Sometime around 5/5/08 (at 13:42 -0400) Rocky Slaughter said:
I am trying to learn how to create my own fonts so that I can have a
truly unique logo.
Fontographer and FontLab are the only two games in town. And
strangely enough they’re both offered by the same developer now!
But if this is about making a logo, you may not need to go to the
extremes of making a typeface. That can be a wonderfully engrossing
task… but it is a huge amount of work!
But if this is about making a logo, you may not need to go to the
extremes of making a typeface. That can be a wonderfully engrossing
task… but it is a huge amount of work!
I totally agree with this. If you use a vector drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator that treats text as objects that can be converted to paths then edited, then there are unlimited possibilities for creating logos from existing fonts. I do it all the time just this way.
What I used to do was create a black logo in Freehand and paste the
image into Fontographer, then I used Auto trace and did the fine
tuning on the beziers and em etc. I found it great fun and not so much
work (at least it wasn’t once you got the hang of it… like most apps
I guess), at least not a lot more than doing it all in Freehand…
Then of course the great thing was when you wanted the logo you just
selected the font and typed the key or keys depending on how the logo
was built up or broken up, added the colour to the text sections and
then just selected a font size to make it larger of smaller and you
got a pixel perfect logo at whatever size you needed. I also actually
used this method in Flash for a website and it worked great.
On May 5, 2008, at 10:01 PM, chuckamuck wrote:
On 5 May. 2008, 7:05 pm, thatkeith wrote:
But if this is about making a logo, you may not need to go to the
extremes of making a typeface. That can be a wonderfully engrossing
task… but it is a huge amount of work!
I totally agree with this. If you use a vector drawing program such
as Adobe Illustrator that treats text as objects that can be
converted to paths then edited, then there are unlimited
possibilities for creating logos from existing fonts. I do it all
the time just this way.
If you only want to make a logo, it’s easier to design it with a vector graphics software such as Illustrator. It’s only worth designing a whole font if you want to use it to create text at will: if you only want the few letters that are actually used in the logo, a vector graphics programme will let you do it faster and with more flexibility. Maybe Intaglio fits the bill?
But if this is about making a logo, you may not need to go to the extremes of making a typeface. That can be a wonderfully engrossing task… but it is a huge amount of work!
How many characters are needed to make a basic font set? It occurred to me that a font set styled on one’s own handwriting might be attractive or useful to a lot of folks, including txt msngrs
-Jim
There must be nearly a hundred required inc upper and lower case etc.
It strikes me that a font based on my handwriting would only be easily legible to people that were familiar with the written version and as a result - not that useful in any other circumstances.
Now if I had handwriting like my father’s copperplate that would be a different story.
Sometime around 17/5/08 (at 14:48 -0400) JimS said:
How many characters are needed to make a basic font set? It occurred
to me that a font set styled on one’s own handwriting might be
attractive or useful to a lot of folks, including txt msngrs
Depends on how you want to use it. 26 letters, 10 numerals, plus
whatever punctuation you felt would be sufficient is all you really
need for general lightweight use.
I have a font CD with 300 ‘handwriting’ fonts, based on 300 different
people’s handwriting. A few are actually useful! They helped me more
or less match the font needed for http://www.edmgallery.com/3d/ for
one thing.
A copy of Fontographer or Font Lab, a scanner, loads of paper and a
generous amount of patience are all you need.
It is normally worth avoiding the free font bargain bins, but the
aesthetic demands of handwriting typefaces are rather different from
traditional fine book fonts, for example. And that could save you a
heck of a lot of time.
Glad you liked the Glade panoramas - I’m just about to sort out the
logistics of doing it again this year.
Oh, if you go to http://www.edmgallery.com/3d/experience/ you’ll see
a version of one of my panoramas posted with directional sound, as a
demo of what could be done. The loops weren’t properly beat-matched
and could be better trimmed too - but it is a fun example. Look
around and check out the stereo-panning audio loops!
