My Typography Project

https://inkscape.org

http://www.hellobrio.com/blog/digitize-lettering-illustrator-image-trace

Step 1: Scan or Take a Photo of Your Work

Again, make sure your work is in a finished state, preferably black and white. If it isn't B&W, you can work around it, but this method of using Image Trace works best with crisp, B&W line art.

Paper to Digital Step 1: take a photo of your hand lettering work - using your iPhone and good lighting is fine

I'm so self-conscious about my hands in this photo!

If you're taking a photo of your artwork, make sure to eliminate shadows or get them as even as possible, and take your photo square-on so you don't have any weird perspective skewing.

Even though this photo is yellowed, the shadows are relatively even and there isn't too much glare. It will be cleaned up in Photoshop in the next step.

Even though this photo is yellowed, the shadows are relatively even and there isn't too much glare. It will be cleaned up in Photoshop in the next step.

Step 2: Open your Photo in Photoshop

Once you've loaded your photo onto your computer, open it up in Photoshop.

Open your hand lettering photo in Photoshop - Paper to Digital, how to Digitize your hand lettering using photoshop and illustrator

Here we are going to adjust the levels so the black art becomes blacker, and the page becomes white.
Go to Image → Adjustments → Levels… or type CMD+L on a Mac or CTRL+L on a PC. (I should note that desaturating your image — converting it to pure black and white in Photoshop — may make this process easier, especially if you're working with a non B&W image. To desaturate, type CMD+Shift+U or CTRL+Shift+U or go to Image → Adjustments → Desaturate.)
Here's the Levels dialog box.

Levels dialog box will help you transform your photo into crisp black and white art in Photoshop

From here, click the white eye dropper and click around on the white parts of the page until the background looks pure white without a lot of noise (the grain and weird shadowing that can start to pop out when you're playing with levels).
Aim for the darkest white part of your drawing that still allows your artwork to be visible.

Paper to Digital: Digitize Your Hand Lettering Using Illustrator

Then, use the black eye dropper to click on the lightest black on your drawing.

Paper to Digital: Digitize Your Hand Lettering Using Illustrator

From there, you can adjust the left and right sliders until your artwork looks clean and high contrast.

Paper to Digital: Digitize Your Hand Lettering Using Illustrator

Even after you've adjusted the levels in Photoshop, you may still have weird shadows especially around the edges of your page because of vignetting.

Step 3: Drop your Adjusted Artwork into Illustrator

Using the lasso tool (L) or the marquee tool (M), select the clean part of your artwork that you want to bring into Illustrator.

Paper to Digital: Digitize Your Hand Lettering Using Illustrator

Copy (CMD+C) that selection in Photoshop, then open a new file in Illustrator, and paste it into that file. I made my Illustrator file 3000x3000px, but you can make it any size you want. Sizing in Illustrator doesn't matter as much at this point because the end product will be a vector.

Paper to Digital: Digitize Your Hand Lettering Using Illustrator

Step 4: Convert Your Artwork into Vector using Image Trace

Next, bring up your Image Trace panel in Illustrator (Window → Image Trace).

With the element selected, choose one of the Image Trace presets from the Preset dropdown. I recommend starting with Black and White Logo for these types of lettering projects.

Paper to Digital: Digitize Your Hand Lettering Using Illustrator

After you've chosen a preset you will see your artwork change in the background. We're not done yet; here we can adjust the settings further. Click on the arrow next to Advanced so you can fine tune the Image Trace settings.

Play around with the sliders for Threshold, Paths, Corners and Noise. I usually like to have less corners so the letters look smoother, but you're going to have to see what works best for your drawing.

Paper to Digital: Digitize Your Hand Lettering Using Illustrator

Step 5: Expand and Ungroup Your Letters and Make Final Tweaks

Once the main parts of your drawing look good, click the Expand button at the top.

Paper to Digital: Digitize Your Hand Lettering Using Illustrator

Then, ungroup the selection twice and you will have individual elements that you can move around the page and adjust as needed.

