Monday, August 17, 2009

A new unilateral serif font: Ablati


Ablati is the commercial release of the font designed during the production of our new font design book, "Practical Font Design". It is a new serif font in my continuing objective of designing book fonts that I can really use. In many ways, Ablati is a very different direction for me. Designed to produce graphics to use in the font design book, I was forced to really reconsider many of my working methods to make them work for outside readership. Like all designers, my internal design processes can get really sloppy. The book helped me clean up my act.

Taking my inspiration from one of my favorite fonts of all time {though I've never reallybeen able to use it much}, Romic, by Colin at Letraset, I decided to design a unilateral serif font. You can buy a copy here at a reduced price.

In most ways, this is a normal serif for me in that it has caps, lowercase, small caps with the appropriate figures for each case. This font has all the OpenType features in the new set developed for the book. There are several ligatures for your fun and enjoyment: bb gg ff fi fl ffi ffl ffy fj ft tt ty Wh Th and more. Several alternative forms, a dozen ornaments, and more. Like all of my fonts, there are: caps, lowercase, small caps, proportional lining figures, proportional oldstyle figures, & small cap figures, plus numerators, denominators, superiors, inferiors, and a complete set of ordinals 1st through infinity. Enjoy!

The Oldstyle and Small Cap fonts are an attempt to have most of the OpenType characters available to people still using Type 1 and TrueType fonts.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Special Pre-release sale! New Font: Arome Oldstyle


I decided to offer a special prerelease sale on the font developed for the new book. From now unrtil it's actually released (maybe two weeks), it's on sale for only $7 for the OpenType Pro version.

The purchase link is on this page, just click here for the new font.

Practical Font Design: FontLab 4.6 released!


I've finally released the 1st Edition of Practical Font Design. It is the story of the development of a new unilateral serif font design, from conception to finish, more or less step by step. It will be developed further based on input from you the readers. New editions will come out as new versions of FontLab are used as the house software of Hackberry Fonts.

I make no claims to superior knowledge or anything like that. I'm just an insignificant designer sharing tips and tricks I've learned over fifteen years of font design using first Fontographer and now FontLab.

My hope is that it will be helpful to those of you who decide that you need your own fonts to be satisfied with what you are designing. This is not formal education but practical workflow stuff. It will be used as the training materials for my apprentices.