Dave Crossland is a typographer who advocates for freeware/open source software. Back in October, he was a guest visitor at our campus and hosted a workshop to the class based on the open source type editing software known as 'Fontforge'.
First, we were instructed to draw letters 'o', then 'n' and then 'a' and simply with no further instructions. When the students had finished in doing so, we presented our work amongst the rest of the class and all compared the variation and styles students had used.
Crossland examined our work only to announce that virtually the entire class had formed the letters using an incorrect process, stating that the correct way in order to design and develop of font should start with area, then outline and then fill.
Students had tried to redo the letters with the way Dave had instructed further and we found that his information was right as our letterforms came out more proportionate and refined. Just overall better.
After the previous task, Dave told us to form the letters 'c', 'r', 'a' and 'p'. Simply put, the word crap. The reason for doing this was to memorise the acronym for his guidline 'C.R.A.P' which stood for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment & Proportion. After doing so and working on these letterforms, the class shortly moved onto a short tutorial given by Crossland on how to use FontForge.
Some people found it tricky while others perhaps did not. I, for one, was using a Windows Vista at the time and the program kept crashing every time I had opened it for about 20 seconds. Suffice to say, it was virtually impossible to apply the tutorial to my work during class.
When I got home, I installed XQuartz, a program that is required to host FontForge on Mac OS X, installing FontForge afterwards. I started up the program and began to do a trial run in the program like the rest of the class did earlier that day and worked on producing the O that we were initially told to produce at the beginning of the day on paper.
Because I was having difficulty to keep in class what with my Windows Vista constantly crashing the FontForge program, I will admit that I did have trouble trying to remember what I had taken in during the workshop and applying to the piece I was trying to at home.
Nevertheless, I managed to pull through and though I am by no means close to being fluent in understanding the program, I hope to get better hang of the software in due time.
On the right are screenshots of the development of the result below. Generally, I am quite pleased with it as a first try. The letterform itself is overall smooth (with some slight uneven and disproportionate areas), but I suppose not entirely bad after all.