Link Dump 04 - December 2024

I recently started working on a humanist adaptation of the well-known IBM VGA 8x font, originally a bitmap font shipped with the IBM VGA (Video Graphics Array) introduced in 1987. I'll spare the details, but I got interested in resources for type design.

Here are some plugins, courses, resources, tools that could help with typeface design.

FFPreviewer from javnik36 is a command-line tool that uses FontForge to output specimen sheets in PDF format for a given font. Could be useful to quickly print and review a font.

FontForge Font Discography is a list of fonts and typefaces created specifically using the free / libre / open source font design program FontForge. All the fonts are open-source and their folders contain an .sfd file which allows to edit them in FontForge.

Curvatura for FontForge is a FontForge plugin to harmonise and smooth curves in a glyph programmatically, and also balance out point handles while minimally changin the Bézier curves. I am not sure whether this is the same program as the default Balance and Harmonize options in FF

Opentype.js is a JavaScript tool particularly used for a browser based approach, to read and parse font files and modify their Bézier paths.

GT Academy is a series of informative Instagram posts by Grilli Type foundry that present the particularities of almost every glyph you need to create. It can teach a lot about proportions, aperture, professional advice, etc. It is not a tutorial nor a full guide, and is tool-agnostic, which can only be good.

Blazetype: How To Design Fonts? is a PDF guide book that costs 17 euros, packed with details in type design. An in-depth guide for what to be careful about when designing your own font.

The Oldschool PC Font Resource is a giant love letter and resource to old system fonts from the age of text-only (or almost) computer interfaces. The site holds a big Font Pack that has dozens of typefaces in a Unicode compatible TTF format.

OH no Type Company's Teaching resources offers less in-depth, yet well crafted advice for font design, including different glyph shapes, and a few guides on the para-design like publishing your font, revisions, spacing, etc.

F0NT5 4R3 FUN. 8Y3!