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Building
a Font
There are two ways to build a new type face. The first is to build it from
the ground up. The second, and easier method (which is the one I'm taking),
is to find an existing font that is close in look and feel to the one you have
in mind and change it. Building a font from the ground up can be very rewarding,
but also incredibly time consuming. A typical font style is more than the 26
characters of the alphabet. You have upper and lowercase letters, numbers,
punctuation, symbols and more. All told a typical type font could have over
100 individual characters. It is not necessary to create unique characters
for all 100. But you will probably wish to design them for your uppercase,
lowercase, and numbers. That comes to over 60.
Babylon 5 to Acme
For this tutorial I decided to build a new font from one already in my system.
I chose the font closest to the one I want to base my Acme logo on. I then
printed out every character I think I might need. I printed out 6 characters
to a page in outline form only. Since I wanted all uppercase letters, lowercase
letters, and numbers, that came to 11 pages. Then using a color pen, pencil
or marker I could begin sketching in alterations, trying out different designs.
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Babylon5 font - printed out
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Acme font - My design
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The key of course is to make consistent alterations to all my
characters or glyphs. If I decide to squash my 'A', then the remainder
of my glyphs must have the same alteration. If one glyph is skewed
20 degrees forward, the other glyphs must also. The alterations
I wish to make are relatively simple. First, I will extend the
serif strokes and then I want to thicken the stems of each character.
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'A' glyph before and after
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After altering the 'A', I continued to 'B' and so forth. Unfortunately,
'Font Creator' does not allow you to import images under an existing
type font. It would make the task of editing considerably easier
and faster. For this project I only edited the uppercase characters.
At anytime I can test my new 'Acme' font by hitting - F5 and typing.
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