So my company has tasked me with “creating a font.” I mostly work with motion graphics, so this is stumping me.
As a company, we use Avenir Book as the font for most of our graphics and videos. But what I need to find out is how to make every first letter of a word Avenir Medium. Right now I’m just manually changing each individual letter. Is there a way I could possibly merge these two fonts and have each first letter Avenir Medium while typing?
Hmmm, yes, sort of, but it would involve a considerable amount of work and learning how to use font creation software (there’s a learning curve). Text with every first letter of every word set in a different weight of type would be sort of ugly and weird, but I guess you have your reasons.
You might ask your question on TypeDrawer.com. There are lots of type designers there who are good at figuring out this kind of thing, but I’m sort of thinking that there’s no easy way to do it. OpenType fonts support a certain amount of programming, so there might be a way by adding medium-weight alternates in the font.
An easier way might be automating something within whatever application you’re using. If it’s InDesign, regular expressions (a text manipulation language based around pattern recognition) could likely handle it.
Unless you really need to do this for some compelling reason, I’d probably advise you not to pursue it.
In addition, the other thing to consider is the legality of it.
Most EULAs don’t allow for manipulation of the font to create another. You may have to go back to the original designer to do it. I once worked on a series of kirs’ educational books and for early ages we needed an infant version of the font used throughout. It would be a relatively easy thing to do. Only a couple of glyphs needed creating. We hadvtongo back and pay the foundry to do it, Fair enough, it’s their copy right and I would want someone else playing around with my baby.
There are usually hundreds o thousands of hours go into designing and building fonts and as Just-B says, there’s a steep learning curve. (The creating of the hundreds of glyphs is the easy part).
My advice would be read the EULA very carefully. I’d wager you can’t do what you want to be able to do.
@Sprout is right. Avenir is owned by Linotype. Here’s the relevant item from the licensing agreement.
- Alterations to Font Software. You may not alter Font Software for the purpose of adding any functionality that such Font Software did not have when delivered to you by Monotype. If the Font Software contains embedding bits that indicate that the Font Software is only authorized for certain purposes, you may not change or alter the embedding bits.