Free Type

The FreeType Project is a open source licensed font platform.
It's used to render text onto bitmaps and because of the open license can be used in a variety of projects. It is designed to be high-quality and accessible to all users.

C- Contrast R-Repetition A-Alignment P-Proportion

The workshop with David Crossland focused on how type is created and also taught us more about exploring opensource font editor FontForge. The processes we used are shown by the pictures I took of my own work below. Creating font's can take many months or even years depending on the detail and the how many families the typeface has. This small exercise was time consuming, but it was enjoyable to learn something new and it makes you appreciate font design a lot more. The workshop also taught us about the authorship of fonts in relation to 'free' fonts. If people put their own fonts out there for free download and manipulation, what are the results of this?
There is a challenge in the real 'author' of the work, this lead to a interesting discussion about free culture in the workshop.

First the font is sketched using light pencil strokes and a rough outline/body is created. Mistakes are encouaged and it's easier at this stage to change anything you dislike about the font.

At the second stage of this process a line is drawn round the original lines to box in the spaces that you want to use..

..Finally the outline is made a lot more definite and the body shaded more completely to create a solid plan for digitizing the font.

Firstly using the 'create line' tools, I create a rough shape of a lowercase letter a...

Then I filled in the type and could then copy it to create the o, p etc as to create cohesive font library's those letters can be used to model other ones.. ..

The final outcome isn't exactly all I hoped it would be. However the timeconsuming and highly detailed approach to font design isn't a skill I feel I have.
However I did enjoy learning new things about Font forge and the community that creates and utilises FreeType.