From the course: Design a Condensed Sans Serif Typeface

Filters - Glyphs App Tutorial

From the course: Design a Condensed Sans Serif Typeface

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Filters

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- [Instructor] Glyphs has a number of built-in filters that can be applied to individual points, to shapes, to entire glyphs, or to groups of glyphs, or individual instances of a master. For instance, we can select the top-left point on the cap H and choose Round Corners from the Filter menu. You can set the rounding amount and then click OK, or if we want to apply it to the entire form, we could do the same thing, go to Filters > Round Corners, set the rounding amount, and click OK. But we can also apply a filter to an entire font without destroying the outlines, and to do that, we'll first save this file as a copy, so I'll save this one as Quick Grotesque Filter. And then rather than applying it to an individual glyph, I'm going to go to the font, and then the first thing I'm going to do is decompose the components. So we've made a lot of these glyphs out of components, and before we apply the filters, we should convert those to outlines. So I'll Select All, and I'll hit shift + command + d, which Decompose Components, and you can also find that in the Glyphs menu here. So now after decomposing the components, if I go into the O, you can see that components have been converted to outlines. Let's close that. And the next thing we want to do is correct all of the path directions, so shift + command + r, and that should correct all of them. And now we're going to remove the overlaps. So we're going to take the outlines that we created from the components and convert them into unified shapes. So again, Select All, and this time, shift + command + o, and now if we go into the lowercase o, you can see that all of the outlines from the components have been unified into a complete glyph. So one more time; let's correct the path direction, and then let's go back into the cap H. And we're going to go to Filters again, Round Corners, and we'll set the amount to whatever we want it to be. I'll go a little bit rounder this time. And this time, rather than saying OK, let's click on the gear icon and select Copy Custom Parameter, and don't click OK at all; in fact, cancel this. So now we have our outline intact and I'm going to go to Font Info and to the Instances and then I'm going to add an instance for each master. We only have one master here, so it will add one instance. So it's a regular master, and we're going to add the custom parameter here, and all you have to do is click down here and command + v, and it pastes it in. And you can see a preview of what that filter looks like spread across the entire instance. So now we can close this, and nothing has changed with the outline. In fact, I can go ahead and type other characters. You can see nothing has changed but if we preview and choose our instance, you can see that within the instance, the filter is being applied, while up here, nothing's actually changed in the outline. As with changes to proportions, there are many variations on a font can be achieved through filters, either alone or in combination with others. Just follow the same basic steps. Test the filter on a single glyph, copy the custom parameter, and apply it via instances. Experiment. I'm sure you'll come up with dozens of unique versions of your already-unique font.

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