From the course: Choosing and Using Web Fonts

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Understanding handwritten letters

Understanding handwritten letters

From the course: Choosing and Using Web Fonts

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Understanding handwritten letters

In the last chapter, I talked about handwritten letters, and how some forms look like they were done with pen and ink. I'm asking you to imagine how the shape of a pen nib combined with ink formed the characteristics of a letter. To help you visualize this better, we're going to take a quick break from fonts while I show what I mean when I talk about pen-formed letters. Now, I'm not a calligrapher; I've only taken a couple of workshops to help me understand letters better, so these letters won't be award-winning, but they'll do. I'm using a C1 nib, which is flat and has a slight angle. The shape of the nib is what makes it a C nib. The size of the nib is what makes it a C1 nib. A C2 would be a smaller, narrower nib. I've marked out a template for my baseline, meanline, cap height, ascender, and descender. Now, in this day and age, many of us have learned to draw forms in a vector-based software. When we do that, if we want to draw an O, for instance, we would draw the outer edge, then…

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