Journal

Posted by: David Logan

14 July 2009

Skylab has given birth to its first bouncing baby font

Skylab has given birth to its first bouncing baby font. Its name is ‘Skooper’ and it weighs in at 12pt (and more). It was originally conceived to be the face of a project we’re currently working on, a project that required something with a warm, friendly vibe.

We’ve released the font under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK & Wales license.

Taking a lead from the curvy perennial classic ‘Cooper’ we decided to hand-render our version in a loose pencil outline, we finished the cut with a diagonal pencil scribble to give it the informal and sketchy vibe we were after.

The font was created by Skylab-Tom who says “I’d been interested in creating a font for a while so this project provided the ideal opportunity to give it a go. So, armed with an old copy of Fontlab Studio, a scanner and a sharp pencil I set to work…”

Download the TrueType file.
Download the OpenType file.

Alternatively you can download the font from dafont.com

For those interested in creating their own hand drawn fonts, here are the steps he took:

  1. Print a reference – As this font was based on Cooper Tom printed off a copy of all the characters required.
  2. Sketching the characters – Tom started by tracing an outline of the characters loosely, then filled in with diagonal strokes, trying to keep the thickness of the strokes consistent.
  3. Scan the sketches – At a high resolution.
  4. Photoshop – Load the sketches in Photoshop and adjust the levels until all that remained was black strokes and white background.
  5. Illustrator – Copy the Photoshop images into Illustrator and convert them to vector using Live Trace (using the one color logo option works best). Use the simplfy path tool to get rid of the unwanted complexity, then use the new blob tool to fill in the unwanted spaces in the characters.
  6. FontLab – Copy and paste each character from illustrator into FontLab using Cooper as a guide to adjust the kerning. Check for errors and if needed adjust each character and close any open contours.
  7. Generate the font as both an Opentype file for the mac, plus a Truetype file for PC.
  8. Install the font!

Comments

Phil

Fri Jul 31, 2009 at 0.33am

You’ve said we can download it, but can we use it? What’s the license?

Andrew Disley

Sat Aug 1, 2009 at 4.29am

Lovely job guys, what are the licensing rules on this font?

Are you happy for people to embed into websites using Cufon and other embedding methods?

Is commercial use of the font allowed?

David Logan

Mon Aug 3, 2009 at 14.57pm

Hey, thanks for the comments.

We’ve released the font under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK & Wales license.

I’ve updated the article with a link, thanks for pointing that out!

Post a Comment

required

required but will not be displayed

required

radioskylab

What we're listening to in the studio.

Home

LCD Soundsystem

View more at our Last FM page

Teamskylab

The latest feeds from the studio powered by Yahoo Pipes.