- What did you learn?: The material that I learned from this project include but are not limited to the x height that is present in lowercase letters, the difficulties of creating sets of rules for font only to have to break them, and the process of experimenting with and creating a new font.
- What was easy?: Personally I found making the majority of the font to be easy. I believe this is due to my process of setting specific rules such as having four pixel wide stems in each letter that were always on the left. Of course this rule had to be adjusted for specific letters but it allowed me to have a base line. After I had my basic font I could easily add on the terminals, tails, and the feet present in serif font.
- What was challenging?: The challenging part of this project was figuring out how specific letters would fit into the font as some needed to break the rules to look somewhat decent. Two letters that challenged the rules that I made were the letter “M” and “W”, both upper case and lower case. The letters themselves forced me to make them one pixel wider than the other letters so that they could look like the letter they represented. Another thing that I found challenging was cutting out the letters and posting them onto foam core. Of course the process itself is straight forward, but I found it to be quite time consuming.
- How could your submission be improved?: A way that my submission could be improved is by putting more effort and creativity into the “@” symbol as I found it to be quite difficult to make look good in the time that I had. I did a variety of changes including putting an “a” in a black box as suggested, but I found that these attempted changes did not fit the font well. If I could figure out a better “@” symbol I believed the submission could be improved.
- How can the professor improve the assignment in the future?: Personally I think the way the assignment was provided is fine and does not need much improvement. The only suggestion I could think of is having one program be the baseline for creating the font as I know Figma, Adobe Illustrator, and Fontstruct were all different options. This could streamline the project a bit, but I am not sure if this would make it more difficult for other students as they may find one program easier to use than another.
- How might you apply your knowledge in future assignments or work scenarios?: Applying the knowledge learned will allow me to make better design choices when it comes to both making and using font. I do make posters for a club that I am, in so having the knowledge to pick fonts based on the time period (such as matching the poster event’s theme) and making my own fonts to match this allows me to create better posters in the process.
