NUTHARC Font Development: Pulling Things to a Close

I'm done. All the relevant glyphs, numerals, letterforms and foreign characters is finished, adjusted and ready to be exported into a font file. Here is the final font table:

The only problem I have at the minute is the metrics. I still think work could be done, but I think it's time to call it a day. The perfectionist in me wants to continue, but I'm overriding these thoughts and finalising the font now. Otherwise, I will be here for another week, and I think I've spent too much time on it already.

I have given the final font to a few people to test out. I would say it's in the beta stage at the moment - it definitely needs testing. I will ask them if they can see any problems over the coming weeks, and I can always go back and make slight changes to it before making it available for download - which is something that I definitely want to do.

It's completely fine and usable for me to promote the font, make samples and typographic posters with, and to extend it into a tool for promoting the Nordic music scene - which is ultimately what I want to do, and the reason for making it key-able.

Short Evaluation

I thought it would be good to offer a short evaluation of my time with Fontographer 5, and to analyse the problems I had with the software along the way.

Firstly, it was much easier to get to grips with than I thought. The stories I had heard before were very negative, it seemed like a very frustrating piece of software to use. I found that if I imported the files in EPS format, it worked absolutely fine.

There were some problems with scale and proportions, but I found a way around that by including a scaled 'I' letterform with each glyph to ensure it stayed the correct size and weight for the font.

Overall, I think it has been a useful experience for me. I have spent a lot of, if not all, of the Easter period creating glyphs, getting to grips with the software and building an awareness of good font design and the metric system. I have come out with a product that I can market and sell, which I didn't have before, and have created more opportunities for my typeface to exist in the real world.

Out of interest, I googled 'Nutharc' to see what would come up. I have been featured on Luc Devroye's website, link below, of who I understand to be a Belgian-born computer scientist based in Canada. So that was nice.

[Link to Luc Devroye's feature]

I also noticed something interesting, a link to a search for 'Chris Lawson Nutharc 2013b' on My Fonts. Could be a glitch, but hopefully these points suggest there is some demand for my typeface, and is something I definitely want to build on through promotion and typographical specimens.