Contents

Introduction

Basic

Intermediate

Advanced

Future

Policy

Infrastructure

The most difficult part of this exercise is finding the inspirational idea for the font. This may be an event for which a poster is to be made, or a product or service. Theatrical events which are themselves full of colour and of novel forms are a fruitful and inspirational source. Perhaps designing a poster for a production that may not actually take place is possible, but something for a real school production is much better, because the results will have social reality. So the obvious candidate is a poster for the play which is in the English syllabus for the year, for example a Romeo and Juliet font, for which there will be existing examples as a result of past movie releases.

In the past fonts have been characters of a 2-D planar nature, and strictly black on white ( or reverse). The history of fonts and characters and the way they are represented in documents, dependant on the technology used to reproduce them, is an interesting study. In the past, the constraints of computer technology have limited each character to occupy its own rectangular space on the page. The fonts used for presenting this paragraph on this webpage are a good example. But in the area of display fonts which are still effectively handset or at least hand manipulated there are no computer constraints. In fact quite the reverse for now a character can have a physical depth so that it is modeled in 3 dimensions, it can be bent, folded and twisted, and it is no longer has forced to sit flat on the page. Characters no longer even need be static objects.

The availability of tools such as Ulead COOL 3D (reviewed in the Advanced Chapter) opens up totally new fields of font design for which designers can exploit to provide exciting new fonts that have never been conceived of before. These can be sold for royalties through existing font promotion houses.

2   Step One - Draw Font

These four steps should be done reasonably quickly, even in a single workshop, mainly as a learning exercise. The student will learn quite a number of things from the exercise. These are to do with the technological innovations which the software makes possible:

• Firstly, the characters do not have to be "solid" but can be the result of a "sketching" process, and can exist as a filigree of lines. The lines may have a rigorous structure such as vertical bars, or may be a maze of fine squiggles. The characters may be a combination of solid blocks and indefinite sections. The character may extend out of itself and include material extraneous to the "normal" character.
• When the characters are placed in the 3D space they can be positioned to appear to overlap each other. And they can even be positioned to occupy the same space. The characters can be tilted uniformly or at random to manifest illusions of depth and lighting variation.
• The characters are extruded into 3 dimensions. For a simple font this results in few surprises, though some characters such as "K" and "R" can look strange given high values of weight and bevelling. However, for characters made of more "sketchy" vector definitions, the results of extrusion can be quite surprising. For instance, characters can be sketched out as a kind of tubular spaghetti, or as though cut out of venetian blinds.

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