TypeWknd Workshop

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Erwin Denissen
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TypeWknd Workshop

Post by Erwin Denissen »

I will present a workshop tomorrow and the participants can use this information to prepare for it.

Note: the workshop is not publicly available and only 20 persons who already subscribed can attend. Other people who joined TypeWknd can still watch and see how the workshop goes.

What you need during this workshop is:
  • A regular ballpoint pen (blue)
  • Paper
  • Phone (or scanner or digital camera)
  • Template Image
  • FontCreator (Windows only)
  • Basic paint software (for example paint.net)
In case you haven't installed it yet, you can download and install FontCreator from here:
https://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/ ... nfirmation

Preparations:

It depends on your skills, but be ware it might take one or two hours to prepare yourself for the workshop. If you can't make it in time, no worries; I will provide my own prepared files during the workshop.

1. Write
Use pen and paper to write the following words:
color, cool, core, decode, deer, doc, elder, erode, led, old, red, and rolled
It can be handy to place a lined paper below your paper, so guidelines shine through while writing.
fullpagesmall.jpg
fullpagesmall.jpg (72.07 KiB) Viewed 5211 times
2. Make pictures
Use your phone to take high resolution (1200 dpi) pictures. You will probably need 6 pictures to cover the whole page. As a rule of thumb place your camera 5 inches (13 cm) above the page and if available use a 2x zoom. I always place the camera on a box, so I can easily repeat the process later if needed. Do this during daylight and avoid shadows on the paper. Also do place a regular empty paper below your completed paper, to avoid lines shine through.
highrespart.jpg
highrespart.jpg (1.02 MiB) Viewed 5211 times
3. Extract
Use this template image, for each of the files you are about to make:
https://www.high-logic.com/tmp/fontcrea ... mplate.png

We open the template and then copy and paste one letter into it. Do not worry too much about a slightly grayish background as it should be filtered out. Some letters might need some manual adjustments. Pay extra attention to start and end strokes when you cut out a letter from the middle of a word.
Use friendly file names. I use d.png for the default letter, d.start.png for the glyph used at the beginning of a word, and d.end when used at the end of a word.
You do not need to extract all letters, look for the best letter for the specific needs. It would be great if you could have these four d.png, e.png, o.png, and r.png.

For these default letters, it is best to exclude the start stroke and to keep the end stroke. I hope my d.png illustrates what I mean:
d.png
d.png (149.6 KiB) Viewed 5211 times
I grabbed a letter which didn't contain a start stroke and I removed the last part of the end stroke.

Workshop Schedule:
  • Introduction (5 minutes)
  • Extract and import letters, including alternates and ligatures (20 minutes)
  • Add OpenType layout features (10 minutes)
  • Add additional glyphs to add different shades of blue (10 minutes)
  • Add a bold master (5 minutes)
  • Questions? (10 minutes)
Again, it would be great if you could do this homework, but you will be fine if you can't do it in advance. See you tomorrow!
Erwin Denissen
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Husham
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Re: TypeWknd Workshop

Post by Husham »

Nice workshop Erwin👍, I watched on this link,
https://youtu.be/Wlcc6mFjwxQ
I couldn't catch it live unfortunately 😔
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