Type Design Journal — Part 7

I made some more adjustments to the typeface in the last weeks and found out which character I like to draw the least. It’s the lowercase x! It can be a pain in the neck, at least for me. I don’t know why… it looks like a pretty simple character, right?! I was so frustrated with the “x”, for several weeks, trying to fix it without sucess. For that reason, I asked for help and feel so lucky to have gotten it.

I’m self-taught, in the sense that I have no formal education to do what I am doing. I wouldn’t be able to make the progress I made so far and, in so little time, without the help of some very generous people. The things that I know now, would probably take me years of experience to learn by myself. I can’t put in words how grateful and lucky I am for that.

I also got help with the connections of the lowercase. I learnt how to do them properly, so that the spacing looks good. When done right, you don’t have to do much kerning. So I redid all the connections and I think that the typeface looks better now. Connections don’t look weird anymore.

Finally, I went over every single glyph to update it. I have been working especially on the basic glyphs and there were glyphs with diacrits and swashes that needed to be updated. When you work on a font editor you can work with components in a way that when you make changes, to let’s say the lowercase “a”, glyphs like “à”, “ã”, “â”, etc. will automatically update. This way you don’t need to copy paste, in this case, the “a” every time into glyphs with diacritics. I guess some things you have to learn the hard way. Below I’m showing you a small video of that progress. I guess you can get the idea of how unnecessarily time consuming this can be, especially when you are working on a large typeface. Mine is not the largest typeface one can find, but still with 700+ glyphs a lot of time gets wasted.

If I had done things the right way, I would have to change the first “u” with the swash just once (the rest of the glyphs with diacritics would have changed automatically). However, should I decide to make further changes from now on that is what is going to happen. At least, I found out about this and will not spend that much time updating every single glyph by using “copy” and “paste”. So I can’t really complain.

I have been showing also some of the progress on Instagram. Feel free to follow along if you like.