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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1513481
Welcome to the vibrant realm of FontLab 8, where the art of typography transcends the grayscale of yesteryears, blooming into a spectrum of color that infuses soul into every character. For decades, you could typeset text in black, or another solid color. If you wanted multi-color letters, you had to hire a lettering artist to create a custom arrangement. But the days when fonts were prisoners of monochrome are gone. The mobile phones of the early 2000s brought us the ability to pepper our conversations with smiley faces, heralding the birth of emoji – the colorful ambassadors of our emotions. First, these were little GIFs, tiny images interspersed within the text. Then, the Unicode Standard assigned dedicated codes to the emoji characters, making them first-class citizens in plain text (figure 1). Today, you can copy and paste the emoji just like A-Z. But unlike the plain A-Z, those emoji dance in hues that span the rainbow, thanks to tech titans like Adobe, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, who expanded the horizons of OpenType. With the new color OpenType fonts, conventional alphabets can finally transcend their monochrome chains. FontLab 8 is the virtuoso’s instrument in this colorful symphony. It’s the only cross-platform font editor that embraces every shade OpenType has to offer, where vibrancy meets personality, allowing you to breathe unique flair into your typographic creations. What’s in a color OpenType font? A multi-color glyph can be a bitmap image (like a photo), or it can be a vector graphic (with plain colorful fills, strokes and gradients). You can use any image editing app (like Adobe Photoshop or Affinity Photo), or a vector editing app (like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer) to make the “pictures”. Then drag-drop or copy-paste them into FontLab 8, and export the font — that’s it.