affinity designer Open Air Fonts

[AdamStanislav]

I have created three new fonts. I made all the glyphs using Affinity Designer, exported them to SVG, which I imported to FontForge to make the fonts. I made the fonts to work with each other. So it is possible to duplicate some text in Designer and give each layer a different color and different one of the three fonts, and you can get some interesting effects.

The first one is called Open Air Duct and looks like this (over some path drawn in Affinity Designer),

The second one is derived from the first one and is called Open Air Window:

And the third one is called Open Air Wall:

The nice thing about them is that the same glyph in all three fonts has the same outline, width, left and right bearing, as well as kerning. Thanks to that, we can just duplicate the same text, assigned different colors to each and stack Open Air Window above Open Air Wall, and Open Air Duct above both, and the result can be quite nice:

I have uploaded all three fonts to https://github.com/Pantarheon/OpenAir, where anyone can download them from.

[William Overington]

I notice that the files each have a .ufo extension.

What exactly is that and how does one use such a file in Affinity Designer please?

Is this a font file in the usual style of using a font? Why are the files not .ttf or .otf files?

William

 

[Alfred]

55 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I notice that the files each have a .ufo extension.

Did you perhaps overlook the fact that there are also *.otf files available via the linked page, and that the *.ufo entries are for folders containing a glyphs subfolder together with a *.fea file and a collection of *.plist files?

[William Overington]

9 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Did you perhaps overlook the fact that there are also *.otf files available via the linked page, and that the *.ufo entries are for folders containing a glyphs subfolder together with a *.fea file and a collection of *.plist files?

Possibly.

William

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

I notice that the files each have a .ufo extension.

Further information here: https://unifiedfontobject.org

[AdamStanislav]

4 hours ago, William Overington said:

I notice that the files each have a .ufo extension.

What exactly is that and how does one use such a file in Affinity Designer please?

Is this a font file in the usual style of using a font? Why are the files not .ttf or .otf files?

William

 

The .ufo folders are in the Unified Font Object format, which is to fonts what source code is to apps. The .otf files below them are the fonts to use in Affinity Designer.

[William Overington]

1 hour ago, AdamStanislav said:

The .ufo folders are in the Unified Font Object format, which is to fonts what source code is to apps. The .otf files below them are the fonts to use in Affinity Designer.

Thank you. Thank you for the smiley appreciating the humour.

Yes, it was my mistake, I clicked the link, saw the .ufo at the top and got in a muddle. I should have checked.

My reply to Alfred was because I have written a novel, which Alfred has read as I published it on the web chapter by chapter and for which Alfred has provided very helpful reader feedback(including proofreader feedback!), and it is a recurring theme from time to time that one of the main characters often avoids saying 'Yes' when asked if she did something but replies with 'Possibly'. As it happens I answered 'Possibly' to a question by Alfred in a thread in another forum this morning in the same way, though perhaps not quite as obviously meaning 'yes', and we are now looking at associative meaning in the use of particular fonts in particular circumstances, as in that the font used for a florist shop is not usually the same as the font used for an ironmonger shop.

You might perhaps like the thread, it starts off with a link to a video. I enjoyed watching the video all the way through.

https://community.serif.com/discussion/116223/font-readability-not-what-you-think

William

 

[AdamStanislav]

40 minutes ago, William Overington said:

You might perhaps like the thread, it starts off with a link to a video. I enjoyed watching the video all the way through.

https://community.serif.com/discussion/116223/font-readability-not-what-you-think

The lady in the video is confused. For one, different fonts are designed for different things. Times New Roman is hardly a vanilla font, nor is it overused because of Microsoft software. Long before Windows even appeared, Adobe made the horrible decision of including Times Roman as the default serif font in all Postscript printers (and Helvetica as the default sans serif font). That is the reason why so many computer generated theses have been printed in Times Roman. It is not a vanilla font for books. Baskerville is probably the best book typeface. Extremely readable, as well as esthetically pleasing, Baskerville is a classic that predates computers. Times was designed for narrow newspaper columns, in which it is quite well readable. It is very hard to read in books which have wider lines than newspapers.

As for my three fonts, I designed them specifically to be used together as shown above. Not for books, not for brochures, not for newspapers, but for something catchy, a few words will catch your attention if used in a large size and with the right colors. The colors need to be different in each layer, but they still have to be similar. It would look awful if, for example, one layer was red, one blue, and one green. It is meant for graphic design, not for the text of a novel.

[Alfred]

4 hours ago, AdamStanislav said:

It would look awful if, for example, one layer was red, one blue, and one green.

Oh, I don’t know about that. I’m sure I’ve seen worse!

 

[William Overington]

Is this using the same multi-font layering technique as I used in my Galileo Lettering fonts?

https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?t=859

The events of the first part of the backstory took place over fifty years ago.

William

 

 

[AdamStanislav]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Is this using the same multi-font layering technique as I used in my Galileo Lettering fonts?