Paper to Digital: Digitize Your Hand Lettering Using Illustrator

If you're noticing that some words are coming out better than others, you may need to do a little doctoring by bringing your words in separately from Photoshop. For example, the "IS" and ampersand in my project are starting to become muddled because the size is so different from the rest of the project.

Delete the words or parts that don't work for you, and re-paste them from your Photoshop drawing into your drawing in Illustrator and fine-tune the settings for those individual words or pieces.


NEXT............

Create a Hand Drawn Font Using Illustrator and Fontastic.me

In this fun and interesting tutorial, I'm going to show you how you can create your very own font using Illustrator and the online web service fontastic.me.

To follow along, you'll need a copy of Adobe Illustrator, though if you haven't got a copy and don't want to buy it, you may be interested in our similar tutorial that uses Inkscape.Inkscape is a free, open source alternative to Illustrator. Whichever vector line drawing application that you use, fontastic.me offers its service completely for free.

High vacuum AFM Aquire true surface information

While I'm going to show you how to create a hand drawn font using a photo of letters drawn on paper, you can also use similar techniques to produce a font using letters that have been drawn directly into Illustrator. If you use a drawing tablet, this might be preferable to you.

If using a photo, ensure that you use a dark color pen pen to draw your letters and use plain white paper for maximum contrast. Also, take your photo in good light to help produce a photo that is clear and contrasty to make it as easy as possible for Illustrator to trace the individual letters.

Over the next few pages, I'll walk you through the process of creating your first font.

Open a Blank Document

The first step is to open a blank file to work in.

Go to File > New and in the dialog set up the size as desired. I used a square page size of 500px, but you can set this as desired.

Next we'll import the photo file into Illustrator.
Import Your Photo of Hand Drawn Text




If you haven't got a photo of hand drawn text to work from, you can download the same file that I've used for this tutorial.

To import the file, go to File > Place and then navigate to where your photo of hand drawn text is located.

Click the Place button and you'll see the photo appears in your document.

We can now trace this file to give us vector letters.

Trace the Photo of Hand Drawn Letters

Tracing the letters is very straight forward.

Just go to Object > Live Trace > Make and Expand and after a few moments, you'll see that all of the letters have been over laid with new vector line versions. Less obvious is the fact that they will be surrounded by another object that represents the background of the photo. We need to delete the background object, so go to Object > Ungroup and then click anywhere outside of the rectangular bounding box to deselect everything.

Now click close to, but not on, one of the letters and you should see that the rectangular background is selected. Just press the Delete key on your keyboard to remove it.

That leaves all of the individual letters, however, if any of your letters contain more than one element, you will need to group these together. All of my letters contain more than one element, so I had to group all of them. This is done by clicking and dragging a selection marquee that encompasses all the different parts of a letter and then going to Object > Group.

You will now be left with all of your individual letters and next we'll use these to create the individual SVG files that we need to create a font on fontastic.me.

Save Individual Letters as SVG Files

Firstly, select and drag all of the letters so that they don't over lay the art board. Then drag the first letter onto the artboard and re-size it to fill the artboard by dragging one of the corner drag handles. Hold down the Shift key while you do this to maintain the same proportions.

When done, go to File > Save As and in the dialog, change the Format drop down to SVG (svg), give the file a meaningful name and click Save. You can now delete that letter and place and re-size the next one on the artboard. Again do Save As and continue until you have saved all of your letters.

Finally, before continuing, save a blank artboard so that you can use this for a space character. You may also wish to consider saving punctuation marks and lower case versions of your letters, but I've not bothered for this tutorial.

With these separate SVG letter files ready, you can take the next step to create your font by uploading them to fontastic.me. Please take a look at this article to see how to use fontastic.me to finish your font: Create a Font Using Fontastic.me

Fontastic.me is a free to use web service that offers a selection of icon fonts, but also allows you to upload your own SVG files to create your own unique fonts.

This short article explains how to convert SVG files that have been created in a vector line drawing application, such as Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

If you haven't got any suitable files to use, please take a look at one of these two articles that show how you can prepare SVG letter files from a photo of hand drawn letters using Illustrator or Inkscape.

