Raafia Jessa

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Thorns

The last time I talked about this project, I said it was almost finished (as I really hoped it was). As it turns out, I was quite wrong. There were ALOT of things that still needed to be tackled:

Challenge 1: Cut out the flower pattern from the letter shape

Each little shape had to be individually outlined and cut out starting from the ones at the very bottom moving upwards (otherwise it’s just a cutting a giant blob out of the letter shape)

Challenge 2: Change the line style to something that can easily be turned into shapes

I had initially drawn the details with a more rough vector brush stroke, but in order to make an OTF, no lines are allowed, MUST be only shapes

Challenge 3: Combine details layer (the lines that are now shapes) into letter shape while minimizing vector points as much as possible

Type programs don’t export an OTF correctly if any letter has more than a 1000 points

Challenge 4: Draw an ampersand that matches the typeface

This is wayyyyy more difficult than I thought it would be, still not quite finished.

Challenge 5: Import into a type program and fix the spacing, kerning, line length etc. and export as an OTF

I’m on this step right now, there are some letters that have too many details and thus have to be redrawn for the program to correctly export the OTF i.e. a lot more hand placing vector points to recreate the flower pattern more simply for the larger letters (B, H, M, Q, R, W, Z)

Most of these challenges have been resolved, there are still a few that I’m still working on.
The OTF typeface is not quite ready to be available for use.
But, as I trim these thorns, here’s some punctuation :)

Just an update :)


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