From the course: Design an Italic Typeface

Begin with roman: Setting up and saving the file - Glyphs App Tutorial

From the course: Design an Italic Typeface

Start my 1-month free trial

Begin with roman: Setting up and saving the file

“

- [Instructor] We are going to being our Italic design with the Roman font and this has two advantages. The first is that it gives us an easy point of departure rather than designing an Italic font with no frame of reference. We can take all of our initial measurements, the metrics, from our Roman starter set. The second advantage of having a Roman font as the starting point is that we can compare our results when we're done. We can work with both fonts together to judge whether our Italic is a suitable family member. First, let's have a look at the setup of the Roman file. We'll start here in the font window and you'll see that I've marked some of the glyphs in yellow. Those glyphs are important because they act as metric keys for the other glyphs in the file. Their side bearings are used to calculate the side bearings of other characters. When we make our Italic font, we'll continue to use those glyphs to coordinate our spacing. Next, we'll go to the font info window which is Command + I and the first tab, the font tab, shows the name of the font, in this case example font. Next, we'll move to the masters tab. There's one master in this font and it's where all the measurements are set. We can leave everything here exactly as it is. Next, on the instances tab, we have one instance. That's the same as the master and it has the name Roman. Let's duplicate this file by saving it as example font Italic. So I'll close font info, go to the file menu, save as, and then we'll save it as Italic. Now in the new file, let's go back into font info, Command + I, and again go to the font tab and we'll leave the name of the font exactly as it is. It's really important for the Italic and Roman to have the exact same name. In the masters tab, we'll leave everything as is also except for one important detail. We're going to change the Italic angle to 15 degrees. Moving to the instances tab, we'll change the name from Roman to Italic. That's it, we can close font info and go back to the font window. It should look exactly like it did before, but with one major difference. Almost all the glyphs have warning signs. That's because the new Italic angle has thrown off all of the side bearings. Don't worry about that right now. We'll fix it as we go along. When we double click on a glyph, cap H for instance, you'll see the Italic angle in the side bearings. That's it for the file setup. Next, we'll start editing individual glyphs.

Contents