My baby is finally taking shape

After completing the summer course on typography, I was itching to create a font. Something from scratch. Something beautiful. And to be honest, I hadn't done anything entirely original in a while and wanted to get my hands dirty! 

And so I embarked on this rather tedious journey of designing the font. After spending weeks wondering where to begin, how to design, and hours of googling, I found a tutorial on youtube on how to create a font using Adobe illustrator. This is exactly what I was looking for.

For any designer who wants to create a font, and doesn't quite understand the technical complexities and mathematics involved, just follow the instructions. It is absolutely critical that you start right, with the correct file size and format so that you don't struggle at the end. Even a tiny error can impact the entire exercise and you might end up re-doing all 52 characters!

Having said that I am nowhere close to end myself, but so far this tutorial has proven very very useful.

I was keen to base my font on something that inspires me, interesting design wise, and also connected me to my roots. I thought about Indian art, Indian architecture and Indian textiles. And there it was... IKAT. It is rich, it is distinctive, it is traditional, and yet so geometric and contemporary. I just knew this was it.

Here's a sample of my work in progress. Far from complete, I still have the entire lower case and numerals to go. And of course all the fine tuning and adjustments. I can clearly see already that the 'O' looks too big! So fingers crossed, I should get this done by the end of the year at least.

Diving deep into type.. (or just scratching the surface)

I love Type Wolf. I think I have learnt more on typography and fonts in the last one month than I have in many years. I am starting to analyse and justify my various font choices rather than picking something that just 'looks good' or 'feels right'. The texture, the colour. The context.

Why doesn't a Garamond work in large sizes? Does Meta work better than Helvetica?  Why is Lexicon the most expensive font? Why is Futura the most popular and most unpopular? Did we know it was Wes Anderson's and Stanley Kubricks' favourite font?  Why the global outcry when Ikea switched from Futura to Verdana?  Why does this fascinate me?

Most of the fonts popular amongst designers are not free, and some really pricey, but there are quite a few brilliant free options to explore as well.

But it's very important to have an understanding on why a certain font works for a particular project, vs another for something else. The history and evolution of the font, the influences. Subtle semiotics, but  it effects the overall project look and experience. We spoke about this in detail in my course on Typography at Central Saint Martins. We had an interesting assignment where we were given a set of projects and we had to choose fonts for each of them, and the reasoning behind choosing that font. Probably the hardest assignment, but the most fun.

On a separate note, I'm loving this brush pen from Atlantis, and the seemingly endless summer Saturdays.