1 00:00:04,639 --> 00:00:10,789 and so he made FontForge which is you know is a font editor very similar to 2 00:00:10,789 --> 00:00:15,108 Fontographer and it has Open Type support, it supports all different type of formats, 3 00:00:15,108 --> 00:00:21,919 it has Python scripting, brings tons of features but it was made by this guy as his 4 00:00:21,919 --> 00:00:28,908 retirement project so it wasn't made for type designers kind of as a a direct thing 5 00:00:28,908 --> 00:00:35,179 it was really made by him having fun programming and so this is available as a free libre 6 00:00:35,179 --> 00:00:39,799 open-source software so all of you guys can download it today and use it in 7 00:00:39,799 --> 00:00:44,689 definitely free and if you have any suggestions or problems and you can 8 00:00:44,689 --> 00:00:54,229 report days on GitHub. Is there anyone not familiar with GitHub? So yeah I'm going to look 9 00:00:54,229 --> 00:00:58,669 at it like a way of managing collaborative projects likea lot of web development 10 00:00:58,670 --> 00:01:09,799 and also design and software. If you go to the FontForge.github.io 11 00:01:09,799 --> 00:01:15,560 website then you can see that there's a download area and and you know I'm 12 00:01:15,560 --> 00:01:20,030 trying to organize funding to pay people to work on FontForge to make it better. 13 00:01:20,030 --> 00:01:25,129 This this is not quite self yet then you'll be able to highlight if you click 14 00:01:25,129 --> 00:01:28,519 down here on the map link and you can see there's some very simple 15 00:01:28,519 --> 00:01:35,718 instructions on how to install FontForge. There's like few steps and so you download 16 00:01:35,718 --> 00:01:41,269 the app here like this and then you follow the instructions you unzip it. You 17 00:01:41,269 --> 00:01:47,179 need to move it to your Applications folder. You might need to get security and a ? 18 00:01:47,180 --> 00:01:53,180 and then you can install it. So you then get your application. There's Fontforge. 19 00:01:55,099 --> 00:02:05,359 Then you run it and the first Window you get is the character view. It is like a palette of glyphs. 20 00:02:05,359 --> 00:02:09,618 If you click on a glyph then you get the character editing window. So if you want 21 00:02:09,618 --> 00:02:12,618 to draw an "n" then we can type "n " 22 00:02:29,849 --> 00:02:31,449 yep... 23 00:02:31,449 --> 00:02:44,679 yep you type "n" to select the "n" and then you get this good drawing area so 24 00:02:44,680 --> 00:02:50,140 this is very much like Illustrator you know. You have these bézier tools on the 25 00:02:50,139 --> 00:02:50,829 left. 26 00:02:50,830 --> 00:02:55,450 you have here a layers palette and you have this good drawing area on the 27 00:02:55,449 --> 00:03:01,359 square. So you have a baseline here to draw a lowercase n, obviously we could 28 00:03:01,360 --> 00:03:07,030 stop drawing up here, that's the ascender line. So we take this Bezier pen tool 29 00:03:07,030 --> 00:03:20,920 and then we would draw some contour in the typical illustrator way. You can 30 00:03:20,919 --> 00:03:31,119 click and try, try out a curve point and you click down to add a corner point. And so you can see when I click 31 00:03:31,120 --> 00:03:33,159 on the first point there 32 00:03:33,159 --> 00:03:41,769 the outline went from red red line,.. When I click on that first point, it goes gray and It 33 00:03:41,769 --> 00:03:46,539 shows you that it is a closed contour. So this is something you don't deal with in 34 00:03:46,539 --> 00:03:52,750 Illustrator but it's very important in fonts because font technology really comes 35 00:03:52,750 --> 00:03:59,709 from the 80s. It hasn't really been updated for 30 years and so it is a bit stupid. 