Basic lowercase serifs - Glyphs App Tutorial

- [Instructor] The lowercase italic letters represent more of a challenge than uppercase. There's more happening in a smaller space and what's happening in that space is much more involved than in the capitals. We'll start in the Font window, selecting all of the Roman case letters, so Shift, click to Z. And Paste them into the background, so we'll hit Command + J and that will Paste the Copy into the background. Next, we'll scale the foreground letters by 95%. So, over here in the Transformation's Palette, scale horizontally by 5%, and then we'll slant them all by 15 degrees. And that's it for the simple set up, so now we have a slanted condensed lowercase with a copy of the Roman in the background layer. So let's start with the lowercase I. And here I want to trim off the Serifs, so let's make this a little bit larger. Grab these points, and I'm hitting Option Delete, to Delete the points. And I'll trim these off down here at the bottom, too. Now, we have a stem with no Serifs and it's 72 units wide. We want our stems to be 95% of the Roman, which is 78 units. So, let's go to the calculator and I will divide, or rather, I will multiply 78 times .95, and that's 74 units, so, back in Glyphs. Let's separate these two by 74 units. 74.4, I'll take it. Next we're going to use these two segments to set up guidelines, so I'll select both points in the segment on the right. Control click and choose Add Guideline and then I'll get a guideline that follows the slant of that particular segment. Same thing on the left, select both points, Control click, Add Guideline. Now I'm going to draw an italic lowercase Serif at the top of this stem. I don't want to connect it to the stem yet, I just want to rough it in. So I'll use the pen tool, I'll start with the corner. I'll leave the points roughly at the top and then I'll go to the interior. And that's a very rough Serif. So I'll Option click on each of these segments to bring out the handles. Then I'll convert these two points to round points by, or curve points, rather, by hitting Return. And then I'll hold down Shift as I grab this point. And I can constrain the angle of that point and handle to horizontal. Then I'll grab this point and bring it over to the Guideline and I'll grab the handle and make it follow the Guideline. Same thing down here, now I'm taking care not to connect it to that segment because I'm still roughing it in. So, it's looking more like a Serif, but not quite. And I'll just slowly reshape this. We can use the usual trick which is to type a copy of our letter next to it so it can watch as we reshape with a little bit less noise. And I'll slowly reshape this until I get something that I'm ready to attach to the bottom and test out. Alright, so, that's a good starting point. I'm going to attach it to the stem, and then I'll Copy it, Paste it and Flip it. I'll take it down to the Baseline and then I want to give it a healthy overshoot, so I'm going to hold down Shift and nudge it down 20 units, one, two. Then move it over so that it aligns with the guidelines. And then attach it. Now we should check our overshoot at the top, also. So, holding down Control + Command and Option and dragging. I can see that I'm at 23 units over the X site here, so I'm going to nudge this down three units. And then it's not lined up with the guidelines anymore, so I'll nudge it over. Alright, this one's a little bit wide, so I want to nudge these two corner points here closer to the stem and maybe make it a little bit longer. And again, I can reshape this and watch the shape on the right as I do. And then maybe I'll plunge this just a little bit more. So I'm holding down Option and that's making it run along that guideline that we've set up. And this one seems a little bit funky here, it needs to go up. So it's very important to keep the insides of these Serifs really curved. To not let them get pointy. Alright, so it's 28 units wide and again, I'll Copy this, I'll Paste it, I'll Flip it, I'll bring it down to the baseline. I'll take it down 20 units for overshoot. Now I'm just going to Cut it, Delete these points and Paste it. Alright, and last, I'll Select All, Rotate Path Direction, to get the points at the right place, and now I'm going to test it next to a cap H and since we already have two I's here, let's add another one. So, what you should see immediately is that this is a little too wide still. And also that the I, despite the fact that it has the exact proper angle, looks like it's tilting backwards compared to the capital H. That has to do with these Serifs that are moving in and out of the form. So, in order to get it to appear like it's tilted correctly, we'll move the top part to the right by about five units. And now it has more parody. So, let's correct the situation with the width of the Serif. And again, take the corrected part, Copy it, Paste it, Flip it. Let's get rid of this stuff down here. Take this, Copy it. I don't have to Copy it, sorry, I can just Drag it. Give it a 20 unit overshoot, nudge it to the left. And again, Select All, Shift + Command + R to rotate, or to correct the path direction. The last thing we want to do on this I is get rid of this jot. We'll go to the background, that's Control + Command + J. We'll grab the jot from the Roman, Copy it. And we'll put it through the same mechanical slanting that we did for the cap O. So, we'll condense it by 5%, Rotate it by 15, slant it, Rotate it back by -15 and then center it over the stem. And now that we have the lower case I, let's make the lower case J really quickly. So, here's the J, we need to correct the stem width, and our stem width as we know is 73. So let's move this over just a little bit. Select these all these points. That's a little bit wide, but fine. Let's get rid of the Serif at the top and let's grab the Serif from the lowercase I. We can grab the jot while we're at it. So get rid of that one, Paste. And we can line it up to the right hand side of the stem. Grab the point, connect it. Select All, Correct Path Direction. And now we can change the angle of this terminal at the bottom just a little and then check it for its width. So it's at 26, we want it at 28. And that's it. So now we have the H, sorry, we have the I and the lowercase J and we're ready to move on to some other lowercase forms. In the next video, we'll apply this to another key character, the lowercase N.