fonts

I saw and played with my first Mac in 1984. I loved getting into MacDraw and coming up with new fonts, even though I didn't know how to actually make them into workable fonts. I just loved designing new typefaces. One of the first things I wished about cool fonts was that they could resemble hand lettering: I'd been trained as a calligrapher (yep, I was trained as a calligrapher) to be able to spot hand-done stuff as opposed to printed stuff. One of the things you look for is variation in letters.

Fast-forward to 2007: I was messing around with a sticky-note, and tried changing the font to Zapfino. In BBEdit, the font is static: a letter is a letter is a letter. But in Stickies, the font becomes dynamic. When you type the next letter, the previous letter may change to accommodate it. There are hundreds of ligatures in this font, activated by your typing. At last! We finally have the bandwidth to do this. Now all I have to do is design a font based on my handwriting, with several instances of each letter, triggered either randomly or by combination. Maybe I'll do that in my spare time.