Fontosaurus
Creating a Typeface
I wanted to create a fun display typeface featuring cut-outs of different prehistoric creatures within the letterforms. This was a long and time-consuming project, but a lot of fun to make.
There were a lot of characters I would need to make, so I did a lot of sketches. Some characters would turn out well with the first thumbnail, others took a few tries. I used a wide variety of species for the characters with the only repeats being uppercase letters having the same species as their lowercase match (and accented characters using the same letterform)
Finalized Sketches
Once I had sketches to go off of, I could do a final outline on graph paper to bring into Glyphs 3 to create the vectorized shapes. Some still needed tweaked from this stage, but it could all be done digitally now.
Vector, Kerning, and Accents
Getting the characters into vector form was fairly straight forward. Now came the tedious part... Making characters with accents and kerning everything. Accented characters (such as É Ò õ œ and so on) just required copying and adding to or manipulating the letters I already had. Kerning was the biggest pain. Using notepad and the find and replace tool to duplicate similar kerning pairs (Ti and Tí for example) helped a lot. But there were thousands of pairs. The image I got was only part way through.
It's Alive!
Finally I had a complete typeface. I made this available for purchase on my Etsy for any dinosaur fan. This was a massive project but so worth it in the end. If you use this typeface, be sure to share it with me! I'd love to see how people put this to use.
Fontosaurus
Creating a Typeface
I wanted to create a fun display typeface featuring cut-outs of different prehistoric creatures within the letterforms. This was a long and time-consuming project, but a lot of fun to make.
There were a lot of characters I would need to make, so I did a lot of sketches. Some characters would turn out well with the first thumbnail, others took a few tries. I used a wide variety of species for the characters with the only repeats being uppercase letters having the same species as their lowercase match (and accented characters using the same letterform)
Finalized Sketches
Once I had sketches to go off of, I could do a final outline on graph paper to bring into Glyphs 3 to create the vectorized shapes. Some still needed tweaked from this stage, but it could all be done digitally now.
Vector, Kerning, and Accents
Getting the characters into vector form was fairly straight forward. Now came the tedious part... Making characters with accents and kerning everything. Accented characters (such as É Ò õ œ and so on) just required copying and adding to or manipulating the letters I already had. Kerning was the biggest pain. Using notepad and the find and replace tool to duplicate similar kerning pairs (Ti and Tí for example) helped a lot. But there were thousands of pairs. The image I got was only part way through.
It's Alive!
Finally I had a complete typeface. I made this available for purchase on my Etsy for any dinosaur fan. This was a massive project but so worth it in the end. If you use this typeface, be sure to share it with me! I'd love to see how people put this to use.