If you've got your letter files prepared, now you can pay a visit to fontastic.me and create your font. On the home page, you'll need to enter your email address and set a password, but this is entirely free. Then click the yellow button labeled 'Create your Icon Font' to continue.

On the next page, click the Import Icons button at the top of the page, select all of your SVG letter files and upload them. You should see a graphic that says how many icons you are uploading.

Once the files are uploaded, you'll need to create a new font to add them to.

At the top of the page, there may already be a label saying Untitled font 1, but if not, click the + New Font button at the top of the page.

If you click the Font Settings text to the right of the page, you can then rename this font as desired.

Now click on each of the letter thumbnails to select them – they have a yellow border when selected and click the Customize text.

This will display your letters in two sections – Character Mapping and Class Mapping.

Font Design Tool

In each of these, ensure that the input field contains the correct letter for the uploaded letter. For some characters, you may see a code displayed after you type in the field. Don't worry if it looks odd, your computer will understand it.

When you're happy, click the Download text and save the ZIP file to your computer. When unzipped, you'll have a folder that contains several different font formats for use on websites as different browsers and platforms require different types. However, you'll also see that there's a TTF font file that you can install and use on your computer.

Now you have your own font file

Use Nexus Font manager, download if free to view the font and create a series of words

Start with the name of your Company

Typography

What is Typography?

Every designer needs to understand typography. We explain the fundamental concepts and terminology in words that you can understand.
In this article we introduce the fundamental concepts of typography, followed by a detailed glossary of its main terms.

Typography is, quite simply, the art and technique of arranging type. It's central to the work and skills of a designer and is about much more than making the words legible.
Your choice of typeface and how you make it work with your layout, grid, colour scheme, design theme and so on will make the difference between a good, bad and great design.
Good typography is partly down to creative intuition, but it's impossible to become skilled in typography without understanding the basic rules of the craft – even if you mean to break them.

Once you're comfortable with the basics, why not try out some typography tutorials, visit some typography resources to investigate font families – and even follow some typography Twitter accounts to keep up-to-date with the latest trends.
Choosing a font

There are an astonishing array of professional fonts to choose from. But with great power comes great responsibility. Just because you can choose from a vast library doesn't mean you have to; there's something to be said for painting with a limited palette, and tried and tested fonts like Helvetica continue to serve us well.

Despite sites such as ours providing links to the best free fonts available, but that doesn't mean it's not worth investing in paid ones. A typeface, like any form of design, is created by craftsmen over a substantial period of time, using the talent and experience they've been honing for many years. And the benefits of a professionally designed font – various weights and styles to form a complete family, carefully considered kerning pairs, multi-language support with international characters, expressive alternate glyphs to add character and variety to type-setting – are not always found in a font available for free.
Basic concepts


Here are some of the most important typographic considerations the professional designers needs to take into account.

01. Size
All typefaces are not created equally. Some are fat and wide; some are thin and narrow. So words set in different typefaces can take up a very different amount of space on the page.

The height of each character is known as its 'x-height' (quite simply because it's based on the letter 'x'). When pairing typefaces - such as when using a different face to denote an area of attention - it's generally wise to use those that share a similar x-height. The width of each character is known as the 'set width' - which spans the body of the letter plus a space that acts as a buffer with other letter.

The most common method used to measure type is the point system, which dates back to the eighteenth century. One point is 1/72 inch. 12 points make one pica, a unit used to measure column widths. Type sizes can also be measured in inches, millimeters, or pixels.

02. Leading

Leading describes the vertical space between each line of type. It's called this because strips of lead were originally used to separate lines of type in the days of metal typesetting.

For legible body text that's comfortable to read, a general rule is that your leading value should be greater than the font size; anywhere from 1.25 to 1.5 times.

03. Tracking and kerning

Kerning describes the act of adjusting the space between characters to create a harmonious pairing. For example, where an uppercase 'A' meets an uppercase 'V', their diagonal strokes are usually kerned so that the top left of the 'V' sits above the bottom right of the 'A'.

