From the course: Creating Fonts with Fontself, Illustrator, and Photoshop

Understanding the baseline

From the course: Creating Fonts with Fontself, Illustrator, and Photoshop

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Understanding the baseline

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- [Instructor] I can't stress enough the importance of having a baseline associated with your characters, which give Fontself, at the bare minimum, an idea of where the base is for all of the characters. Now it's not just those that travel along this line. It's also other things, such as this interpunct, the apostrophe, the two quotes, and the asterisk on the end. They also have a proportional relationship to that baseline. So I would create first off a guide and name the guide baseline. If you wanted to up your game totally, as far as it would go, you could add all five of the guidelines mentioned in the previous movie, but if you just want to up your game enough, add two more. Add an ascender. Now here the ascender and the cap height are pretty much the same, and a descender down at the bottom there. That gives Fontself an exact idea of where everything sits proportionally along the line. And it says just how high things are going to go in the font and also just how low things are going to go in a font. And keep roughly to those lines. It doesn't matter if you glitch over the top for a curve, for example. And when I say glitch, I mean sort of bounce over the top for curve there, or if you just bounce underneath for a curve, for example. Just a little bit is fine. But if you go too far, Fontself will warn you anyway. So there you go. Up your guide game when you're creating your font. Add these three: a baseline, an ascender, and a descender, and that way you're unlikely to encounter any particular vertical spacing issues as you carry on.

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