Most of the font work I do is with FontLab, but lately I’ve been taking time to experiment with both Glyphs and FontForge. I have test fonts going for both, because there isn’t any better way of learning font design software than creating the letters from scratch (merely opening an existing font and fiddling with points doesn’t get you anywhere).

While at TypeCon 2013: Portl&, I took a workshop that allowed me to experiment with many different types of pens and nibs: brush pens, calligraphy nibs, spencerian nibs and sharpies. One of the calligraphy nibs was 3/4″ (19.05mm) wide. It was literally like drawing with a shovel. So fun!! I drew the whole alphabet with it, and decided to use those drawings as the basis for my Glyphs test font “shovel face.”

I don’t have all 26 lowercase letters digitized yet…this is just a side project (and oh, there are many…ha!). But the results are kind of fun, I think! Pardon my poor spacing. It’s all a work in progress…