Hey there, quick heads up about this blog post – it’s a bit outdated. I’ve made some changes since this was published. I’ve left my job to focus entirely on creating fonts. Because of this shift, the font mentioned here is no longer available for free. Plus, I’ve moved from WordPress to Shopify, and I’m juggling a lot right now, so I won’t be able to keep this post updated. Thanks for understanding!
Thought I would never finish my new font Separator. From the original idea to completion, It’s been a long time and a hard slog, but finally, it is finished. I wanted to create a typeface with no curves. Why? Why not? Crazy bastard. Everything with a single stroke in the same weight. A technical look and feel is what I’m after, with sharp angles. Everything with equal emphasis.
It’s never going to work.
No curves? Apart from each endpoint — you won’t find any curves. It’s all straight lines. It gives Separator a hard edge. It has no expressive contours, keeping it clean and simple. I suppose it’s a bit like Din Light, with a smidgen of courier.
Well done - what took you so long?
Designing in Illustrator first and the tedious work of copying characters from Illustrator to Glyphs app. It sucks balls. It’s not glyphs app’s fault — it’s an amazing program. It’s my fault for my reluctance to switch drawing from Illustrator to Glyphs.
It’s never too late to change things.
Once all the characters were designed and pasted into the glyphs app, I thought this was way too thin. I don’t like it. Dammit. Back to Illustrator, more changes, copy, paste, copy, paste, copy… Sweet baby Jesus. And that’s what took me so long. I nearly gave up. I stuck with it, cleaning all the weird paths and points, creating extra glyphs for other languages and all the other nonsense that goes with it. And it was done. Hell yea. No time to celebrate — I wanted multiple weights. Time to jump in and learn the agony and ecstasy of multiple masters.
What are multiple masters?
If I’ve got this right, you create two versions of the font and glyphs app creates all the other weights for you. It sounds easy to do, and it’s a simple enough idea — annoyingly, it was a ton of extra work. When you create the masters, you have to resolve issues between them. Each point in the regular version must have a corresponding point in the bold version. For some reason, points go missing, and extra points get added; these must be fixed. Bollocks.
The light at the end of the tunnel
Once finished, it was really satisfying to let glyphs app create the additional weights. Bloody awesome feature that, in the long run, saved me so much time. I will be doing this again. Time to kick serious ass and see what we can do with this little font — let the games begin.
Conclusion
Sometimes, it’s hard to see how something will turn out. You just have to try it. Hopefully, you’ll get something good; if you are very lucky, you might get something awesome. With Separator, I have a few niggles — I always do. Some of the capital letters are too big, the lowercase descenders are odd.
On the whole, as an experiment, I’m happy with the way it turned out. I’m still just scratching the surface of font creation. Some things are going way over my head.