With Glyphs, a font editing application that Georg Seifert released in 2011, he released a big improvement to the way typefaces are produced these days. He developed it for a simple reason: With regular type software, you only see one letter at a time, on a big, plain area. That’s simply not what the character will look and work like in the end. And that’s why Glyphs gives the possibility to always show a combination of letters and words, and edit the shapes straight away.

In his presentation in the Type Lab, he shows another cool feature that is possible with Glyphs: The creation of “Farbschriften”; colored fonts, bitmaps within characters. Within Glyphs, you can simply drag and drop an image into your character canvas. At first, it will appear as a background image; a template which is usually used to trace sketches and transform them into vectors.

If you want to use the bitmap as the actual character, simply name the layer “iColor 512” (if you have a 512 pixel bitmap). It might take some trial and error to adjust the character’s positioning – simply compare it to other characters in your font.

Currently, the Apple Color Fonts are only supported in iOS and Mac OS X apps that use the Apple text engine. But future support for SVG image fonts is on it’s way through Mozilla and Adobe – for now, this is a rather experimental feature, but it can give a nice little touch to your iOS or Mac OS application. It works especially well for handwritten letters, for example with watercolor, or if you simply want to add an illustrative character to your letters.

You can find out more on Apple Color Fonts in Georg Seifert’s tutorial published in the Glyphs documentation. Have fun!

 

AB