Now that the end of the semester is coming up to an end, I think I’ve worked with Glyphs long enough to write a post about it. Before I took this class, I didn’t know much about what I was going to learn. Throughout the course, there were fun exercises that we did together like Adenos and creating posters using Adobe Illustrator. Now that we are almost done in terms of the content of this course, I can finally see how all the small activities that I thought were just there for fun add up to creating our own typeface using Glyphs. Personally, the whole process of designing a typeface was extremely engaging and exciting especially because it was my first time creating one, and the thought of creating my own personal typeface seemed really cool.
Although we’ve had several sessions in class to watch short tutorials and make cheat sheets out of it, the best way I learned was when we were left to use Glyphs alone. Not that any of the exercises like making notes and posters weren’t helpful, I just thought that whatever we needed or wanted the glyphs to do, there was a new skill to learn. And I feel that ‘doing’ it rather than ‘watching’ it from video tutorials is much more effective in terms of how much I can remember to use it the next time I needed it. Now that I’m 75% expert in Glyphs, I can laugh at myself in the past for adding so many unnecessary nodes in a letter and tweaking it here and there countless times to create soft curves and lines. Working with Glyphs also helped me with Bezier curves; this really helped me with another course- Yes, Logo- when using Adobe Illustrator to create complicated logos.
I think using Glyphs has been the best learning experience so far, because as I create a letter, I notice so many common features it shares with other letters. For example, I was working with Glyphs today to create a set of capital letters. My inspiration and reference typeface is Palatino and the set of capitals in Palatino were very different to the lowercase letters. I felt lost because I didn’t know where to start. However, as soon as I started noticing similar patterns in letters like ‘I’, ‘L’ and ‘E’, it was so much easier than I had anticipated.
To be honest, I am extremely happy with the result of my typeface (although there are still some letters I need to work on) and I am grateful that I can walk out of the classroom with a new skill learned- creating typeface by hand and a software. I wish I could have worked more to fine-tune my typeface, which I am certain I will be doing even after the course finishes this semester. If I ever had the chance to recreate another typeface, I would try to experiment with other typefaces like Lucida and Faroe, but most definitely, I want to create a sans serif typeface.
Overall, I am so pleased that our class can fill the whole table in the design studio with our work, drawings, test-outs, tracing papers, posters and drafts to prove our engagement towards this course. I’m also really excited to listen Quim, John and Zsombor’s presentations about their own typefaces and how they incorporated common features in their set of letters.
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