How do we want the browser to handle these fonts? Without knowing the priorities of the websites that are to be built with Fontself fonts, it’s hard to make one-size-fits-all default. We didn’t want to burden the font designers with too many options when publishing their font, so we needed to decide on some sane defaults.Ĭonsider the font loading strategy. The designer and the website’s visitors should be treated to a good experience either way. With Edge switching to Chromium, they will (hopefully temporarily) lose support for OpenType-SVG, one of the most versatile and interesting color font formats. The publishing service should be very easy to use, but also allow fine grained control to advanced users.Īnd because Fontself also allows you to create color fonts, the service has to be extra resilient: there will be users on browsers out there without support for color fonts.The hosting should be fast, reliable and have a basic defense against abuse and piracy.The font should work everywhere, and be optimised and free of bloat and bugs.If you build a font publishing and hosting platform for non-technical folks (graphic designer and creatives), there’s a whole list of details you need to get right: Oh, and highly optimised hosting so fonts would be as easy and performant as, say, Google Fonts.Ī video explaining the what’s what of Fontself Catapult Technical challenges It wouldn’t just create a WOFF/WOFF2 file, but also offer whitelisting, all the needed HTML and CSS, assistance for various platforms like WordPress or CodePen, and a custom specimen page. The new publishing platform, named Fontself Catapult, was going to be an extension to allow you to publish your font specifically for the web. OTF file, which you can distribute and use like any other font. You draw the letter A, tell Fontself Maker it’s an A, and it magically takes care of creating a font of it. The intersection of webfonts and color fonts is of course exactly my sweet spot, so when they asked me to help out I said “oh heck yes!” What should a font publishing tool do?įontself Maker as a font design tool was already well established: it converts anything you can create in Illustrator into a font. They already had Fontself Maker, a tool to create fonts from the comfort of Adobe Illustrator, and were planning to add a new service to help designers publish their fonts on the web. When you spend many hours in front of Illustrator, you can realize that using this program is like hammering a screw into a wall because you don't have a drill.Creating Fontself Catapult, a color font publishing platformĪbout a year ago I was contacted by the people from Fontself, a software company from France and early adopters of color fonts, to work on a new project. The answer is because Illustrator's Bézier curve capabilities are less accurate and weaker than the ones you can find in font editors like this one, Glyphs or Robofont. ![]() Now surely the question of the reasons for acquiring a program of this type when you already have Illustrator CC, which already costs us money a month. A program that requires Illustrator CC on Mac OsX or Windows and that allows you to create fonts in minutes, convert any shape into a typeface, export OpenType files, extend a copy of Illustrator CC and install it on both Mac and PC. Fontself is a program dedicated to creating fonts and it can become almost indispensable when we get used to it.įontself Maker brings you the ability to create fonts at a very affordable price, $ 49. From Illustrator high-quality fonts can be madeAlthough if we use another program, such as Fontself Maker, we will surely get more out of it.
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