal experience, and it…