MacDirectory Magazine

Stijn Grooten

MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.

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If your logo or symbol has multiple portions with different colors, then you can create more glyphs, like “two”, “three” etc., and put each portion into a different glyph. When you type your text, the text cursor will move ahead by each glyph’s “advance width” (like on a typewriter). Move the sidebearings (left and right bounds of the advance width) for each glyph so that together, they take up the space of the full symbol. Each partial glyph can stick out beyond its sidebearings so that the portions that you’ll later colorize overlap nicely (figure 2). If you’ve made a two-part logo in the glyphs “one” and “two”, you’ll be able to type “12”, colorize each digit, choose the font and get the result you want. With OpenType ligatures, you can make the typing even easier: just create simple substitution rules that replace a series of input letters with the glyphs you’ve drawn. Click Compile and FontLab will create blank glyphs for the input letters — you don’t need to draw anything in them (figure 3). And now the finale: Export the font as OpenType PS into the folder of your choice. Inside the folder will be your fresh OpenType font. Install it, open a graphics program or text editor and type “12”. Colorize each letter and choose MyLogoFont from the font dropdown — voilà! If you created the ligature feature, you can even type the longer text, like “FontLab” (figure 4). Now the logo is instantly available to all apps on your computer: Illustrator, PowerPoint, Word, InDesign, Photoshop... You can include the .otf as a web font that will work on your website. And that’s just the beginning. You could turn a multi-color logo into an OpenType+SVG font that will work in Adobe Creative Cloud apps, or make a variable font with the optical size axis, where the logo or symbol adapts its shape depending on the text size! The possibilites are limited only by your imagination. Logo fonts - one of the most versatile tools you can add to your kit. Try one today www.fontlab.com. Figure 2. A logo can consist of multiple glyphs. In this case "Font" is one glyph and "LAB" is another The letterforms are being used as pictures here, not as characters.

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