Back in December, I had an opportunity to speak at the
Pecha Kucha Tokyo event #98. My thank you goes to Mr.
Jean Snow for inviting me there.
What is Pecha Kucha? Here's extract from their website:
PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images.
PechaKucha Nights are informal and fun gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, works, thoughts, holiday snaps -- just about anything, really -- in the PechaKucha 20x20 format.
I've been to few events in London and they are trailer-like-fun way of sitting through multiple presentations. Though regular events in Tokyo has a nice vibe and is a great place to socialize. Presenters as well as audience have a good balance of English and Japanese speakers, and that's a bit of a bonus for people like me.
Here's some photos from the night. Photography by amazing
Michael Holmes:
And here's the presentation I did on my
Family Typeface project:
For one thing I sound so nervous and now I am too embarrassed to watch that video above. I mean, really. I wanted to try this informal way of presenting (the spirit of Pecha Kucha i.e. chit chat) but my topic went all over the place and it seems I'm still too rookie to do a presentation without a good practice beforehand. And no, drinking before the presentation didn't really help. That being said, It was fun nonetheless, and I particularly enjoyed informal chit chat afterwards with audience.
What I ultimately wanted to say in the presentation (and I wasn't so clear there) was that I've been thinking lately about aim-less / client-less / design-for-sake-of-design creation is great for your soul. I love problem-solving aspect of graphic design, but I think graphic designers can also be motivated like how illustrators or photographers do their self-initiated work.
I think, by nature, graphic designers are problem seeker. I've been using the term
problem seeker after hearing
Christopher Simmons using it because it feels spot on. At the pecha kucha presentation I used terms like problem solver and consultant, but problem seeker seem expresses what I really wanted to say.
You have
problem seeking side to graphic design on one hand, but it just is
so much fun to do work for the sake of having fun. That was one of my biggest finding from this idea-driven brief-less project, making handwritten typefaces. My then tutor Joshua Trees at Central Saint Martins really encouraged me on this when I was in college.
In any case, since my pecha kucha was just an introductory one, and I don't think it was clear enough to make people create their own fonts, I'm going to go over how to create your own handwritten font here on this blog. I'm sure there are many other different ways to do this, but it doesn't hurt to know how I do it.
In many ways, it may seem as a cheat-way of creating a typeface. I hope I don't upset any typographers...
How to create font using your own handwriting
What you need
TypeTool is the software that people usually wouldn't have. It's a font-generating software. It's got some flaws, but generally speaking it is easy to use and do what it needs to do. It's probably not a cheap purchase if you want to create one font, but it's worth buying if you are planning to make several fonts in the future. As far as I know, this is as cheap as the font-generating software goes.
I use CS5 of Illustrator, but nothing too complicated is being done here; we are just vectorizing the scanned paper. I am assuming any version should be able to do it...?
Step 1) Write down letters
Write out all the letters you'd like to have.
I print out a form (I might make it available online if there's any need for this) to fill in because I've done it for quite many people. Though essentially, all you have to do is write out all the letters you want to have on a piece of paper.
Then scan the paper into your computer.
The scan quality doesn't matter so much, as long as the contrast between written letters and paper are clear. Format doesn't really matter too, as long as it can be read in Adobe Illustrator.
Just as a reference I give you my scan settings:
- resolution: 200dpi
- color mode: grayscale
- dimension: approx. 1600 × 2300
- file format: JPEG
Step 2) Vectorize letters on Adobe Illustrator
Open Adobe Illustrator, drag and drop the scanned image directly onto a new artboard.
Make sure the image is selected, then click
Live Trace. This prepares to vectorize your image.
Then, set Preset to
Simple Trace. And click
Expand.
The beauty of Simple Trace is not only it vectorizes the image but also it deletes any 'white bit'. So you are left with clean black-only vectors. You can change Threshold to the value you prefer too.
You can manually delete or modify any bits you don't fancy.
Step 3) Copy and paste each letter into TypeTool
Open TypeTool. Each box corresponds to specific letter. Double clicking the box pops Glyph window (shown at the right window of the image bellow). Copy (Ctrl + C / Cmd + C) each letter from Adobe Illustrator then paste (Ctrl + V / Cmd + V) on to each Glyph window in TypeTool.
Tip1: When you are copying in Illustrator, you probably have to double click the letter first as the whole vector is probably grouped.
Tip2: If you can't see any letter even when you paste it into TypeTool, Zoom out the window. It's something that TypeTool does: it doesn't paste at the center of the screen.
Step 4) Sort out tracking
Let's work on the spaces between each letters.
Go to
Window > New Metrics Window.
Select
Text Mode (the symbol that looks like
I ), type out letters.
Select
Metrics Mode (the symbol that looks like | M | ), you can select and by dragging and the each end of the letter, you can adjust the space that particular letter has.
Step 5) Name your font
Go to
File > Font Info.
Here, you can name your font. This name is how appears as the name of font when one installs the font into the computer.
Step 6) Generate font
Go to
File > Generate Font.
Here you can generate font that's ready to use. OTF is recommended, but you can also choose other font formats like TTF.
CONGRATULATIONS you just created a font using your own handwriting!
(The example above was done using Hyunho's handwriting. Check out his
website here.)
I'm not a pro of TypeTool or designing typeface in general, but if you have any question by all means, drop me an email to
info@shihoyokoyama.com I'll try my best to answer questions...
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
