Now that I have created my totally awesome first font, I want to create a bold version of it. But when I look over assorted fonts, there seems to be no standard for bolding. Fonts widen the contours 35%, 50%, 90%,… sometimes every glyph is widened a different percentage. And some of the bold glyphs are actually narrower than their normal counterparts. Is there any rule of thumb, algorithm, standard or whatever for bolding a font? Any suggestions?
Thanks
Unfortunately, the rule is that there is no rule. You widen the font however much you, as the designer, thinks is best. Sometimes, that means determining glyph by glyph what looks best, sometimes you will find that a certain amount of emboldening suits your needs over the whole font. I personally don’t make bolds as I find them typographically uninteresting; I go for an accompanying smallcap instead of bold for emphasis.
You can save a lot of work by using the glyph transformer, but it won’t do the whole job for you. There is no undo when using it, so you have to get the right settings by repeatedly opening the same font and not bothering to save it until you get it right. Each font will need different values to look good when made bold. Still, some characters will be fine, while other will need manual adjustement.