How to create a glyph in illustrator how to#

I can even somewhat draw a rough sketch of what I'm trying to accomplish using a pen and paper. That is, I can find what I'm looking for if I browse long enough through font design inspiration, or if I don't find it, I know still what I'm looking for. In my head I have a pretty clear vision of what I want the end result to look like.

Using the pen tool? If so, how do I practice using it? Or, using some other hitherto secret technique? How do I practice that? Obviously there is the aspect of practice. So while there is a lot here on the surface, what I'm really trying to get at is how you learn to get good at drawing font glyphs, and what you need to be doing along the journey. What I end up creating looks like some janky primitive randomly-jolting-around curve or line chain with different bumps and such that don't make any sense and doesn't feel or look good. But it's not intuitive enough to really be able to concentrate on capturing that calligraphic, non-uniformly aligned effect that makes this glyph look so good and natural. I try and recreate the sketch with the pen tool one painstaking point at a time. Right now basically I start with a blank canvas and the pen tool, and a hand drawn sketch off to the side. Are you manipulating the bezier curves directly? Or is there some secret technique for adjusting the look of the 'fill' in your glyph until it 'feels right'. How deep do you need to go with the pen tool. Pretty much every video and written tutorial either (1) assumes simple geometric shapes make up the glyph, or (2) that you are tracing a handwritten font (which ends up looking not even close to as good as a well designed natural font like the glyph above, they're always way more 'hand-drawn' looking).Дo you draw it on paper and trace it? If so, how do you go from the inherent ugliness/sloppiness of a hand-drawn sketch, to a smooth and consistent (across multiple glyphs) design? I know there are smoothing tools but it's not that simple.

How to create a glyph in illustrator how to#

Of those 4 things, it's been hard for me to find a tutorial that teaches you how to 'get good at' designing a good looking glyph whose continuity is continuous rather than discrete primitive geometric shapes, whose style is calligraphic, whose segment alignment is non-uniform, and whose consistency is present. While I only showed one glyph here, you can notice that across many glyphs, there are certain repeating elements like the same exact shape and sized serif features on each glyph (despite where they are placed), or common circle-ish shapes for the 'o's' and 'p's' and such.

So there's not a lot of rhyme or reason (consciously that I can think of) why the curvature of the glyph reaches certain distances. For example, if you drew a straight vertical line along the backbone of the glyph, it wouldn't touch every bump along the way. The different segments and pieces of the glyph don't align along some simple vertical or horizontal line. If we consider the whole grey area a 'fill', the fill gets thicker in some places along the curves, and thinner in other areas, as if it was drawn with a pen like calligraphy. It's not built out of primitive simple geometric objects like circles and triangles like most of the font tutorials are made out of that you find online. Here is an example font glyph that's reasonably complex: