Reusing Shapes Intro¶
Why FontLab’s Features Are Crucial For Creative Font Designers¶
Reusing shapes is not just time saving. It’s vital to your life as a creative.
The reason?
Exponents.
But exponents are hard to understand because they are only starting to impact us as a species.
Here’s what I mean:
Say you are a post office employee. You work an hour, you make $20. This is linear.
The equivalent in fonts: You are a medieval monk. You write three pages a day. This is linear.
In three or four years, you will have a Bible.
Then along came movable type, and all the sudden you could:
Use one punch, to make many matrices, to make many pieces of type, to make many pages, to make many books.
Or thinking of it more mathematically: punch × matrices × type
Once books spread throughout Europe, more people could read, the education went up. Now we have social media and spaceships landing on comets.
Harnessing FontLab’s Exponential Power¶
Here’s how FontLab’s powerful features multiply your efforts. (You don’t have to know what all these mean at this point.)
contours × contour add × elements × delta × components × smart components × group fills × glyphs × layers
Now, not all these multiply ALL your efforts. But they multiply your efforts in one way or another.
What you are dealing with is a piecewise exponential function.
Each re-using you do, gets you further up the exponential mountain.
In these tutorials, I will let you know when reusing a shape might result in less than optimal results.
But remember, you can also work on reused shapes individually with non-destructive transformations. Or, you can separate the reused shape from the other shapes (unlinking references, and expanding transforms).
Remember, recycle, reduce, REUSE. ♻
And may your art and career grow exponentially!