New Font 085

Recovered at the scene by Luke Dorny on or about January 5th, 2025 before heading west.

A Journey with links

screenshot of sketches for typeface — What are some common letter shapes?
By: Luke Dorny Lic: CC BY-ND 4.0

Okay. Today we start a new typeface design and create a font. Luke-style. Could be boring, could be interesting. Let’s start.

Goal

Create a font and share the entire process.

Background

I’ve tinkered with typefaces before, and not too long ago, and the three to six unfinished typefaces gave me a real sandbox of experience making type, but not start to finish. So with this in mind, let’s make a typeface and put it online.

Updates

All my work will be posted here, but I’ll also be putting occasional updates on my Mastodon account https://typo.social/@Luke, so you could follow me there, and also you could subscribe to my JSON RSS feed https://lukedorny.com/feed, if that’s a thing you prefer.

NOTE: No affiliation with Glyphs. I bought it full price with my own money. You’ll have to use some of the links at the end to find solutions for your budget or platform.

Step 1

First off, naming. How to find a unique font name? My first step was to look at https://namecheck.fontdata.com and see if the name I wanted was taken. You can also add your own font there if you like. Nice tool!

Step 2

Begin sketches and ideas. What features will it have? What character sets will be designed? Upper and lower case glyphs?

Sans-serif
Variable weight?
Variable width?
Variable rounded corners?

Step 3

Open Glyphs.app and begin.
https://glyphsapp.com

screenshot of Glyphs — Opening Glyphs.app and creating a new font file project. You can grab Glyphs from https://glyphsapp.com and they have a smaller and cheaper version called Glyphs Mini if that’s your speed.

Step 4

Review the steps for making a variable typeface, if prep or setup steps are needed:
https://glyphsapp.com/learn/creating-a-variable-font which mentioned this article as a primer: https://medium.com/variable-fonts/https-medium-com-tiro-introducing-opentype-variable-fonts-12ba6cd2369

Let’s just start with one axes and go from there.

Masters

Had a wonderful phone call with Aaron Bell of https://www.sajatypeworks.com, who makes typefaces for several languages. Have known him for years and always see him at TypeCon. He had a few pointers for getting started with variable fonts, which was handy.

So, we’ll start by adding a Regular, right in the center, and a Narrow and Wide, as well as a Book and Bold weights. Let’s tinker with this and if we feel confident we’ll tackle the rounded corners idea later.

Screenshot of Glyphs with the new font settings — We’ll make a master for the center of the design spectrum, with narrow, wide, thin, and bold and add in the numbers for the axes.

Step 5

Now we’ll need to start with some simple designs from our sketches, and it’s suggested that we start with the shapes of the base glyphs O, H, n, o, and go from there.

Learning Video

This video just launched an hour ago and I’m watching one of my favorite video font designers Arrow Type describe variable type issues.