Welcome to the forum.
Will Dunn wrote:not sure if im posting in the right section.
Well, it might not be as the FontCreator - Discussion section is intended for discussing the FontCreator program. Maybe the Font Related Information section would be a better location.
Yet, this is a very friendly forum, so do not be concerned. One of the moderators might move the thread to another forum, so if it disappears from the FontCreator - Discussion section please look for it elsewhere.
Will Dunn wrote:
but i wanted to introduce myself. My name is William Dunn, and I've been wanting to get involved in font creation, and so decided to go ahead full-throttle and really try to do it as a second job. I am willing to work long hours if need be, I have some good ideas and really want to get into this as much as possible. Any advice?
Well, my advice is as follows. It is inadvisable to have a second job as such. A person needs rest and relaxation and some idle time in his or her day. This allows for taking up the slack if other things arise.
However, spending some spare time as a hobby that might one-day lead to a career is a possibility. That way, if there are unexpected demands on your time, the hobby can be left untouched for a while until time is available again.
Also my experience with learning things is that long hours are not what is needed. Shorter sessions are better for me, with time for ideas to sink in and time to think over how to proceed. However, different people learn differently so what suits me might not be what suits you.
Long hours and pressure might work for doing repetitive tasks with little intellectual content, such as loading boxes into a van, yet it can be counterproductive for tasks that involve learning and complexity.
The following might be of interest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law
Views may vary on this, but my advice would be to try to produce something and publish it in the Gallery section of these forums. That way you will have generated output that can be considered. To start, producing a font that has only a few letters in it would be fine. That can get you started. The first font that I ever published had only one character in it. It was the then-new to Unicode character Hot Beverage. It was only one character, yet it got me started. I had published a font and I might have been the first person to publish a font containing that character.
Also, as you want to learn about font creation, it can be helpful to have some knowledge about the way that characters are encoded, that is, that each character has a code number: also which character code is used for a letter E, which character code for a letter e, which character codes for Greek letters, which character codes for Cyrillic letters and so on so as to begin to gather a background knowledge of character encoding.
http://www.unicode.org
I suggest that you join the Unicode public mailing list.
http://www.unicode.org/consortium/distlist.html
Looking in the archives is interesting.
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/
I hope that this helps.
William Overington
6 September 2011
Edited on Tuesday afternoon to remove the word "for" that was in the wrong place in one sentence, and to clarify another sentence.