Glyphs workshops at TDC, New York

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24–26 October 2014

Register now for one, two, or all three days of Glyphs workshops at the TDC in New York. But beware, registration is required and space is limited, so reserve your seat as soon as possible. You can find all details on the TDC page.

  • All workshops are held in English, and take place at Type Directors Club, 347 West 36th Street, Suite 603
  • Students can choose the amount of days they wish to attend.
  • All attendees will be given a complimentary 6-month license to Glyphs and some third-party software.
  • Attendees can purchase a Glyphs license at the discounted price of USD 250.

Day 1: Introduction To Font Design

  • When: Friday, 24 October, 8:30 am
  • Who: Matteo Bologna (mrmucca) & Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer (mekkablue)
  • For whom: This session is recommended for type novices, as well as for expert-level type designers
  • Prerequisites: No prior experience is required, some experience with Bézier-based vector drawing tools is useful. Bring your MacBook (OS X 10.7+)

In the morning session, we will sketch a few letters, digitise them, export the font, and use it in InDesign. In the afternoon, we will add additional letters to the font, kern them, optimize them for the screen, add diacritics, and produce the combined letters. At the end of the day, we will not have a finished font, but a respectable start.

Day 2: Glyphs Pro Workshop

  • When: Saturday, 25 October, 8:30 am
  • Who: Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer (mekkablue)
  • For whom: This session is recommended for type novices who learned the basics on Day 1, expert-level type designers, and prior Glyphs users.
  • Prerequisites: Some prior experience in type design recommended (the words OpenType and Multiple Master should not sound foreign to you) or the introductory workshop. Bring your MacBook (OS X 10.7+), and know your admin password, because we will make some installations

In the morning, we will start with a monoline (open paths) design in Glyphs. We will export it using a Glyphs feature called Custom Parameters. By adding glyph variations, we will make Glyphs auto-generate OpenType features for us.
In the afternoon, we will expand the monoline to a single-axis Multiple Master set-up, making use of built-in features as well as third-party scripts and plugins.

Day 3: Python with Glyphs

  • When: Sunday, 26 October, 8:30 am
  • Who: Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer (mekkablue)
  • For whom: This advanced-level session is recommended for the type novices who learned the basics on Day 1 and Day 2, expert-level type designers, and prior Glyphs users.
  • Prerequisites: Bring your MacBook (OS X 10.7+), with the latest Glyphs.app beta and a Python-ready text editor installed (I recommend TextMate 2 or Sublime Text 2, personally, I use TextMate). No prior knowledge of Python required, but we will assume you have used Glyphs.app before

In the morning, we will learn some basic concepts of programming in Python: variables, loops, functions, etc. We will put our knowledge to use by writing a report script and batch-modifying font attributes through Python scripting.
In the afternoon, after a short summary of the morning session, we will use Python for creating and modifying glyphs in an existing font. At the end of the day, we will take a brief look at the so-called Python Objective-C Bridge in order to directly access app functions.