Font creation is a tedious task

Who would have thought this could take so long?

So I wrote out this alphabet for "TV Dinner Assassin" with a 1.1mm fountain pen, scanned it at 1200dpi, and cleaned it up in Photoshop, saving as Bitmap. Sounds straight forward enough, right? The letters looked pretty clean to me.

Well, when I Live Traced them in Illustrator with the Lettering setting, all those stupid letters turned otu to be really complex. I'm talking 150 anchor points per letter minimum, and curves that are all over the place, recreating the aliasing effects and every little bit of unclean curve in vector graphics. Swell.

So now I have to resize and adjust two upper case alphabets for this one font and it's taking forever. After finishing with A - D (8 characters total), I called it a day.

That shit's boring, yo!

Well, I have to get through it so lettering can start on the first issue. I'll do two versions of the font: One with all those imperfections intact, yet all serifs properly adjusted, and one based on this final version where I simplify the curves and get the anchor points down to the bare minimum. Should be interesting to compare and contrast.

I've got to talk to JP and sit down each day to work on a few of those characters till it's done. Hopefully it gets faster soon.

One thing's for certain: I need to buy a graphics tablet so that I can draw out alphabets directly in Photoshop (or maybe even Illustrator. We'll see). That way, the scan won't produce shitty aliasing because of paper roughness.