Open Type

For this workshop in Free/Libre/open Type, we had a guest speaker, David Crossland. He has been giving workshops on cutting edge and emerging type practice worldwide. Along with giving workshops, Dave is a consulter for the Google Web Fonts project in England. He is particularly interested in the potential of software freedom in Graphic Design and typography. In his workshop he introduced us to the open source software Fontforge.

He started of by telling us how to avoid fatal mistakes while drawing fonts. He went on to tell us that the basic shape of a letter should be done by beginning to fill the letter rather than doing the outline first. Once we were happy with the shape and form of the letter we were then asked to do the outline followed by a solid fill.


He also told us that when creating typefaces we must look at the 4 different elements:

1. Contrast
2. Reptition
3. Alignment
4. Proportion

Dave Crossland

Fontforge

Then onto the second part of the lecture, we were introduced to Fontforge. Fontforge is an opens source program that was developed primarily by George Williams. The software allows users to edit and create fonts with no cost at all.

Below is my attempt to create the letter 'n'.

For my first attempt, I felt that the outcome was of good standard. The program in general is very user friendly and the tools are really basic and easy to understand.

Module: Authorship & Interaction
Ba (Hons) Graphic Communication Design
University of Westminster

Bhavika Gajipra

FONTFORGE OUTCOMES