Design a Digital Font from A to Z

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.