Chris Dickman (bio)

FontLab TypeTool 3
While Adobe is pretty much synonymous with graphics and publishing these days, what if you had to name the top developer of typographic tools? Step forward FontLab, a firm that has been toiling in the typographic trenches for a very long time indeed. The design community owes a significant debt to FontLab, thanks to its acquisition and revival of the venerable Fontographer, which it rescued from a slow death at the hands of Macromedia in 2005. Fontographer is FontLab's mid-level font creation product, positioned between the high-end FontLab Studio and the more modest TypeTool.

FontLab sees TypeTool as an entry-level tool for students, hobby typographers and designers with the occasional need to create or customize fonts. Typical uses include the creation of new text, dingbat or clipart fonts, customization of existing fonts, adding logos or signatures to fonts, and extending fonts with ligatures, old-style figures, fractions, currency symbols, punctuation or international characters. Entry-level it may be, but nevertheless it can be used to create professional-quality TrueType, Type 1 and now, OpenType fonts. However, while TypeTool lets users create or modify existing OpenType fonts, with support for up to 65,000 glyphs, unlike FontLab Studio it can't edit the advanced OpenType typographic layout features.

New in TypeTool 3 is support for the bitmap Background layer, into which users can import bitmap images or BDF bitmap fonts, and for the Mask layer, which can be used to place reference outlines. As well as the usual Bézier drawing tools, a set of VectorPaint tools is now included for creating realistic bitmap-like outline editing using shaped brush strokes. TypeTool can import and export individual glyphs in EPS format, and exchange drawings with Adobe Illustrator through copy-paste. Also new is support for the entire Unicode 5.0 codepoint range, improved drawing with open contours and tangent points, multi-line metrics and kerning editing, and better printouts. TypeTool for Mac and Windows can be purchased on the FontLab site for $99, which seems like a pretty good deal to me. Demo versions are also available for download.

dot-font: Talking About Fonts
Mark Batty Publisher is certainly racking up a string of unique book titles devoted to graphics, art and popular culture. I took a look at its Talk Back title here last summer, while Mike Lenhart more recently reviewed Mexican Blackletter. In the last few months Mark Batty has released such titles as Bathroom Graffiti, CBGB: Decades of Graffiti and Madonna of the Toast, making me a little apprehensive about what it was going to come up with next. To my relief, the answer turned out to be a truly useful typographic title, as well as a new series of small books dedicated to design topics.

The first two titles in the dot-font: Talking About... series are updated versions of columns by design and type writer John D. Berry that originally appeared online. Talking About Fonts and Talking About Design are both worthy efforts that stand up to the passing years quite well. They're agreeably modest in format, scope, price and in even the tone of Berry's always-thoughtful commentary on design and typography topics. There are currently type-centric extracts from both available on Graphics.com: The Pleasures of Old Type Books and Putting Some Spine Into Design.

Founded in 1990 by Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody, the FontFont library now contains thousands of type designs by some of the most talented creators worldwide. The new Made with FontFont anthology of type specimens and essays contributed by designers and design writers thus sounds promising, given the firm's central role in the recent history of type design (a spread is shown below). Those who can't afford the $65 price tag can still get their dose of FontFont via its bi-weekly newsletter and Font magazine.

More Type Articles on Graphics.com
In the first installment of All Things Typographic I mentioned the Pop OpenType symbol font released by the Kapitza design partnership. Kapitza recently provided Graphics.com with a tutorial exploring the creative possibilities of pattern fonts in general and Pop in particular, made possible by the provision of a free download of a few characters from the Pop font.

Also of interest on Graphics.com is the just-posted extract from Type, Image, Message: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop, by Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell (Rockport Publishers). Inversion: Type and Image Trade Roles provides examples of what happens when type is portrayed as part of an image, or when an image is built from type.

Open Up to OpenType Webcast
Regular readers (hi, mom!) know that I am a big fan of the OpenType format, even going so far as to designate 2005 as The Year of OpenType. There's no doubt that this format now dominates and for good reason, given its many improvements over PostScript and TrueType. So you can bet that I'm already signed up for the second event in Dynamic Graphics magazine's free webcast series, timed in conjunction with the typographically-themed issues of Dynamic Graphics and sister publication STEP inside design. Open Up to OpenType is scheduled for Tuesday, May 8, at 2 pm EDT, with no less a digital type pioneer than Adobe as the official sponsor.

The event will be led by Ilene Strizver, founder of The Type Studio, who will be showing how designers can get the most out of OpenType's advanced features. More information and registration is available on the Dynamic Graphics site. Prior to the event, be sure to check out Ilene's current article, also on the Dynamic Graphics site, Solve Your Font Problems, which takes a look at three popular font managers.

Chris Dickman
Graphics.com