From the course: Creating Icon Fonts for the Web

Unlock the full course today

Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.

Determining units per em (UPM)

Determining units per em (UPM)

From the course: Creating Icon Fonts for the Web

Start my 1-month free trial

Determining units per em (UPM)

“

When I first starting designing icon fonts, it took me a while to wrap my head around some of the new terms and concepts that are involved with designing a font. And one of the concepts I had trouble with is UPM or Units Per Em. Now this is an incredibly important value, and you'll set it when you start designing fonts. So it's critical to understand exactly what it does. Later on, we'll set this value as part of our overall font settings when we start working in the Glyph's mini application. But, since you need to know what UPM is before drawing your icons, we're going to discuss it in this chapter first. Okay. So I've opened up the finished icon font in the Glyph's mini app. Don't worry about doing this along with me. We're really just doing this to illustrate a concept. So if I open up our Font Info settings, and scroll down a little bit. I can see that, for this font, the units per em, or UPM, is set to 2048. Now, if you recall from earlier, an em, specifically, a typographer's…

Contents