36 00:03:59,709 --> 00:04:07,150 When you have your letterform like this, it has to be closed and anyway if you 37 00:04:07,150 --> 00:04:13,599 press the graph ? key then you get like a black preview. So when we were sketching 38 00:04:13,599 --> 00:04:17,949 the ? area and then we filled it in and so with the computer you 39 00:04:17,949 --> 00:04:22,269 draw the contour and then you hold down the key and then kind of get that sense 40 00:04:22,269 --> 00:04:23,680 in a black and white shade. 41 00:04:23,680 --> 00:04:32,259 So we can close this window and get to the "o" and for the "o" we're just going to 42 00:04:32,259 --> 00:04:37,840 very quickly click on the circle tool down here in the tools and it might look 43 00:04:37,839 --> 00:04:44,198 like a rectangle on your screen, you can click you can see it when you click it, it toggles. 44 00:04:44,199 --> 00:04:52,990 so when you click that, you can drag out a simple circle and then preview that. And if we drag out 45 00:04:52,990 --> 00:05:01,930 another circle on the inside and preview that it's not punched out. It's two black circles. 46 00:05:01,930 --> 00:05:06,759 The way that font systems know which is a black part which is the white part is by 47 00:05:06,759 --> 00:05:10,449 the direction. If you look carefully you can see there are these little blue 48 00:05:10,449 --> 00:05:17,710 arrows pointing to the direction and they're going the same way. So if we go 49 00:05:17,709 --> 00:05:22,299 to the Element menu and we say correct the direction, then we can see that now it's 50 00:05:22,300 --> 00:05:28,538 made out to contour clockwise and the inner contour counter-clockwise. We can also double-click 51 00:05:28,538 --> 00:05:36,490 on a point to select the whole contour and go to Element, reverse direction or set clockwise or 52 00:05:36,490 --> 00:05:41,889 counter clockwise. And so when we do this when we have two directions going two ways 53 00:05:41,889 --> 00:05:47,348 and it knows which one's the outside which was the inner and which one should 54 00:05:47,348 --> 00:05:48,069 be black and which one should be white. 55 00:05:48,069 --> 00:05:52,569 This is very important. 56 00:05:52,569 --> 00:05:57,699 This idea that you have closed contours and they have directions, something you don't 57 00:05:57,699 --> 00:06:03,788 have to deal with in illustrator but you just have to deal with it in a font editor. 58 00:06:03,788 --> 00:06:10,240 That's the first two windows of a font editor. The third window, which is something 59 00:06:10,240 --> 00:06:11,670 you don't have in Illustrator 60 00:06:11,670 --> 00:06:16,110 or in alternate programs, is you have a metric window. So you can do the 61 00:06:16,110 --> 00:06:21,000 metrics menu, new metrics windows and then you get this window where you can see 62 00:06:21,000 --> 00:06:27,689 you can type in what is at the top here and you get preview of them in line. 63 00:06:27,689 --> 00:06:32,759 So we're going to click on this letter and metrics, center in width. Then we're gonna take 64 00:06:32,759 --> 00:06:41,189 the "o" and center it in width too. And in this table, what we can do is we can click on the width and using 65 00:06:41,189 --> 00:06:47,519 the arrow keys to shift we can reduce the width symmetrically and you can see as I do 66 00:06:47,519 --> 00:06:59,189 this the letters are coming in and we take the "o" now ? that one too. 67 00:07:01,949 --> 00:07:12,180 Now, just let me zoom out a little bit. Now I want you guys to look at the row of "n"s very carefully as I do this. 68 00:07:19,509 --> 00:07:26,500 So looking at this row of "n"s, I want you to look at the shapes and tell me if you 69 00:07:26,500 --> 00:07:29,500 see them change. If you see the shapes of it changing. 70 00:07:40,209 --> 00:07:44,259 Yes? the ? - There getting taller? 