Moment-by-moment creation of our Sound Effect fonts SHIVER and SHAKE
About this time last year, we presented an extremely condensed version of our font making process. Apparently *some* people thought it went by a little too fast, so…
A few weeks ago, I started posting moment-by-moment updates on Twitter while creating the solid weight of our SHIVER and SHAKE font sets. Relive the magic, uh, markers as SHAKE comes into being below…
Recently found paper with letters @RichStarkings sketched moons agoEven deeper in the old manila folder, a whole alphabet sketched out!Placed scan in illustrator, new layer on top. Trace with pen tool, no fill, no stroke.Jide the scan layer and set fill to black to see how it looks…On letter I, I finally figured out the rhythm: curvy LL and UR corners, sharp UL and RRlove @RichStarkings exclamation point! but I question his question mark.whaddya think? better?first alphabet finished!gotta go back and tweak some of the earlier letters – before: yuck! after: oh yeeeeeahhh…in illustrator, select and copy, then open fontographer, open any letter and pastepaste each letter into its window in fontographerall the letters (so far) in place! “Untitled-1”?!? Better save this sucker…size one letter to the baseline and toplineapply the same to the rest of the letters with Element > Transformtype out a word in the Metrics window to see how it’s looking… yikes! :OI start by setting the spacing on H I and O……because they have equal spacing on the left and right sides……and use them to work the rest of the letters against.constant challenge of finding the right balance between wanting to perfect things……and leaving enough imperfection and inconsistency that it still has “life” to it which, when you’re making Comic Book Fonts, is kind of essential, no?it’s gotta play in Ohio, says @KurtBusiek? Alright, then —and there’s Z. Done? Not hardly!tracing the second alphabet. these little letters are less defined, gonna need cleanuplove how @richstarkings drew the O squarish and flat — gotta match that on the C & Gsecond set traced. now to arrange…ha! love ’em when they’re filled and the scan is gone. like Artie Simek alphabet soup.first alphabet above, second one below. crazy inconsistencies. but that’s the charm…?pasted the alternate set into fontographer. save the great BB and HH for ligatures!heading into the Sound Effect Testing Room… put in your earplugs!KABOOM! Notice a thick/thin thing happening with O and M but not B — which way to go?lest i forget…ah, the painstaking letter spacing process. don’t try this at home.breaking my round LL/UR, sharp UL/LR corners rule. inside hooks look better sharp, no?spacing done! now to make sure similarly shaped letters are similar enough. but not tooif you ever shopped for Comicraft fonts and wondered what we mean by “alternate characters”…… this is it: two versions of every letter, in the upper and lowercase positions.and in Opentype, we can substitute pairs automatically, for extra niftiness! woogot A-Z and a-z looking pretty sweet. But that’s only part of it…punctuation time: Period from exclam. Dash from E. X becomes < and > , etc.and the all important swear word placeholders. I imagine they serve some other purpose too.
