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.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1500862
skeletons of your icons. Use Bézier curves, ellipses, polygons and stars to create the basic modules of the icon set, and apply a stroke thickness to get a crisp result (see figure 2). Finally, use the powerful mechanism of element references to re-use the basic shapes in more complex icons. Make your icons precise: can use a grid and guides to align the points in your drawings. And if you use a font editor like FontLab 8, you can also work with “pixel-perfect” integer coordinates. In fonts, and in icons made in a font editor, the “eM” is the hypothetical artboard on which you place your design. Let’s say you want to mainly use your icons a size that’s equivalent to the 18 pixels font size — then set “Font Info › Family Dimensions › Units Per eM” to 180 or, if you need more freedom for your Bézier handles, to 1800. Turn on “Round coordinates” and the points in your drawing will snap to the integer grid (see figure 3). You don’t need to draw all icons from scratch. Perhaps you’ve picked an existing icon set that lacks one or two pictograms that you need. Drop all SVG icon files to a new FontLab font, select all glyph cells and choose “Element › Image › Make SVG Editable”, then “Font › Detect Composites”. FontLab will find identical elements across all icons and connect them to form references. Then use the streamlined, precise, intelligent contour editing tools to change one reference, and have all other update (figure 4). Magic, instant consistency and precision!