Reusable components?

#1

Hey Fontself experts out there.

I was wandering about two features / workflows that would be very helpful and time saving.

  1. Resuable components such as serifs: Would be cool if we could create e.g. a Serif and use it several times. If you change it once, it is changed everywhere… is that possible in any way?

  2. An even more fancy feature would be: Creating the 6 or 7 most important characters and Fontself creates the rest automatically based on these base characters.

for example: I create a b >> automatically created d, p, q, l, h …

Any advice for imroving / fastenijng my creation process would be fine.

How is your design process typically?

Thanks in advance,
Florian

#2

I’m always looking for ways to streamline workflow, so understand where you’re coming from. Point 2 I can’t however see happening, as it probably opens up too much in terms of plagiarism or copyright as it would involve either AI (don’t get me started on that) but also a lot of letter forms from different users would look similar…not to mention being technically a very complex thing to automate.

I think with point 1, what you’re talking about here are ‘global elements’, or ‘instances’, where a change to one is reflected across all copies of that feature .i.e serifs? This one is a little more feasible, depending on your workflow. I tend to use a mix of hand sketching and illustrator. Inside illustrator you could create a few ‘serifs’ (two baseline serifs: a left and a right. (Look at the bottom of an uppercase serif A) a few vertical serifs etc. Its possible to select all the shapes in illustrator and either use the ‘smooth’ tool or the corner options to adjust the radius and softness of the corners, effectively altering the look of all serifs at once.

That’s about the only way I can think of at the minute to create or control shapes at a ‘global’ level. For my own personal workflow I enjoy creating each of the letters and find it essential, particularly for the handwritten scripts, but as I say, totally understand the need and want to streamline workflow.

1 Like
#3

Hi twinbrush,

Thanks for your response and your insight. Actually I am not much thinking of Script / Handwriting Fonts – that’s another chaptee.

I was more thinking of Serifs / Caps. And one of my ideas was to work with Illustrator „Symbols“.

symbols-panel-libraries-ai
symbols-panel-libraries-ai.png1200×675 150 KB

Those can be reused and still be edited in one place, so that changes are applied on all instances of that Symbol. But there is only one concern: Do I have to convert them separately before I import my shapes into Illustrator? I will try… I just know that „Glyphs“ has got support for reusable components that can be globally used and edited at one single place.

And concerning AI-support: I just recognized that there are several similar letters that cam be grouped:

  • m n u
  • o e c
  • l h d p q b
  • v w x y
  • B C D O G Q
  • A K M N V W X Y
  • 6 8 9 0 3
    ….

And I thought it would be cool to design some key characters and the software generates drafts for the rest … I know it is very powerful and also dangerous … but that can be said for all AI-applications …