Calendra, Part #6: Font Design

❖ Version History ❖

28th of June, 2020
Once on the path to create digital designs of Calendra, I very quickly came across an issue: I wanted to use specialized / authentic looking Celtic font and typography within the designs, but I had none installed on my computer that I felt fit the job.

This lead me to sifting around the internet in search of the perfect font to use, and in my hunt I did find a great many options, but none of them carried the same look I had been searching for in every way, I kept finding myself wanting bits and pieces from various different designs. Then, I remembered something from far earlier in the year that I had dabbled with… it was a software called “Calligraphr”, and it was something that you could use to design your own font from scratch.

Though the idea of creating a font is something that is very time consuming and tedious, I felt like it would give me the access to exactly the look I wanted for this game. So, I downloaded one of their font sheets and began the quest on creating the 100 letters, numbers, & symbols that needed to be designed. I had basically three parameters that I wanted to meet:

1. I want it to look celtic & gothic
2. I wanted replace punctuation with all the symbols that would be needed in the game.
3. I wanted there to be a hollow version of the lettering and a bold.

I spent about two weeks doing each individual piece of the font design. I began by creating the hollow format of the lettering that you see pictured above, because these same letters, numbers and symbols could easily be copied onto a new layer and filled in to create the bold formatting of the font.

In this process, all of the symbols we needed for the game had to be designed. There had been no symbols to represent the seasons, or the super powers that each card held, there had only been drafted ideas about this concept as we had designed the previous iterations of the game. Interestingly enough, many of the same concepts from the little wood chip version of the game were utilized and redesigned into a far higher quality because they had worked so well as a placeholder.

I had also had the idea to do a 25% opacity version of the font. In my head, I though it would be cool to be able to see through the letters, but have them somewhat colored in as well. What I discovered after I created this sheet though is that the file format necessary to create a font relies on .svg (vector graphics). This format of graphic has a very useful aspect of being able to be redesigned to any size without losing quality. but. it also has the downside of no longer being able to retain opacity, so these letters just appeared black when typed (exactly like the bold font shown below).

Realizing that the 25% opacity could not possibly work, I simply returned to finishing the full opacity bold font sheet. Once finished, several days of downloading, testing, installing, uninstalling, redrawing, re-uploading, and starting all over again occurred until I finally came across the final iteration. Once happy with the final product, I came back to the card editor and began formatting the cards with the new lettering to see how everything turned out!