I am not a type designer. Like pretty much everyone else in the world, I lack the time, patience, and skill to design an entire font and I probably always will.

Glyphs uses familiar bezier curves for line control.

Even though I’m not going to produce the next Helvetica, I have found that type design software is still a useful tool to have in the box and here’s why:

Logotype.

Sometimes you want to make modifications to an existing font or build unique characters when designing a new logo or  setting other display text.

The FedEx logo is a great example of this – the right-pointing arrow implied by the negative space between E and x was achieved by designing a custom typeface based on Univers and Futura.

Although FedEx had the budget to commission an entire face from a respected foundry and  also required many variations to accommodate numerous brands and departments, the word FedEx is is only five characters – you could just draw it in Illustrator.

The problem with drawing letterforms is that you lose out on all of the  slick geometry and text effects available in the Adobe Creative Suite.

It is just extremely convenient to maintain live type in application software and will generally produce sharper, more precise text in print – especially when trapping text to another color or using a knockout effect.

The Glyphs application for Mac, written by German developer Georg Seifert, is currently in public beta and is available for download at glyphsapp.com (or schriftgestaltung.de for those of you who sprechen Deutsch).

Some of the earlier builds used to construct the Ross logotype were a little buggy when it came to undo and other handy functions,  but more recent builds have stabilized considerably and I highly recommend spending the half day or so it takes to become familiar with the basics of this very useful tool.

If you find drawing from scratch in Glyphs to be overly complicated and not worth the effort,  just draw your vectors in Illustrator, copy’n'paste straight into a character in Glphys, and export an OpenType file.

This extra step to roundtrip your custom lettering into an .otf will definitely pay off if you intend to use it in more than one project.