#fira tips

and take some time this weekend and follow these steps to make sure you don’t need to do more work than needed with the IFTTT tool :>

Summary: Post teaches you 1. How to automatically make a video embed post on tumblr everytime you go live on twitch, and 2. How to keep your discord community updated on your tumblr activities so that they’re not missing out!

OOH thank you for the ask <3!!!

I think my best skill lies within calligraphy and lettering!! I developed the interest back in design college and really fell into a love for typography and letterforms. I’ve always dreamed of working to improve myself as a type designer and hope to open up a type foundry of my own someday and pour over the intricate details of letterforms and publish my own typefaces :>

A Quick Lesson in Typography

Here’s a way to flex your design knowledge on twitter and elsewhere. Y’know that thing that people call “fonts”? Well, if you wanna get technical, designers actually categorize them with terms like type families, type faces, type weights, etc.

“What’s the difference?!” you may ask. I’m here to tell ya :D

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A type family refers to the style (Arial) and all of its weights (Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Black) and sizes (12pt, 15pt, etc.).

A typeface (or font family) is similar to font, but only pertains to weight and style. → Arial Regular is a typeface. Arial Bold is a different typeface.

In the digital world, a font pertains to the software we install and use.

So when someone says they’re using the Arial font or the Times New Roman font, technically they’re actually using a typeface, not a font. It’s become such common usage though that when we hear it, we more or less know what you mean :)

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Another detail that can help separate you from the masses is understanding kerning and tracking. Moreso the first one as opposed to the latter. 

Kerning is the spacing between each letter. 

Tracking is the spacing between each word. 

If you are dealing with a paragraph, you’re working with its tracking. If it’s one line, presumably a header of some sort, you’re kerning it. The best way I can explain it is essentially designers will invert the text in their brain (aka look at the negative space) and adjust the text letter by letter (or line by line) until it looks right.

For your purposes, I’d say focus on learning how to kern your headers. Most people aren’t working in book publishing so you don’t need to worry about tracking.

Here’s a fun visual way to try it out yourself!!

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For me, my nerdiness doesn’t stop there. Oh no. There’s a whole dictionary list of specific terms that I love to scrutinize and dig deep into.

Now THIS is my jam. This is the stuff I spend my spare time diving into, and it’s the nitty gritty of what makes up a letter. Letters are beautiful, and the people who work on them spend a lot of time perfecting them until you get timeless typefaces like Helvetica and Garamond. I won’t spend too much time on these, but this is a great place to start if you ever wanted to make your very own typeface. There’s also so many little tricks that designers have made to make a letter look just right and it’s just so cool !!!!

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Anyhow, so little rabbithole led me into exploring calligraphy (yes, I have quite a number of fountain pens and inks) and the lettering community on instagram. Combined with paperquilling (another little hobby of mine, maybe I’ll talk about it if someone sends me another of the 💛 in my ask), the work that I’m most proud of is this one!

I think taking something made digitally and in 2D and bringing it into a 3D environment is an interesting culmination of everything we’ve learned so far. This whole thing started with calligraphy and typesetting on paper way back when, and now everything’s gone digital, it just feels right to combine the paper and typography medium and bring them to life in a new and different way!

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Also this too! Yes it's a Harry Potter themed series (fuck JK Rowling). Custom typeface, loosely based on Abril Fatface and Playfair Display for an elegant yet magical vibe!

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This one that I made for a friend a hekkin long while back and is more along the lines of the “classic” paperquilled lettering works that you see on instagram.

I’m not gonna lie, it’s been a while since I’ve made something like this but at some point I was working on an unfinished piece for Kiryu Coco when she left Hololive. Maybe I should finish that.. 😂

In any case, hope you enjoyed my little ramble! I also hope I didn’t bore you to death with my meanderings haha