font.is

Love rela­tion­ship between Illus­tra­tor and Font­Lab bro­ken with CS5

In the arti­cle Using Illus­tra­tor to draw fonts for import­ing into Font­Lab, which I wrote sev­eral years ago, I describe how nice it is to use Illus­tra­tor and Font­Lab together. This is espe­cially nice for those who have made sketches for a font in Illus­tra­tor and need to move it into Font­Lab. For oth­ers it’s help­ful to be able to move one or more glyphs from Font­Lab for easy fix­ing and then paste it back to the exact position.

This beau­ti­ful rela­tion­ship has come to an end in Illus­tra­tor CS5. Con­tinue reading…

Cus­tomize Quick­Look for fonts

Quick­Look, the abil­ity to see a quick pre­view of files and fold­ers sim­ply by select­ing and then press­ing the Space bar has been avail­able for some time now.

This is a great time saver and gives access to infor­ma­tion that in many cases you would oth­er­wise have to install spe­cific soft­ware to get. Quick­Look can view was num­ber of for­mats but it is pos­si­ble to extent its use by adding plug-ins to it. Most of them are free. Some soft­ware devel­op­ers offer plug-ins for Quick­Look for their soft­ware if Quick­Look does not pre­view files made by their software.

Con­tinue reading…

6 links to help you get into grid based design

I got a request from a designer who wants to get started with grid based design, or at least wants to know what it is all about. The ques­tion was like this: Can you rec­om­mend a good primer on grids? Seems to me all mate­r­ial I find on it is way beyond what I’d call basic.

The ques­tion was asked on Twit­ter, so my answers were lim­ited to the 140 char­ac­ter bound­aries. There­fore I split the answers into six sec­tions like this:

Grid design 01. Let’s start with this nice expla­na­tion on base­lines, the key ele­ment (a PDF): http://bit.ly/c2jlBc

Grid design 02. When you have selected your main lead­ing you should adjust it to the page using : Easy­Grid­Cal­cu­la­tor

Grid design 03. This Easy­Grid­Cal­cu­la­tor helps you make a grid and columns based on your leading/baseline.

Grid design 04. When fin­ished cal­cu­lat­ing you can think of every­thing in doc­u­ment grid units and the fun starts.

Grid design 05. Links to what I have writ­ten about mak­ing grids in Illus­tra­tor: Grid Sys­tems InDe­sign comes soon.

Grid design 06. Good source with links about design­ing inside grids: Design­ing With Grid-Based Approach

What type are you?

What Type are you, pre­sented by Pen­ta­gram. Try it for fun.

Con­tinue reading…

The Tech of Font Man­age­ment on Mac OsX

If you desire to read a long arti­cle (mean­ing many words) filled with knowl­edge (lots of words you may not have known before) about how to man­age fonts on the mac. No pic­tures at all, lay­out is really … let’s say plain, but it is one of the very best arti­cle about the sub­ject of man­ag­ing fonts on the mac. Ok then, go at read: Font Man­age­ment in OS X, by Kurt Lang.

I know this is not for every­one, but it’s a must-read for sys­tem admin­is­tra­tors and peo­ple who deal with fix­ing macs. Still there are some new things that I hope will be dealt with next time Kurt updates the article.

Con­tinue reading…

Font I like … Creighton

Just look at this sam­ple of Creighton from ITC. Bold and strong but with very rounded cor­ners which makes it softer and more friendly to use in menus, travel related mate­r­ial or pack­ag­ing to name a few as a sug­ges­tion. Con­tinue reading…

Cheese or Font?

One more font game, Cheese or Font? for your pleasure.

Con­tinue reading…

The Grid Calculator

You may have seen what I wrote about the Grid Cal­cu­la­tor in other arti­cles. If not, this stand­alone cal­cu­la­tor is a tool to speed up cal­cu­la­tions when you are mak­ing grids.

Con­tinue reading…

Wall­pa­per : Font Anatomy

For some time I have tried to get a reli­able infor­ma­tion about the indi­vid­ual parts of the char­ac­ters of the alpha­bet. The anatomy of type if you like. It was not so easy to find online. Still I found some and then some in var­i­ous books.

The prob­lem how­ever is I did not find any one source I was fully sat­is­fied with. Each one had some names miss­ing which the oth­ers had and so on.. Con­tinue reading…

Improper kern­ing

A clever idea, kem­ing, a new typo­graphic term mean­ing that kern­ing has gone bad. I found this on Ironic Sans. But­tons, t-shirts and more can be bought with this pun at Cafepress.com.