Week 12: Trimmies
Named after her older sister, Piecees.
Greetings Reader <3
The thing I love most about type design is that moment when the font you’re working on starts to click. It’s a distinct feeling of clarity where all the kinks are worked out and you become really stoked on what you’re making. It’s one of the reasons I started this year-long project — so I could live in that moment. But this week nothing clicked!! I tried 6 different concepts before I finally just threw a hail mary and made some dingbats.
No complaints here because I love dingbats! I have been sitting on this half made set of borders for a while. Before, I wasn’t quite sure how they were going to come together. But after revisiting them, it became clear how very TDN they are and so I needed to share.
My approach to designing these was to make a set of borders that doubled as patterns. It was also very important for them to fit within my personal design aesthetic and pair well with my work. On the technical side, I made the glyph 1000 units tall (deleted the ascender, descender, and x-height values). I also made sure the width of each glyph was 1000 units so they would be perfectly square. If an object didn’t fill the space, I made sure it butt right up against the appropriate side bearing. I wanted to have consistent spacing across the board so that they function on a grid.
Some tips for using Trimmies:
Open the glyphs palette to see the whole characterset at once and pick the shapes you want to use
Make the leading equal to the size of the type to remove any whitespace between the lines
Pick a handful of characters that pair well together and repeat them randomly to make an interesting pattern!
Use the shapes on their own to add a little decoration to your work
Refer to the included reference PNG to match the shape to the character
Take it sleazy,
Libbie