Berlin Letters 2024 ↗

Welcome to the captivating world of type design at the Berlin Letters Festival 2024! This workshop is designed for designers and typography enthusiasts of all levels. No prior experience in type design is necessary, but a bit of Bézier vector drawing (e.g., in Adobe apps like Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop) can add to the fun.

What You’ll Learn:
In this one-day session, dive into the type design process, gaining essential technical knowledge to kickstart your own font. By the end, you'll have a font in progress and the skills to continue refining it on your own.

Schedule:
Please be on time to make the most of this creative experience.

• Sketching: Hand-sketch three letters, unleashing your artistic flair and setting the foundation for your unique typeface.
• Basics of drawing: Master the art of drawing paths with precision. Learn the secrets of proportions and optical adjustments in type.
• Digitizing and adding diacritical marks.
• Spacing and kerning: Grasp the nuances of spacing and kerning, understanding the crucial differences between them.
• Generating the font and testing it in Adobe apps.

Introduction to how variable fonts work: we will build a simple 1-glyph variable font, and export it, peek inside the compiled OTVAR, and properly produce and test a variable font.

You will learn about:

• reading the OpenType spec
• avar, gvar, STAT and fvar tables
• custom parameters and settings in the latest version of Glyphs
• find and avoid interpolation issues
• useful Glyphs extensions for variable font production
• third-party software and websites for testing

So you know how to work in Glyphs. Or do you? Discover the full power of components in Glyphs 3, and save hours, if not days, in your workflow.In this fun tour-de-force, you will learn how to efficiently reuse shapes across your typeface.

• regular components
• corner components
• cap components
• segment and brush components
• smart components
• what to do when you cannot use components, but still need to sync shapes