It may be the naïve approach, a mindless algorithm that expert typographers would spurn… but I’d be stupid not to at least try it. Hey, you want to design fonts? It comes with the territory. One of these is easy, but the others take considerable time and care. Instead, I have tried several semi-automated approaches, to get close to what I want. Perhaps I might eventually end up with something that looked halfway OK, but would it still have the distinctive look of the Coelacanth family? Unlikely. How does one make a bold?Ĭreating a good bold by manually dragging nodes is beyond me. So start as extreme as you can without losing the basic shapes of the glyphs. There are limits, and if you start too extreme you’ll be tempted to deform the letter-shapes substantially, so your counters don’t disappear… but those deformations aren’t a good basis for interpolation. Starting with extremes is generally a good idea, because if you can get it looking fairly good at an extreme weight it should look excellent by the time you’ve interpolated it back towards your carefully-designed regular. The bold can then be produced by interpolation, along with semi-bold, etc. So rather than start by working on a “bold”, I’m beginning with a “heavy” which is much more exaggerated. To produce the complete Coelacanth family I’m relying heavily on interpolation. I’d like Coelacanth to be versatile and meet all the common typesetting needs so it must have bold. Bruce Rogers didn’t create a bold for Centaur (on which Coelacanth is based), but we now live in an age of philistines, and bold type is ubiquitous. To get full access to glyph properties, open the Glyph panel ( Window > Panels > Glyph).The Coelacanth typeface I’m creating is classic Venetian style, harking back to an age before bold type was invented. Pressing ++Shift-Space++ will show a quick preview of your edits. The points in the other glyphs will snap to the grid of the current glyph, which may not be what you want.) If you turn on Edit > Edit Across Glyphs and Edit > Edit Across Elements you will see you can select and edit different parts of several glyphs simultaneously (Note: if you use grid snapping, the current glyph defines the grid origin. Use the Contour tool ( A) for editing glyph contours, use the Fill ( F) tool to fill black or white areas inside contours. You can use the Text tool ( T) to edit the line of glyphs in the Glyph window.
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