1. What did you learn?
I learned that there are a lot of details that go into making a font. The concepts of x-height, cap-height, baseline, ascenders and descenders were all new to me. I also learned several different typeface classifications beyond just serif and sans-serif.
2. What was easy?
Playing around with basic shapes and seeing how much I could do with just a few of them was fun! Staying consistent with baseline, cap-height, and x-height was pretty straightforward once I set some guide lines.
3. What was challenging?
I found that it got progressively more challenging as I moved from letters to numbers to special characters. Putting together the poster was also more challenging in terms of getting everything properly aligned and spaced.
4. How could your submission be improved?
Because I worked in Illustrator rather than FontStruct, I didn’t have a downloadable font to work with for creating the poster, so I ended up copy and pasting everything from my lettering grid Illustrator file and arranging it on the poster manually. It took a lot of work to get everything properly aligned and spaced, and I’m sure it’s still not perfect. I found that there’s an extension you can purchase through Fontself called “Fontself Maker” that would allow me to create an OpenType font out of the characters I designed in Illustrator, so that’s something I might want to try to improve my submission.
5. How could the professor improve the assignment for the next class?
For the next class, it might be helpful to spend more time on how to professionally present the font on a poster.
6. How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?
Knowing the basics of creating a font will be helpful in any future projects that would benefit from a unique, custom font rather than something that’s already out there.
7. How did a specific reading or video inspire or help you?
I was most inspired by the Pinterest board shared in the “Modular Font Examples” slides. I liked the examples on here that were more shape-based rather than square pixel-based.