What's your ‘Type’?
Read about my influences and the process I used to create a font… in a week.
I am a picky person especially when it comes to a few things in life: The amount of ice cubes in my Iced Americano, the fonts that I use, and oh! Rear wipers on cars.
Do we need another Font?
In this oversaturated world where there are millions of fonts all around us, it probably does not make sense to create another font but as a medium of putting my knowledge to use to benefit all of us it does make sense.
To answer the question, I’d say Nay-be.
The Foreword
Having completed Ellen Lupton’s course on Typography Design for Brand Storytelling (All thanks to Robert for sharing the details of this one), I was motivated to put forth my learnings to something of use to all of us.
I must give a disclaimer that the result is far from perfect; and hence I would need your eyes and feedback to improve it before I take it to the next phase… that is to make this font available to a larger set people by submitting it on Google Fonts.
Anyway, read more about my journey down below.
I started off by observing fonts around me, something that the course also talks about. What fonts do I like the most, what attributes of it I like it and the whole shebang.
Pinterest, my phone’s camera and my eyes did help me here, honest.
From stopping in middle of my path to click photos of hand painted typefaces on derelict walls to creating a board on Pinterest. I did it all.
After this exercise of mine, I sketched a couple of letters already an old notebook. I wanted to create a tall, sans-serif, display font that could be used in posters, or large-scale artwork and a font that follows the tenets of symmetry and includes my liking for Art Deco and pays homage to the city of Mumbai.
I went right into Adobe Illustrator with the short styles I had drawn. I checked out how letters should look and compared different fonts. Then, I made some rules based on what I learned:
- The height of the letters should be 2x the width.
- The outer edges need to be rounded.
- Inner edges need to be straight.
I began by creating the letters E, F and H, as the heights of both the letter and the crossbar could be gauged. The curved edges got a soft 1px rounding on the outside, staying straight on the inside. The crossbar low to capture the Art Deco style from the past in a modern way.
Due to my own technical limitation. I only created a typeface which is in uppercase, but then this ensured that it looks symmetrical… win win situation, methinks.
The next step was to create numbers and punctuation marks, which was fairly easy to do so since I already made my hands dirty creating the alphabets.
After having designed the letters in Illustrator. I was dumbfounded.
I thought that is it! I have a font, but no that was not it. Talk about not researching enough.
Anyway, to overcome this unexpected roadblock… I went to my trusty ol’ friends… Google and its sibling YouTube.
Time for a Fun Fact: In Chemistry, there is a glass beaker which is called as U-Tube which is used to measure pressure differences. Read more about it, very interesting, honest.
Anyway, not digressing more. Yes, where were we? Google and YouTube… having gone to the uncharted territory called as Page 2 of results and consuming countless hours of videos by independent content creators and channels like The Futur, I came to the realization that to create a font I need another software.
I did come across a few good software such as FontSelf and Glyphs but both were paid. Not wanting to spend a lot of money, I continued my research and found this gem of a software called as FontForge in the by lanes of a city call open source. Grateful for this.
Having watched a few tutorials to teach myself how to use this pièce de résistance. I started off on the final leg of my journey… or so did I think.
After having imported my letters, number and punctuation marks from Illustrator to FontForge, I was on cloud nine, as I had something that could be exported as a font, and I did, but…
Boy oh boy, words cannot describe my dismay to the first iteration of what I was to name QuarterSans. The kerning (spacing between letters) was off, it looked all squished up… which reminded me of my time on the Thane local from Currey Road.
We go to the drawing board again. This time armed with some experience.
YouTube again came to my rescue from where I taught myself how to maintain the right kerning and set other font parameters.
Having successfully exporting a font, which was bestowed its name, “Quarter Sans”. You may be wondering why this name?
Well, somethings are better left unanswered innit?
Having showcased this typeface to my friends whom I asked for adjectives to define the same. I think I did justice to what I set my intent to do.
As a user experience designer, I cannot lay enough emphasis on testing and QuarterSans was subjected to feedback by my trusted comrade Nupur. (A big thank you) and she gave a thumbs up.
Fun Fact: Thums Up, the aerated beverage that I love and I guess you may too was named ‘Thums Up’ instead of “Thumbs Up” because the lawyers suggested the company to drop the letter ‘b’ to avoid making it sound like a generic word, and thus, it was shortened to “Thums Up” and the legendary cola brand was born with a simple, bright red logo.
End Notes
The trials and tribulations during the course of this project taught me how to design a font. (Wow, no sh*t, Sherlock)… which was the intent after all. The next steps in this project are to further refine it after taking your feedback and create lowercase letters and finally submitting it Google Fonts.
And I made a website! quartersans.co.in
Thanks for reading!