Looks like the same idea, yes.

By the way, I have tried something different with these fonts: 

 

[AdamStanislav]

Here is how I did that video. First I found some suitable background footage on one of the VideoTrax DVDs I bought a decade or so ago. Then I went to trusted old Affinity Designer:

The bottom layer has the word SPORTS in The Open Air Wall font. It has a white fill and a thick white stroke. It still left an empty space inside the O, so I covered that with a white ellipse. Then the Open Air Window is in gray (7F7F7F), with the opacity of 75%, and finally the top layer is Open Air Duct in black. I exported three separate PNG images, one with the two white layers, one of the gray and of the black layer.

In Vegas Pro, I placed the white layer above the video and set it to multiply with the video, which produced a black image with the exception of the white part which let the bottom video through. Above that I placed the transparent gray layer, and then the black layer. And it looks like the gray portion is frosted glass. I had to experiment with the right opacity for it to look good. But I think I got it.

[AdamStanislav]

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

Oh, I don’t know about that. I’m sure I’ve seen worse!

 

Interesting how the colors affect each other in human perception, so some of the red looks purple and the green almost cyan. And yes, I’ve seen worse, too.

[AdamStanislav]

It has occurred to me that using Affinity Designer contours with the white background would allow me a much better effect than stroking it. And it has occurred to me that if I export the whole thing as one PNG, perhaps I might be able to use the whole image as a multiplication layer in Vegas Pro (and it turned out I can).

Here is the design in Affinity Designer:

And here is the video:

 

[AdamStanislav]

I have unlisted those two videos on YouTube (you can still watch them from here) because I have made a third one which is a much better way (I think) to make titles with these fonts:

 

[AdamStanislav]

In these videos I have noticed the letter T in SPORTS is too far form the letter R. To me, it almost looks like SPOR TS.

So I checked my kerning pairs, and sure enough, there was no RT kerning pair. I, therefore, added the appropriate kerning and even uploaded the updated version of the fonts to their GitHub page. I am not going to make yet another video just for that, but here is a PNG picture of what the title looks like with the updated kerning:

I think that looks a lot better. Do you agree? 😎

[Alfred]

42 minutes ago, AdamStanislav said:

I think that looks a lot better. Do you agree? 😎

Yes, I do, although it now makes me wonder whether the AT pair shouldn’t be kerned a little more tightly.

[AdamStanislav]

16 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Yes, I do, although it now makes me wonder whether the AT pair shouldn’t be kerned a little more tightly.

As William might say, possibly.

[AdamStanislav]

5 hours ago, Alfred said:

Yes, I do, although it now makes me wonder whether the AT pair shouldn’t be kerned a little more tightly.

OK, then. Is this better? Still on my computer, as I do not want to upload before hearing any comments here. At any rate I don’t feel I should bring the T any closer to the A than this. But I am sure I still have to go through further kerning. As of this version still on my computer, there are 11,341 kerning pairs defined (the same 11,341 in all three fonts, or else it would be impossible to have them perfectly aligned).

[AdamStanislav]

2 hours ago, AdamStanislav said:

I do not want to upload before hearing any comments here.

On second thought, it is so easy to do with GitHub, so I did upload it after all.

[Alfred]

8 hours ago, AdamStanislav said:

OK, then. Is this better?

Looks pretty good to me!

[William Overington]

9 hours ago, AdamStanislav said:

OK, then. Is this better? Still on my computer, as I do not want to upload before hearing any comments here. At any rate I don’t feel I should bring the T any closer to the A than this. But I am sure I still have to go through further kerning. As of this version still on my computer, there are 11,341 kerning pairs defined (the same 11,341 in all three fonts, or else it would be impossible to have them perfectly aligned).

 

11,341 seems a large number.

Can you say how you got to that number please?

Is there some sort of software tool that does that or did you need to enter them manually?

William

 

 

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

Is there some sort of software tool that does that or did you need to enter them manually?

Are you seriously entertaining the notion that Adam (or anyone else!) might define that many individual kerning pairs? Knowing that you use High-Logic FontCreator, I can only guess that you’ve never used its Autokern Wizard.

[Alfred]

8 minutes ago, Alfred said:

High-Logic FontCreator

Speaking of which, this post to the High-Logic Forums (containing to links to three test documents) may be of interest:

https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?p=14424#p14424

[William Overington]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

Are you seriously entertaining the notion that Adam (or anyone else!) might define that many individual kerning pairs?

Possibly.

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

 Knowing that you use High-Logic FontCreator, I can only guess that you’ve never used its Autokern Wizard.

Well, that is one guess.

However, you could perhaps consider that I may have used it and forgotten about it.

I don't remember using it, but I am not going to say that I have not because it is entirely possible that a High-Logic thread might come to light where I did.

While writing this post, I now seem to remember that I did sometime produce a font named Kern Deco but whether I used auto-kerning I don't remember.

https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1823

William