Design a Digital Font from A to Z (Spanish, Multisub)

Learn to design a font from scratch with Glyphs, Illustrator and OpenType functions Juanjo López, better known as Juanjez and specialist in letter design, will teach you the process of creating a digital typeface. From the drawing until it is ready to be installed in your source folder and used in a design program.

About this course

You will begin to get to know Juanjez’s work, motivations, hobbies and typographic hobbies better, as well as some of his books and reference websites.

Before starting to design, Juanjez will give you some wise advice on what it means to embark on a long-term job such as typographic design and will talk about key aspects such as self-orders, motivation and patience to achieve the final goal .

Next, you will learn about the materials, the file formats with which you will work and the main functions of the Glyphs program, the Mac software for typography design and font production.

Once you have learned the process, you will begin to draw. You will learn some general concepts about the drawing of letters and handle the Bézier curves, the differences between Illustrator and the font creation programs, to draw letters directly with Glyphs, tricks to save time and to create a complete character set.

Then, to get a harmonious system of shapes and spaces that you can call typography, you will learn to space and kerning.

You will also learn how to apply OpenType functions such as ligatures, small caps, etc. to your source. We’ll take a look at Python and use programming scripts to automate tasks.

Finally, you will improve the view of your type on screen with the hinting and you will discover the technique of interpolation to facilitate the task of creating typographic families.

What is this course’s project?

Design a complete digital typography, that is, a set of characters valid at least for western and central European languages, correctly spaced and including some typographical refinement such as ligatures or other OpenType functions.

And for the letter to look as it should, the final exercise will consist in creating a specimen, a poster with your typography.

Who is it for? This course is aimed at lovers of letters, who like to draw and use them but have never tried to make their own, or have tried and stuck in some complicated point.

What you need There is no need for special prior knowledge about typography, only large doses of perseverance, having a clear end goal and not being in a hurry.

Regarding the materials, you will need pencil and paper and a typography design program, although in the course we will use Glyphs.