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Becoming
a Font-a-holic... and Loving It
Article by Don
Herion
Babylon 5 to Acme
For this
tutorial I decided to build a new font from one already in my system. I chose
the font closest to the one I want to base my Acme logo on. I then printed out
every character I think I might need. I printed out 6 characters to a page in
outline form only. Since I wanted all uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and
numbers, that came to 11 pages. Then using a color pen, pencil or marker I could
begin sketching in alterations, trying out different designs.
 |  |
| Babylon5 font - printed out | Acme
font - My design |
The key of course is to make consistent
alterations to all my characters or glyphs. If I decide to squash my 'A', then
the remainder of my glyphs must have the same alteration. If one glyph is skewed
20 degrees forward, the other glyphs must also. The alterations I wish to make
are relatively simple. First, I will extend the serif strokes and then I want
to thicken the stems of each character.
 |
| 'A' glyph before and after |
After altering
the 'A', I continued to 'B' and so forth. Unfortunately, 'Font Creator' does not
allow you to import images under an existing type font. It would make the task
of editing considerably easier and faster. For this project I only edited the
uppercase characters. At anytime I can test my new 'Acme' font by hitting - F5
and typing.
