08102013

Dave Crossland is a pretty awesome individual. Behind the facade of his careless curls, bright fuzzy eyes and zoning off into a daydream between topics when he talks, he travels the world giving inspiring talks about a very passionate love child of his; free software development skewed toward typography.

During his talk, he lightly brushed his typographic history which led him to where he is now. He also let us dabble in a recent project that is actively being developed all the time called FontForge, in which we created bits of font that could potentially make up an entire set of typography in our own design.

Dave Crossland is now working with Google and is set to create Google Font. Google Font is an open font library is made to keep almost 95% of all the typography we have on the web, including all the signs, symbols and different languages that are based on Latin fonts.

All in all, Dave Crossland is an inspiring little man that creates concepts and ideas that time and time again manages to bring to life.

The pictures on the right are examples of how FontForge works as well as YouTube video demonstrated by Dave Crossland himself. We managed to create strange works of art from scratch, which I could say resembles some form of Typography.

I played with the width between each letters, as well as the base line for the longer x-height letters.

For example, I used the baseline for the the letters 'n, i, c, o, and e' and the maximum descent line for the 'l' to create a quirky, asymmetrical typeface. All the letters of my typeface touched the maximum ascent line and sat in between the right and left side bearing.

I also mixed between fonts that had serif and fonts that didn't to see what the effect would be like.

I thoroughly enjoyed the process of making my own font, and I see myself using this piece of software in my other projects.

The images below are my own process of making the fonts for my own name.
I picked the letters "NICOLE" to spell out.

I tried out using the line and curved tools, as well as playing with white space within each blocks.

During Dave's class, he told us to sketch out the letters N, O, and A. The first picture below was the sketch I did without any guidance from Dave. In the process from the first photo, we learned about a few interesting and key points to starting the process of making your own font.

1. Contour
2. Repetition
3. Alignment
4. Proposition

These were the guidelines that Dave gave us which allowed us to do the second sketch in the photo below.

With this new found knowledge, I then ventured out to trying to make my own typeface.