Going in Styles
By Adam Twardoch | www.fontlab.com
Styles are variations of a typeface that retain the basic design features while making some consistent changes across all the glyphs. The most common styles are bold and italic. While most text is used in a regular style, bold and italic are used for emphasis. Bold, for instance, is typically used for headlines. Italic is used frequently for captions or words in a foreign language (Figure 1.).
Bold and italic styles are usually carefully crafted by the designer of the original typeface. However, not every font has styles. You may find yourself in the situation where you need a stylized word or phrase, but the style you need doesn’t (yet) exist for the font you are using.
Fear not! You can make a pretty good imitation of a bold or italic font quickly on your own. The bold variant is particularly easy as FontLab has a built-in bold “effect”. Just apply this effect to a copy of your regular font; make a few tweaks; and voilà! — you have a new bold font. (Figure 2)
