Open Type workshop

Today I had the great honour to attend Dave Crossland's workshop in Free/Libre/Open Type. Dave has been giving workshops on cutting edge and emerging type design practice worldwide and today I had the pleasure to share his amazing knowledge.

To start with Crossland spoke about how Authorship has always been challenged in reference to copying and sharing software. He spoke about the Free Libre System and how it is an open source, which means that the source code can be openly shared to encourage people to volunteer and help improve the software design. Some examples of open source software are: Inkscape, Gimp and Fontforge.

I learnt how Crossland focused on promoting his own open source text, and how his fascination with the freedom of software helped him design new typefaces for Google Web Fonts.

For further inspiration please check out the following links:

This was followed by a practical task, where I learnt that to create a typeface, I had to consider the following criteria: Contour, Repetition, Alignment and Proportion.

Below are examples of drawn letter forms experimenting with the above:

Having understood the above workshop and drawn letter forms, I was now ready to experiment with a Free Software Font Editor-Fontforge.