BlackOutDesign

The Font Isn’t Always Right

When designing, we tend to rely on fonts to assist in doing our job. Possibly one of the more important tools we can have is a good library of great fonts at our disposal, as well as an understanding of how these fonts will layout, their letter forms and spacing. Sometimes though you really like the font, but not every letter form works for you. No one ever said you had to use it as, that’s one of the reasons why Ai has a convert to outlines options

In this particular case the font was already designated by years of use with the client, and when asked to design an anniversary logo for them, I went straight to their logo font Eurostile (Bold Extended 2). When I laid out the tag line however I found some letters in the Eurostile alphabet fighting with the extended width and rounded corners indicative of this typeface.

To be more specific the A and Y. As well as the C and E not being to my liking. They just didn’t feel like they fit the overall appearance of the font for this case. What to do, what to do. With just a quick glance at the font it was easy to see what other letters in this font could be easily used to create new forms that worked for my purpose.

With simple cuts and a few dimensional changes one can simply make a U into a new A that matches the curved corners of the majority of the typeface. The C can be trimmed down and extended to the proper letter width for a more open form. Slide that over to create a new E. Simply take the U again to create a Y that fits the bill. The finished forms are now ready to go.

When all is said and done it was a quick and easy fix to get the font to how I would prefer it to look in this case. When you compare the two I don’t think it’s hard to see that these small changes were forth the effort.

Though not for this article, similar practices can even be used to create icons and logos as seen here. Every portion of the Train, Bulb and Sign are all whole letters or portions of letters from a handwritten font to capture a hand-drawn effect.