Building a font file that works isn’t always as easy as choosing “Generate Font” from the File menu, in this course students will take more than just a peek under the hood of how a font works and will learn to use tools and techniques that can take the edge off of font production and testing.
Over the course of eight weeks topics will range from writing and testing OpenType features, using the RoboFab toolkit to build simple tools to automate repetitive tasks, getting naming and other font info tables set up the right way, and clearing up common bugs and error messages that inevitably come up during font production. The classes will be taught in the RoboFont editing environment.
Requires: Mac with an installation of the RoboFont editor
About Andy Clymer
Andy Clymer is a typeface designer and developer at Hoefler & Frere-Jones. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in graphic design from San Diego State University and a Master of Design degree in type design from the Type & Media postgraduate course at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague, Netherlands. While in The Hague, Andy was influenced heavily by the notion that type designers have had for centuries of building one’s own tools for the job — mechanical bits and pieces, historically, and now bits and pieces of software. This carries through into his role at H&FJ where he contributes both to the design of retail and custom typefaces and to the software that helps produce them.
