When I decided to start my own business, it was initially clear to me that the design, which was supposed to represent myself and my services, had to both withstand any criticism of a future customer and also showcase my skills. Nevertheless, in this highly self-critical project, I still adhered strictly to my usual approach of developing a design.
A corporate design is, of course, always a visualization of the personality of a company - its objectives, identification, services or products, and corporate philosophy. It's not easy sometimes to find a creative starting point, but I always start a design draft with the color combination first. So I imagine the company as a person and ask myself what color the person most likely would wear to convey his/her ideals.
In the case of my own company, I laid down the main color with white, which should impart a liberal attitude in every respect. Owing to the fact that I present my work in the context of sustainable responsibility, the color green was almost self-evident. And to add the necessary freshness and variety to the color palette, I also added a rich orange as an accent. With these colors chosen, I then created a palette for web images (RGB) and a palette for print (CMYK).
In my workflow, the form follows after the color, and I decided for clear and simple geometric shapes as they invite the viewer to interpret with plenty of space. With color and shape choices made, I start to design the layout and turn to some classic tools, such as the golden section. The layout was created in CorelDRAW with the help of alignment tools, the PowerClip feature, and the Layout toolbar.
When the layout is done, I start searching for fonts that make the design concept credible and rounded. Somehow no font was suitable for my concept, so I concluded that it would be the best to simply create a font for the corporate design on my own. Luckily, CorelDRAW provides tools for font creation, so I got on without hesitation. I started with a document of 167 pages in length, one page for each character. This page count is enough to represent the most commonly used letters, numbers, and special characters of the Latin and Western European character set.
First, I constructed a typographical design grid for the dimensions of the upper and lower case letters with Dynamic Guides. With the help of the B-Spline tool, the Document Grid and Snap To Grid functions turned on, I created some basic shapes which reflect in certain characters - for example, the center line arch from a small "h", "n", and "m" - and was then able to quickly create letters by copying the basic shapes.
I placed the shapes on the Desktop Layer, so that I had access to them on every page of the document. Characters, symbols, and numbers have also been created with the B-Spline tool. To ensure a constant line width of the font, I applied the Artistic Media tool to every letter. I moved the letters in accordance to ensure an optically consistent spacing between them by using Ctrl and the left and right arrow keys. With my font almost finished, and all Artistic Media Objects converted to curves, I started to save each page in a single font file. Finally, I have corrected the minimum kerning in a free program called "FontForge".
Thanks for sharing the link.
Thanks again, Silvio! The procedure of creating a font can get very complex and demanding, though CorelDRAW makes it as easy as possible. A tutorial about font creation would be very long, something along the lines of a couple-hour-training. But I'll keep your suggestion in mind. Ah, here I have a link, where Steve Bain covers the most important steps., it has helped me a lot:coreldesigner.wordpress.com/.../create-your-own-custom-fonts-using-coreldraw-part-i
Hi Mo,
Very interesting your arguments about having your own font design. It looks great! How about creating a basic Tutorial (step by step) for rookies in this task?