Type is something I’ve appreciated from a distance for quite a while but never dabbed in until lockdown. At some point I was living with full-time working friends, my work at the [tattoo] studio was dry & so I had to figure out how to stay busy as I felt quite lost and bored. I am always challenging myself & I am rarely NOT working on something, so a long period of stillness was not exactly something my brain resonated with.
So I picked up an old uni project where we designed custom characters and I taught myself to use software to turn it into a typeface. That’s where the first version of Bastardo came out, and it’s also the reason it’s called Bastardo Grotesk*ish, as I really had no idea of what I was doing before I started. I recently released a v2 and it’s so exciting to see the growth in quality and sensibility in the span of a year.
I also honestly love the idea that a typeface is inherently existing to be paired with design, and the idea of watching the typeface be interpreted by other designers was thrilling. My friend Gemma keeps laughing at me adding new hyphens to my job description but I think that’s hilariously really what drew me in: something new to learn.
Now onto the hot topic, AKA “SHARING IS CARING”, so I would love to compile a doc including great tools for type designers to test-proof-kern-etc their typefaces. I am a child of the internet, and a lot of stuff is very free and very accessible, so here is it.
I'll go first, but feel free to suggest additions:
KERNING
• http://www.as8.it/type/basic_kerning_text.html
• https://pangrampangram.com/blogs/journal/kern-king-is-dead-long-live-kern-king-br-the-great-template-for-kerning-types
• https://justanotherfoundry.com/generator
• https://github.com/Tosche/BubbleKern
• https://github.com/huertatipografica/HTLetterspacer
• https://kern-on.com/
• https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/kernalytics-rf-ext
• https://www.typography.com/blog/text-for-proofing-fonts
LANGUAGE SUPPORT & TESTING
• https://underware.nl/latin_plus/validate/
• https://www.setuptype.com/x/cod/
• https://justanotherfoundry.com/generator
• https://wakamaifondue.com/
• https://hyperglot.rosettatype.com/
• https://simoncozens.github.io/coverslip/
• https://fontdrop.info/
• https://www.alphabet-type.com/tools/charset-checker/
VARIABLE & TESTING
• https://fontgauntlet.com/
• https://workshop.mass-driver.com/waterfall
• http://corvelsoftware.co.uk/crowbar/
• https://www.motaitalic.com/tools/font-tester/latin/
• https://www.axis-praxis.org/samsa/
• https://variable-type-tools.appspot.com/
• https://github.com/imohanvadivel/variable-font-playground (github)
• https://www.axis-praxis.org/specimens/__DEFAULT__
• https://bulletproof.italic.space/lettering
• https://fontproofer.com/
• https://opentype.js.org/index.html
EXTRA
• https://github.com/kabisa/specimen-skeleton/
• https://github.com/markboulton/specimen-builder-print
• https://www.fontradar.com/
• https://typedesignresources.com/ (looooong very complete list)