Studio Ostendo operates in multiple creative fields including photography, design, and education.
Type designers know that good curves make good letters. In Glyphs, that means placing points on the extremes of curves and balancing the curve between the handles. The Speed Punk Plugin for Glyphs shows a curve meter on either side of a curve point. The meter shows when a curve is balanced and when it needs a bit of tuning. This is a great tool for manually balancing those curves in Glyphs!
Red Arrows is reminiscent of the one teacher in high school who used a red pen to mark every flaw. Exactly what it says, the RedArrow Plugin for Glyphs shows red arrows that point our tiny details that need to be fixed in letter shapes. Elements like nearly straight lines, incorrect smooth connections, or need for inflection points are all pointed to by red arrows.
Stem thickness is something that can plague beginning and seasoned type designers. One change in a letter here, another change there, and all of a sudden the stems are all over the place. The Stem Thickness Plugin for Glyphs shows the thickness of of the stem in a pointed space. With a simple interface of a line that cuts through letters, the Stem Thickness Plugin can help designers keep their letters consistent.
Kerning is the removal of inconsistencies. While its best to use spacing and side bearings to get a font as refined as possible, every font needs some kerning to be visually consistent. Font design programs are built to do just that, and the Kern On Plugin for Glyphs helps immensely. Essentially, a designer trains Kern On which learns from a set of models. Then, using information from the model pairs the designer sets, it tries to help by applying similar logic to future kerning pairs.
Check out this great video of Kern On in use by its creator, Tim Ahrens:
https://kern-on.com/videos/KO-in-practice.mp4
In Glyphs and other font design tools, type designers generally draw the outside edges of each letterform. The LTTR/INK App for Glyphs works more like the pen tool and stroke in Adobe Illustrator. With LTTR/INK, designers draw a skeleton and apply a stroke brush to the skeleton. This is the closest thing to drawing by had I’ve seen, and the customization capabilities are incredible. Plus, they offer a Free Trial!
The Font Remix Tools for Glyphs are a suite of font filters that help with all sorts of aspects of the type design process. The Harmonizer helps create visually consistent curves while retaining the shape as closely as possible, the Scaler allows designers to precisely adjust all masters of the current glyph, and the Tuner can adjust width, height, weight, and slant of letterforms.
Be sure to visit the RMX website because there are lovely demo videos and consumable content that address what these amazing plugins can do!
I may be biased, but I love and use the LTTR/INK app, the RMX suite, and the Speed Punk plugin as my own type design mini-game. Build out your perfect Glyphs plugin suite and send me an email about how it goes!
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