Kerning similar to, but not the same as, 'tracking'; this relates to the spacing of all characters and is applied evenly.

04. Measure

The term 'measure' describes the width of a text block. If you're seeking to achieve the optimum reading experience, it's clearly an important consideration.

05. Hierarchy and scale

If all type was the same size, then it would be difficult to know which was the most important information on the page. In order to guide the reader, then, headings are usually large, sub-headings are smaller, and body type is smaller still.

Size is not the only way to define hierarchy – it can also be achieved with colour, spacing and weight.
The glossary

A visual guide to some common typography terms - see key below

Key to image: 1. Bowl; 2. Stem; 3. Counter; 4. Arm; 5. Ligature; 6. Terminal; 7. Spine; 8. Ascender; 9. Apex; 10. Serif; 11. Ear; 12. Descender; 13. Crossbar; 14. Finial; 15. Ascender height; 16. Cap height; 17. X-height; 18. Baseline; 19. Descender line
Aesc (phonetic: ash)

A ligature of two letters - 'a' and 'e'. The aesc derives from Old English, where it represented a diphthong vowel, and has successfully migrated to other alphabets including Danish and Icelandic.
Aperture
The constricted opening of a glyph, as seen in the letter 'e'. Varying the size of the aperture has a direct effect on the legibility of a letterform and, ultimately, readability.

Apex
The point at the top of a character where the left and right strokes meet. The example shown here is the top point of an uppercase a.

Arm
A horizontal stroke that does not connect to a stroke or stem at one or both ends - such as the top of the capital T.

Ascender
The part of a lower case letterform that projects above the x-height of the font. Ascenders are important for ease of prolonged reading, though the combination of too much ascender-height and not enough x-height can cause problems.



The ascender projects above the x-height of the font


Baseline
The baseline is where the feet of your capital letters sit. Below this line are descenders and loops.
Bowl
The shapely, enclosed parts of letters such as 'p' and 'b'.
Beak
The beak-shaped terminal at the top of letters such as 'a', 'c', 'f' and 'r'.
Bicameral (as opposed to Unicameral)
Bicameral refers to alphabets that have upper and lower case letterforms, such as Roman and Cyrillic - as opposed to the likes of Hebrew and Arabic.
Bracket
A wedge-like shape that joins a serif to the stem of a font in some typefaces.
Cap height
The height of a capital letter above the baseline.
Copyfitting
The job of adjusting point size and letter spacing in a bid to make text occupy its allotted space in a harmonious fashion.
Counter
The enclosed - or partially enclosed - portion of letterforms such as 'c', the lower part of 'e' and 'g'; easy to get mixed up with the bowl.
Crossbar
The crossbar connects two strokes, as in 'H'. Not to be confused with the crossstroke that cuts through the stem of letterforms such as 't'.
Cursive
These are typefaces that imitate handwriting. Ever popular with Joe Public, the design community is often less than thrilled by these sometimes flowery fonts.
Descender
The part of the letterform that falls below the baseline. In lowercase terms, this means 'p', 'y' and 'q', and sometimes applies to uppercase 'J' and 'Q'.
Diacritical
Is it so critical that you might die? No. Diacriticals refer to accents applied to letterforms by languages including French, Czech and German in a bid to enhance the function of the glyph.
Dingbat
Once known as printer's flowers, dingbats are decorative elements that can vary from simple bullets to delicate fauna and flora often formed into themed collections.





