Random Notes: Typography, Life and Whatnot

[dewline]

I've Made a little more progress with one of my amateur font design projects this afternoon. I'm not entirely sure how close I am to being done, beyond characterizing it as being "close to halfway". The font in question is a fictional, "constructed" alphabet, with 90+ letter-glyphs, a base-ten number set-up, and a rudimentary punctuation scheme of about a dozen glyphs. It's on my "To Do in 2006" list from New Year's.

On the health front, I got some proper exercise. Two miles, I believe, in the space of about ¾ of an hour. Not bad, but there's room for improvement, whether we speak of time elapsed or distance covered. Good to see the weather getting somewhat closer to spring-like as the days go by as well.

A possibly odd -- perhaps "absurd" is a better descriptive -- sidebar question: Does anyone else ever fixate on the amount of daylight gained as the seasons progress from winter to spring to summer? Checking the weather forecasts daily to see how much more daylight one's neighbourhood gets per diem?

Cultural note: This is Wonderland got some attention from one of the Globe and Mail's columnists today. (Not sure how long the link will remain publicly accessible to non-subscribers, and as a satisfied reader of the paperware edition of that paper, I'd recommend you pick it up!) Interesting points raised, Kate Taylor!

Back to you, friends and neighbours...

Comments

[jcoville.livejournal.com]

Is creating your own font hard?

Part of me thinks it ain't. Find one that's similar to what you want, open the letters in photoshop, make adjustments and re-save it, open or copy it within the font program and save again.

But the other part of me thinks I'm just daydreaming and there is probably a lot more that goes into it than that.

Font Design?

[dewline.livejournal.com]

That part of you that suspects that you're daydreaming on this one's exactly right, Jamie. Font design is a challenge in its own right. <a href="http://high-logic.com/>Font Creator Program 4</a> is a wonder to work with, and every time I trot it out to work on this project, I find I'm learning more respect for the various designers we've been relying on for our fonts, and their technological predecessors as well, down through the centuries.

I hate losing content in mid-post

[dewline.livejournal.com]

That said, I was going to wax poetically at some length on Font Creator Program 4 (http://high-logic.com/), and its merits and means of Building a Font from scratch. Or, in my case, not quite scratch, but eyeballing charts off of a comics-oriented website. I speak of a fictional alphabet that hasn't yet been fonted by anyone else for certain that I know of. It's fun and a challenge -- as it should be -- but it can drive me slightly nuts on occasion.