Lettering to Font Workshop

with Francis Chouquet (Date: TBC)

Ever wanted to design a funky font from the 60s or turn some great lettering into a font? This weekend workshop is a great opportunity to do it! In this two-day class, you will choose a lettering of your choice and study it to turn it into a font. You will design the characters on the iPad, with the Fontself app, including spacing, and create some fun specific features using Opentype in the font-design software Glyphs (Mac only).

In the Saturday session, we will start by analyzing the lettering piece you chose. You will understand it in order to create the rest of the alphabet. Then you will use it to create all characters in the Fontself app, with a pencil, hand-made, just like in the old days, and tha app will take care of vectorization and spacing.

On Sunday, you will design some fun ligatures and stylistic letters in order to give a more natural feeling to your font. We will then move to Glyphs, adjust glyphs settings and spacing when needed, and start create some magic with Opentype features, like integrating ligatures, a stylistic set so you don’t use the same letter design twice in the same word (like two different a’s for example so it does not really feel like a font) and add some bouncing to the lettering so they don’t all fit strictly on the base line and feel more natural for a hand drawn font.

Course schedule
(Date: TBC)
Classes take place from 1–8 pm UK time

Course materials and projects
You will need is a stable internet connection, an iPad and a Mac. You’ll get a free trial version of Glyphs 3 and a licence for Fontself on the iPad.

Capacity

The course is open to a maximum 15 participants. This ensures that each student gets ample time for feedback.

How does it work?
The course is taught by Francis Chouquet. The workshop will take place over Zoom from 1 to 8pm UK time, with a one-hour lunch break. A day or two before the first session, we’ll email you a zoom link.

Bio
For more than a decade now, Francis has focused his work around letters. His work is strongly influenced by American lettering styles from the 40s to the 70s with joyful, funky and destructured forms. His everyday work focuses on lettering in different forms, like logo design or typographic illustrations for posters, book covers or magazines, and on type design.

He has his own foundry where he sells experimental fonts, layered and color fonts, like Lustik. In 2018 he published a book called “the Lettering Workshops” and he is also a teacher at Domestika where he shares his love for mid century lettering and illustration, my process, to create a festival poster.

Fees
The course is £350 (+ 20% VAT if applicable) and is non-refundable. If you have any questions, please email [email protected]