Lines and splines

October 29, 2007 4:45 PM

So You Want to Create a Font (Part 1, Part 2). For something with a less presumptive title, there’s this, this, this, this, this, or even this, Eric Gill’s An Essay on Typography.
posted by tepidmonkey (15 comments total)

In the wrong hands, this could result in the nest Comic Sans.
posted by louche mustachio at 4:54 PM on October 29, 2007

er..."next"
posted by louche mustachio at 4:54 PM on October 29, 2007

So You Want to Create a Font

This will totally become a show on NBC if the television writers go on strike.
posted by ALongDecember at 5:17 PM on October 29, 2007

Here's are some amusing Flash presentations (with wonderful audio accompaniment) from German guitarist, luthier and font designer Hans Reichel.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:19 PM on October 29, 2007 [1 favorite]

"Here's are some..."

Nice. I knew I shoulda gone to college...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:20 PM on October 29, 2007

Does anyone know anything about Eric Gill's private life? His fonts look fantastic but I am undecided until I learn more about Gill the man.
posted by fire&wings at 5:40 PM on October 29, 2007

Adventurous font designers might be interested in Spiro by Raph Levien. The curve technology this guy has developed is absolutely amazing. I've been using bezier curves for over a decade (not as a font designer though) and in just two seconds of using his 0.01 prototype, I fell in love with it. The prototype is extremely bare, there isn't even an Open dialog, but you can save. The Typophile thread where he announced it has some more details about the technology and the app.
posted by effwerd at 5:52 PM on October 29, 2007

Fire&Wings -- Eric Gill was one weird dude -- suspected of unnatural relations with his daughter (just to mention one thing).
posted by Faze at 6:00 PM on October 29, 2007

Oops. Sorry. Here's the Eric Gill the weirdo link.
posted by Faze at 6:02 PM on October 29, 2007

A shame. He had such a nice face.
posted by hal9k at 6:10 PM on October 29, 2007 [1 favorite]

Is it mandatory to have a typo in your comment in this typography thread?

if so, I like funts.

er, fonts.
posted by wendell at 6:10 PM on October 29, 2007

Why, yes! I do want to create a font!

Nice.
posted by lampoil at 8:01 PM on October 29, 2007

One of my many unfinished projects was creating a font for the symbols of the Dumas message, with which to write messages in a universal language. But my downfall was deciding to make it a visually nice font via cosmetic tweaks, instead of being just a blocky exact copy of the coded-in-binary symbols. This decision to slightly stylize the forms meant that the task went from quick and simple, to actually requiring... y'know... a lot of work.

I was never too good at that whole Work thing :-)

I bring this up because AFAIK the world Universe still needs a font version of the Dumas symbols, so if this FPP got you all fired up to do a font... but you're wondering what kind of font to do... well there you go :)
posted by -harlequin- at 12:22 AM on October 30, 2007

I went to High School with the guy that created Hoeffler, does that give me any cachet here?
posted by Aversion Therapy at 4:01 AM on October 30, 2007

cool. thanks.
posted by the_very_hungry_caterpillar at 1:13 PM on October 30, 2007