Adding layers

In the past few months I have updated several typeface on myfonts.com by breaking apart shadowed and inline styles. With the parts separated into different faces, it is easy to create colorful lettering using layers. Below are examples of two-colored lettering for shadowed versions of Letunical, NewNerdish, and Phraxtured.  The results are shown over both white and gray backgrounds.

 Inline styles can be separated into three components: the inside, the middle ring, and the outside ring. Below are two fonts, Letunical-Inline and WurstHassen, that been decomposed, showing how the different components can be combined to produce two or three-colored lettering.

When I began breaking the inline faces into their parts, I made three separate typefaces of parts. (See LifeAfterCollege, for example.) Then I realized that I needed only two of the parts because the original typeface could serve as the base.

Because printing and displaying a font converts the mathematical outlines to a matrix of dots and those dots will not exactly match the outline, the order in which the layers are placed will affect how the end result appears. For example, here is Letunical with the a black middle ring in the top, middle, and bottom layer.


In the past week or two Myfonts has changed the way that fonts are displayed for purchasers. The changes are designed to give buyers easier access to the information that is most useful to them. The new display no longer has a "gallery" tab that displays whatever images the font designer uploaded. The only images that a buyer will now see are those that qualify as posters, images in png format at least 1440 pixels wide and twice as wide as tall. The gallery still exists and I have a number of documents there, mostly pdf files, that have special instructions. I think I have been able to link to all of them from the font descriptions.

Also discontinued are the images that Myfonts started with, square font flags that originally were 200 by 200 pixels. They may still be used on their old test site.