Dingbat are decorative elements such as bullets


Display fonts
Any typeface intended to be used in short bursts can be defined as a display font. They're often created just for use at large point sizes, as with headlines and titles.
Drop cap
An oversized capital letter often used at the start of a paragraph that 'drops' into two or more lines of text, but can also climb upwards.
Ear
A small stroke extending from the upper-right side of the bowl of lowercase g, as shown in the example. It can also appear in a lowercase r.
Ethel
A ligature of the letters 'o' and 'e'.
Em
Often referred to as 'Mutton' to distinguish it from the very similar-sounding En, Em is a horizontal space equal to the current point size of text.
En
'Nut' to its friends, the En is a horizontal measure one half the size of an Em. That being the case, 'lamb' might have been more appropriate.
Eye
The eye is similar to a counter, but instead refers specifically to the enclosed part of the letter 'e'.
Finial
A tapered or curved end, which appears on letters such as e and c.
Fleuron
A subcategory of, or the precursor to, the dingbat. Fleurons are floral marks dreamed up by printers of the past to help decorate text.
<font-face>
The HTML5 tag that brings typography to the internet with typefaces directly embedded in web pages.
Glyph
Any singular mark that makes part of a font, whether a letter, number, punctuation mark or even a dingbat. Glyphs are the building blocks of typography.





Glyphs are the singular parts that make up a font


Grapheme
Very similar to glyph, but possibly a bit broader. A grapheme is a fundamental unit of language, such as a Chinese pictogram, an exclamation mark or a letterform. Still with us in our guide to what is typography? Great! Because we've got more terms coming your way!
Gutter
The spaces between facing pages of, and very often columns of text.
Justified
In a paragraph of justified text, the contents are arranged so that there is no white space at the end of a line: each begins flush left and finishes flush right.
Kerning
The art of adjusting the proximity of adjacent letters to optimise their visual appeal and readability.
Leading
Leading describes the vertical space between each line of type. In olden times actual strips of lead were used to separate lines of text vertically; the naming convention persists.





Leading describes the vertical space between each line of type

Legibility
The ease with which one letterform can be distinguished from the next. It feeds into but is not the same as readability.
Loop
The lower part of the letter 'g' is known as its loop or lobe. Sometimes called the tail - a term that also takes in the lower portion of letter 'y'.

The lower part of the letters 'g' and 'y' are known as the loop or lobe


Logotype
The lettered part of any marque or identity. The logotype can be taken separately from its graphic companion.
Ligature
The conjoined but non-identical twins of the typographic universe. Ligatures pull two forms together to produce a new glyph.
Manicule
Also known as the bishop's fist (stop sniggering at the back), the pointing hand symbol is a popular dingbat.
Monospace
Fonts in which every letterform occupies the same horizontal space.
OpenType
Designed by Microsoft and Adobe, OpenType supplanted and improved upon TrueType and PostScript fonts.
Oblique or sloped roman

To be distinguished from italics, in which the letterforms are purposefully drawn to be different to their upright cousins. Oblique letters are merely slanted versions of the standard roman form, often arrived at by mechanical means.
Orphan
The first line of a new paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page. This is considered to be as bad as the name suggests.
Pica
One sixth of an inch in length, the pica is associated with line-length and column width. There are 12 points or 16 pixels in one pica.
Pilcrow
The paragraph symbol, it now marks the presence of a carriage return but at one time is thought to have denoted a change of theme in flowing text.
Point
A standard typographical measurement equal to 1/12 of a pica or 1/72 of an inch.
Readability
Readability refers to the ease with which a block of text can be scanned by eye.
Serif
A flare or terminating flourish at the end of a letterform's strokes believed to originate with the Roman tendency to paint letters onto marble before chiselling them out.
Sidebearing
The horizontal space to either side of a letterform, separating it from other letters.
Spine
The main curved stroke of a lowercase or capital S.
Squoosh
This is the inadvisable process of squashing or expanding a typeface digitally either to fit a space or for visual effect. If you do it, make sure you keep it to yourself.





Squoosh is the process of squashing or expanding a typeface digitally


Spur
A small projection from the curve of a letterform, sometimes known as a beak or a beard. G provides a good example.
Stem
A vertical, full-length stroke in upright characters.
TDC
The Type Directors Club is a typography organisation based in New York.
Tittle
The brilliantly suggestive name for the dot above letters 'i' and 'j'.





Tittle is the name for the dot above the i or j


Terminal
A type of curve at the end of a stroke. Examples include the teardrop shapes in: 'finial', 'ball', 'beak' and 'lachrymal'.
x-height
The height of the lowercase x in any given typeface. This delimits the size of the glyph's detail and therefore also of its ascenders and descenders.