Create your own font with affinity designer and glyphs

Hello everyone welcome to my latest class. If this your first class with me, welcome! I am Jen and I will be guiding you through this creative course. I’m a freelance graphic designer, illustrator and educator based out of the midwest and I run Bella + Sophia Creative studio. If you want to learn more about me, check out my youtube channel: The Freelance Life. You will get a behind the scenes view of the work I do as a creative freelancer and the work that goes into making classes like this one. I am a huge advocate for sharing knowledge in accessible ways and I have found online courses and places like Youtube are great places for this and help me to connect to a diverse group of people looking to learn and grow.

In today’s class, I wanted to tap into our graphic design skills and have an adventure creating fonts using Affinity designer and Glyphs. I will take you through my whole process of creating a hand drawn font from ideation, sketching, digitizing in Affinity Designer and then getting your letterforms into the Glyphs software (Mac version). I am sharing my process as I find that often, courses relating to font/typeface design are almost exclusively done in Adobe software and I wanted to highlight that there are other options and I have found that the Affinity software can be used to do similar things.

If this is your first time taking one of my classes relating to graphic design I highly suggest you check out my previous design courses - I have a variety that cover topics like design for good, logo design, packaging design, layout design and more. I also have some helpful marketing related videos too if you are trying to grow your creative business.

What the class is about

In this class, I will walk you through my process on how to create a simple hand drawn font. I will take you through my whole process of creating a hand drawn font from ideation, sketching, digitizing in Affinity Designer and then getting your letterforms into the Glyphs software (Mac version). Before we jump right into the font making process though, I wanted to share a quick mini overview on designing type. These tips are not exhaustive as I could do multiple courses on the intricacies of designing typefaces, but they will outline some of the most important things beginners should know.

We will cover things like typography anatomy basics, the difference between serif fonts and san serif fonts, the different parts of a latter and variables to keep in mind when it comes to type design.

Then, we will talk more about where to find font inspiration, 2 of my favorite type design books, ideation when it comes to building out your letter style. Then, as we begin to create our font, we will apply those typography basic so we can create a cohesive font.

As we create our fonts, I will highlight some helpful tips to keep in mind for sketching and inking your hand lettering if you chose to start analog. I will also highlight how you can skip the scanning phase and use the pixel persona in Affinity designer to sketch out your concepts if you have access to a drawing tablet. Then, we will digitize our letters in Affinity designer. If this is your first time using Affinity, no worries - I will go at a comfortable pace and highlight important tools so you can keep up.

Finally, we will go over how to use Glyphs Mini, create your hand drawn font and export it for use on your desktop!
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