Asset: SciFi Font "Huberfish" and How It Was Made (by Teague Chrystie) (Patreon)

[INTRO FROM IAN]
This is a guest post! One of the absolute most exciting aspects of this patreon has been the possibility of bringing other folks on board to tackle things I don't know how to do, or am intimidated by; this guest post by Teague is an example of that!

I've been friends with Teague for- dang, almost 20 years?? We met ages ago on a fan film forum "TheForce.net"- which was the place to be for high-concept low-budget backyard filmmaking back in the day (if you were there you're likely  already familiar with the 'Aurebesh' font he mentions (and which was also, I suspect, was the original reason I wanted a font to begin with) :P. )

There are always background/worldbuilding details that I'd love to dive deeper into, but would require a larger mental/time investment than I can justify (thanks Paul Spooner and the Shade subway map!) Dynamo Dream takes place over multiple worlds, and there's really no justifiable excuse for English to be the default language of most of these worlds, and while I don't particularly mind not bringing attention to it (or implying that the language has just been translated through The Power of Cinema)- having an unidentifiable written language seemed like a nice middle ground, without having to go full Tolkien.

Teague has long been one of the cleverest, most methodical son-of-a-gun's I know (it's from a while back, but his write-up of learning arduino is one of my favorite things to read (and is what originally got me into arduino)) , so I was totally delighted when he said he'd be down to tackle it!

DOWNLOAD FONT HERE:
Download Page
Creative Commons 0 license - use it for whatever you like
[from limited research, I think I recommend installing the OFT version, unless you have a specific reason to believe TTF might work better]

Also, from a worldbuilding perspective, this is sort of a lazy shortcut- a "commons" language that's seen on multiple worlds. If you want to use it in your project and imply there's some bleed-over, of course I think that's fun :D

[END INTRO FROM IAN]



Hi! Even before I introduce myself,

Spoiler alert: Calligraphr. It's a free service that takes your artwork and converts it into fonts. It's a game-changer. As a lazy graphic artist, I've fiddled with font-making a number of times over the years, and I've had some minor successes — but, straight-up, Calligraphr is the tool I've been imagining the whole time. It's very simple, and while there are limitations with the free version, they didn't interrupt this project in any significant way. To be clear, I have no affiliation with Calligraphr.

— anyway! Hi, I'm Teague.

Ian asked if I'd be interested in whipping-up some kind of... font... language... something, to allow for various kinds of written signage to populate his lived-in reality-lookin' sci-fi worlds; something to resemble a just-barely-foreign human language, without any recognizable characters. What I ended up creating is just a straightforward cypher; that is, A-thru-Z, as per usual — but with different symbols. Then I constructed a handful of fonts for Ian to use in various ways, deploying these symbols in various font-ish and hand-ish styles.

Fun fact: At one point, I had Aurebesh memorized. (A similar cypher-style 'language' from the Star Wars universe.)

To create the symbols, I took two full circuits through the alphabet, creating 52 alternate symbols total, before narrowing it down to my favorite 26. The symbols themselves try to adhere to some fairly intuitive self-imposed limitations: Nothing too complicated; easily distinguishable from each other; primarily constructed of vertical or circular strokes, with occasional nurnies and diagonals; more than anything else, they had to be flexible, just like real symbols are. You needed to be able to identify each one equivalently whether sans-serif or spray paint.

You could do this kind of design work on a notepad from absolute scratch, but I actually began by taking English text characters and altering them. I figured the easiest way to fall backwards into all of my 'intuitive' criteria above would be to simply aim for a jibberish Times New Roman.

So, I started with Times New Roman.

Made a grid of capital letters, rasterized the text layer, and — one-by-one — set about creating fake letters from real ones, taking care to maintain the weighting and contrast of a normal Times New glyph. Thick and thin lines, ideally in the right places.

Fun fact: Broadly speaking, fat lines correlate to downward strokes.

(Fun fact note: In some of these attached images, you're seeing glyphs that were abandoned before being polished. Pointing out places where I'm not following my own rules is unfair of you and definitely not in the spirit of fun facts.)

There's really only two key takeaways from the fake-font design process: The first, as mentioned, is keeping the thick-thin look more or less consistent with real-world rules. The second is keeping a consistent mid-line. Nearly as much time went into re-editing 'finished' characters as had gone into building them the first time; but, once I had a finished set, I'd go back through all the new glyphs with a single comparator glyph that featured an exemplar midline (basically chosen-to-taste), and then moved around the constituent pieces of any glyph with a midline-ish structure, to complement the chosen example. Consistent weights, consistent lines, consistent midlines. The consistency of the rule-following is what makes it pop like a font.

