FontLab in 8 days — Day 8: Color is the new black¶
Fonts of color with FontLab 8¶
No one would have believed in the last years of the 20th century that the world of type was anything beyond a black-and-white affair. If you wanted color in your letters, you could fill each letter with solid color, gradient or an image in a graphic editor, but there was no easy way to apply different colors to different parts of letters. When mobile phone users started using colorful emoji, system vendors extended the OpenType font format to make room for color. The first color OpenType fonts were the emoji fonts bundled with iOS, macOS, Windows and Android. But independent designers started using the new technology to create expressive colorful typefaces.
This opens a whole new world to font creators. With the right tools, you can now make fonts that look like… anything. A good way to start is to use a layered font, where each font corresponds to one color. For example, one font represents the inside of the letters, a second font represents the shadow. In any design program, you can type the same text twice on top of each other, switch the fonts and apply the different colors (figure 1). Or you can use a font editor such as FontLab to overlay the two fonts and export as a color OpenType font — then, you can just type your text that is already colorized.
But when you create a color font yourself, you’re not limited to just simple colors. You can use patterns, textures, gradients or even photos as fill, and you can color different parts with different colors (figure 2). If you’re more ambitious, create your own letterforms and color them as if they were drawn with a brush or calligraphic pen. This works especially well for handwriting and script fonts (figure 3). Taking it a step further, you can even draw beautiful typefaces in hand lettering style for use as ornamental text or headlines (figure 4).
If drawing is not your thing, don’t despair. There’s an even easier way to make fonts of color. The color OpenType font format can use bitmaps as well as vector drawings for glyphs. That means that you can construct a font from seaweed, rocks, candy, rebar, or anything else you want. Then just take a photo of it; cut/copy/paste the pix into a font editor; kern the glyphs and voilà! New color font (figure 5).
Colorful Characters: Font Creation with FontLab 8¶
FontLab 8 is the virtuoso’s instrument in this colorful symphony. It’s the only cross-platform font editor that embraces every shade OpenType has to offer, where vibrancy meets personality, allowing you to breathe unique flair into your typographic creations.
What’s in a color OpenType font? A multi-color glyph can be a bitmap image (like a photo), or it can be a vector graphic (with plain colorful fills, strokes and gradients). You can use any image editing app (like Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo), or a vector editing app (like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer) to make the “pictures”. Then drag-drop or copy-paste them into FontLab 8, and export the font — that’s it.
But a font transcends a mere gallery of images. Instead, it’s a dynamic system, where every keystroke shapes and reshapes the text. You may want to adjust the spacing and kerning to refine the distances between the glyphs, ensuring harmony between them (figure 2). Another path you may choose is to start from an existing monochrome font or two. Overlay them in FontLab, assign a color to each of them, shift them around and combine, and create cool shadow or outline effects that tease the eye (figure 3). Finally, FontLab itself is a full-fledged color vector editing environment. You can draw or import vector elements, then fill and stroke them with plain colors or shimmering gradients (figure 4).
Once you’ve put together your favorite kaleidoscope of glyphs, you need to export the font into the right format. One and the same monochrome OpenType font works everywhere — not so with color OpenType. With FontLab 8, you can export your colorful font project into all relevant color OpenType formats (or “flavors”): OpenType+COLR, +SVG, +sbix and +CBDT. You’ll get more than one font, and most likely, only one or two of these will work in a specific app or system.
Embark on this adventure with FontLab 8! Redefine the boundaries of typography, one colorful glyph at a time, and transform the black-and-white typographic rhythm into an eclectic celebration of you.
Colorful characters with FontLab 8¶
All the niggling rules and best practices for font design could send even an accountant looking for the aspirin bottle. And yet, they are necessary in order to create robust fonts that will work on all platforms and applications. Thus, keeping your fonts in the black (so to speak) involves a lot of attention to detail.
Accountants have auditors who come along and double-check their work. Typographers have FontAudit — a system that does a similar thing for fonts. FontAudit is part of FontLab. It’s like an app within the program that runs tests on selected glyphs for things like unwanted loops and unnecessary points — about 18 different tests in all. Many of these errors would be invisible except on very close inspection, and manually checking a font for all of them would take an enormous amount of time.
When you open a glyph in a glyph window and turn on FontAudit, a bunch of colored symbols appear on the glyph outline (Figure 1.) If you click one of these places, a dialog appears that explains why FontAudit raised a flag. You can fix this problem or all problems in the glyph. Open the FontAudit panel to see and fix FontAudit problems, and use the period and comma keys go through all glyphs in the font (Figure 2).
Sometimes a flag may be raised for something that’s not really an error. For example, FontAudit reports if a curve is nearly flat, and can fix the problem by replacing it with a straight line. If you really want slightly tapered curves in your font, turn off the “Nearly flat curve” test in the Preferences and FontAudit will no longer complain.
Each flag requires human judgement to determine what the next step should be. However, once you’ve determined which are errors that need correcting, you can use the FontAudit action to automagically the problems in all or selected glyphs in one step —- a huge time saver! (Figure 3). If you turn on all tests and fix them all, your font may become too “regularized”, so it’s best to fix one type of problem at a time, or maybe a few.
Accountants are not so lucky. They have to go back and fix their own mistakes by hand once an auditor points them out. But typographers can do it with just a few clicks of a button.