71 00:07:44,259 --> 00:07:48,639 Yeah, they appear to get taller. That's right but obviously we're not changing the 72 00:07:48,639 --> 00:07:53,019 shape of the black forms. What we're changing is the rhythm between the black 73 00:07:53,019 --> 00:07:58,449 and the white and so when there's a lot of white space than they appear to be 74 00:07:58,449 --> 00:08:05,769 wider and when we bring them in, they appear to get taller but the black shapes are not 75 00:08:05,769 --> 00:08:06,849 changing. 76 00:08:06,850 --> 00:08:12,010 It's the white shapes between the letters that's changing. That white shape is 77 00:08:12,009 --> 00:08:19,089 becoming like a ? rectangle or a square or a white rectangle as we change the left spacing. 78 00:08:19,089 --> 00:08:23,319 Does anyone not see this? 79 00:08:28,029 --> 00:08:35,230 This is really fundamental right because you have to draw all the letters in a 80 00:08:35,230 --> 00:08:41,259 font editor and space them as you draw them because the spacing affects the 81 00:08:41,259 --> 00:08:51,460 shape. This is like the big secret. And the reason we start with the "n" and the "o" is 82 00:08:51,460 --> 00:08:57,340 that the "o" is you know gotta be super symmetrical and so we just have an 83 00:08:57,340 --> 00:09:02,139 intuitive sense you know like obviously this is touching, this is too tight and then 84 00:09:02,139 --> 00:09:08,319 go like this and these letters stopped coming together like a word and so you 85 00:09:08,320 --> 00:09:15,129 are looking for that nice natural rhythm why we think that ? Then similarly 86 00:09:15,129 --> 00:09:21,519 with the "n", we want to bring that "n" that it's nice to plays ? You know, we have a sense like 87 00:09:21,519 --> 00:09:26,590 this is really too tight and maybe this is too wide. 88 00:09:29,690 --> 00:09:35,330 Here, maybe something like this. Then when you're done on their own you can do them together 89 00:09:36,710 --> 00:09:41,990 obviously this is just a crazy design done in seconds. Then we need to go back to 90 00:09:41,990 --> 00:09:49,190 design and fix that up. So that's how you do spacing. You get a sense of the the "n"s 91 00:09:49,190 --> 00:09:55,610 and the "o"s working together and then you can start add letters in. So let's open 92 00:09:55,610 --> 00:09:58,610 up an example. 93 00:10:12,328 --> 00:10:23,789 Then you could add your "a", "b", "c", "d". You get a sense of if that letter is 94 00:10:23,789 --> 00:10:30,928 well spaced in the context of the spacing defined by the "n"s and "o"s. And also 95 00:10:30,928 --> 00:10:40,230 the "b" here, the flat edge is not having the same spacing as the "n". The round edge would be 96 00:10:40,230 --> 00:10:49,798 having the same spacing as the "o". Then you would make a deviation from that system of spacing. 97 00:10:49,798 --> 00:10:56,669 Then the fourth window in a font editor is the Element, Font Info window and this is where 98 00:10:56,669 --> 00:11:01,889 all the metadata is for a font. This is where you can set the font name, the vertical metrics 99 00:11:01,889 --> 00:11:09,600 the OpenType features, all that stuff. When you set the name then you can go to File and 100 00:11:09,600 --> 00:11:15,420 then generate font and that's where you can select the font format that you want. So as we 101 00:11:15,419 --> 00:11:21,389 said we're going to do OpenType CFF make a note here? so you make the routine? like 102 00:11:21,389 --> 00:11:23,419 this, 103 00:11:23,419 --> 00:11:30,620 Put it on your desktop, click Generate and then FontForge might give you some warnings 104 00:11:30,620 --> 00:11:37,580 but generally we just gonna last? through what they step back? and on the desktop you 105 00:11:37,580 --> 00:11:46,580 that font file that you generated and then you can click open with fontbook and click install and then 106 00:11:46,580 --> 00:11:46,970 the font you've drawn is in ?