Fun fact: Replace the word 'font' in the previous sentence with 'diploma,' and that's how you do calligraphy. (Your mileage may vary.)

I made 52 fake letters in this fashion, using Times New as my initial starting point. (With a bookish font, I knew I'd always be able to alter the glyphs into a sans-serif or a hand-lettered style as necessary. A serifed font comes with all the toppings.) I whittled 'em down to 26, threw in some punctuation, and was off to the races.

Even though he hadn't explicitly asked for me to go this crazy with it, I told Ian in my initial reply that I'd be dumping multiple variations on him. What was needed here could not, properly, be one font! The man needed to decorate every surface of a universe! The official notices! The garage-band sign-ups! The graffiti! The ships! The buttons! All over the bathroom stalls, presumably!

I graphics'd together a fake Times New Roman, a fake Impact, a fake Eurostile, and a fake Verdana — or, in other words, I gave him a Serif Font, a Poster Font, a Sci-fi Font, and a Sans Serif Font. (With various tracking and weighting, I think this makes for an alright universe-of-fonts starter-kit. ['Starter!' 'Starter' kit! Obviously there's nothing but holes; I still definitely wanna do some script and blackletter-style glyphs — but, one day at a time.])

After that, I got some paper and knocked out a hand-lettered set of the glyphs using various implements: a fat brush pen; a thin brush pen; chalk; and, finally, spray-paint.

Fun fact: You know how there's cheaper cereal in bags on the lowest shelf of the grocery store? For this project, I discovered the same thing applies to spray paint at Lowes. The $8 can of black spray paint I expected to buy remained at shoulder height at the store; meanwhile, the $2 (!!!) can of unbranded spray paint I spotted in a pallet on the ground not only got to come home with me, but also got to thoroughly mess up some printer paper.

Photographs of these glyphs were cleaned-up in Photoshop, such that ink-on-paper became black-on-white, and as of that point, I was finally at the same place with the hand-fonts as I was with the font-fonts: stocked with nonsense glyphs, ready to be font-ified.

Fun fact: I am dumb. Calligraphr has multiple templates; I am probably doing the dumbest possible thing. After your first hour of usage, please expect to be better at Calligraphr than I am.

The template I got was for a basic alphabet; it's a downloadable sheet that you're meant to print out, draw your letter-forms onto, and re-upload. I found no problem uploading a sheet directly exported from Photoshop. I used the same master PSD for all of it.

I set up guides in a grid (following the lines on the sheet) to make dragging-and-placing easier, and then started saving versions; v001, brought in my Times New characters, placed 'em where they went; saved the whole thing as a JPG. Resaved the PSD as v002, deleted my Times New characters [but got to keep my guidelines], and brought in Impact; repeat, Eurostile; repeat, Verdana — then, repeat with all the hand-drawn ones.

Calligraphr, in the configuration I was using, only allows a user 'one font.' Individual characters can be replaced, but — in the free-mode I was working with — what you can get from them is "A Font." You build it, which gives you a download link [TTF and OTF], and then... once you have it, you have it. It's an installable font. ...so I just deleted my whole font, and uploaded v002. Build, save, delete. v003, v004, etc..

At the outset of this project, I expected the work to be fifty-fifty design and headache-y font stuff. Because of Calligraphr, the 50% of headache-y font stuff diminished to, like, 1% of what I expected. Calligraphr is a fast and, frankly, impressive service. Not sure what they've got goin' on on the far side of their servers, but it automates the turnaround of bitmap-based fonts impressively quickly. Some of my fonts took a minute or two to turn around; most were about five seconds of wait-time, before a download became available. (Thank you kindly, you genius people.)

And that's it! Thanks for reading!

Given that Huberfish, which is the name of this language-font-set-whatever, is nothing more than an English cypher, it's up to Ian whether or not the messages scrawn all over his universes will have meaning or not. Maybe you'll untangle what he wrote, and discover at the end that there's nothing to read.

...but, if you want to try, here's a cheat-sheet.

[Final Note from Ian:
I've already started using this thing like crazy and I love it (particularly the spray paint one- so good for adding immediate character/details to walls). It totally captures the "yeah that's not English" but without feeling distractingly bonkers. And now I have to make a new collection of reader board letters, haha!]