domestik.net

The distressed typeface used as heading styles throughout this site was created with the aid of Font Creator, perhaps the most intuitive piece of software I have had the pleasure of using. I have been consistently let down or confused by font creation software since macromedia’s fontographer which in itself was a little confusing, although it has been about 5 years since I’ve looked at it and my confusion is more than likely due to my own lack of experience at the time. Font creator, however, was, from the moment of opening, clearly a user friendly package worth the $50 US the creators are asking.

The font itself is built from helvetica ultra compressed. The distressed effect (used throughout the whole site) was created by peeling sticky tape off a print of black toner, scanning and masking various areas. This was fine for use with graphic headings however, I’m planning on implementing the Mike Industries version of Inman flash replacement for use in my headings from H1 through H3 and I need a proper font for use in the flash file. After having a look for a suitable distressed font, I couldn’t find anything that replicated what I had and so went about making my own.

Creating the Artwork

So taking the sticky tape method a logical step forward, I imported the scan into flash and used the trace bitmap command to create an eps. I then separated the foreground out from the background manually using illustrator. This done I copied and pasted the texture back into flash. Still in flash, on a separate layer, I typed the character set at 72pt and broke it apart till it was editable graphic. Next, Ipasted the texture onto the same layer, making sure they were different colours, and copied the lot back to illustrator where I was able to select by fill and delete the texture from the type leaving the distressed font behind. This may seem like a lot of to-ing and fro-ing but it is a damn site quicker than using illustrators minus front command.

Once the hard work was done, I imported each character into font creator. I enlarged each character in illustrator by 500% first so that I had large detailed version to work with. This imported at almost perfect size. All you need to do then is adjust the kerning for each character. I didn’t see this at first and figured I would have to read up on it., but after re-opening the file, saw the kerning line and simply dragged it out accordingly. Too easy!

So… Here is the first draft of my very own distressed typeface

So there it is. A fairly complete character set, perhaps a little too distressed in hindsight but working none the less, I will no doubt re-visit it in the not too distant future cleaning it up a bit and I will certainly be purchasing Font Creator and creating more fonts in the future.

Download the font for your own use. Let me know where you use it. I’d love to see what you do.

Tags: Design

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2004 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.