Making your own serifs and decorations in Font by Zaweba

Built-in serifs, decorations and cut-outs cover a lot of ground, but sooner or later you'll want a shape that isn't on the list. A serif shaped like a little flag, a decoration taken from a company logo, a cut-out that echoes a pattern on your packaging. Your own components are how you get those shapes into a font.

In Font by Zaweba a component is a shape that attaches to points on the letters. There are three kinds. Serifs attach to stem ends. Decorations are placed on chosen points, such as the centre of a letter or along its strokes. Cut-outs are subtracted from the letters, so they leave a hole or a gap. Your own components can be any of the three.

Two ways to make one

The first is to import an SVG. If you already have the shape in a drawing program, save it as SVG and bring it in. That works well for anything you've drawn carefully elsewhere, including shapes made in Vectornation by Zaweba or Paint by Zaweba.

The second is to draw it in the built-in component editor. That suits simple shapes you can build quickly without leaving the app. Either way, you give the component a name and set whether it's a serif, a decoration or a cut-out.

Every component has an anchor and a stroke-direction arrow. The anchor is the point that gets placed on the letter, so it decides where the shape sits relative to the stem end or the point it's attached to. The arrow tells Font which way along the stroke the shape faces. Getting these two right is most of the work. A serif with its anchor in the wrong place will float away from the stem or sink into it, and one with its arrow the wrong way round will point back into the letter.

Starting from a built-in shape

You don't have to start from nothing. Built-in components can be copied to make editable versions. That's often the quickest route to something of your own: copy the Wedge serif and change its proportions, copy the Star decoration and give it more points, copy the Round hole cut-out and stretch it into an oval. The original stays as it was, and the copy becomes one of your components.

Your own components can be renamed, edited and deleted at any time. Clear names help once you have a few, so you can tell your square slab from your rounded one at a glance.

Using a component across the alphabet

Once a component exists, you use it the same way as a built-in one. Turn on Serifs, Decorations or Cut-outs in the style stack and choose your shape. The point tags on every letter decide where it lands. Points are tagged automatically as stem ends, corners, curves, junctions and so on, so a serif goes on stem ends and a decoration placed along strokes follows them. A single choice restyles the whole alphabet.

The options that come with each kind still apply. For serifs you have sliders for size, overhang and bracket, a choice of top and bottom, top only or bottom only, and whether they go on straight stems only or on every stem end including curves. For decorations you have size, a fixed size option, offset along the stroke, rotation, where to place it and whether rotation follows the stroke.

Tips for shapes that work

Keep shapes simple. A component is repeated many times across the alphabet and seen at every size from a heading to a footnote. Fine detail that looks lovely in the editor becomes noise at small sizes. Check the live preview's waterfall after adding a new component.

Think about the weight of the letters. A serif that suits a light font may look tiny on a heavy one, and the size slider can only do so much if the shape itself is the wrong proportion. It's often easier to make two versions, one chunky and one fine.

If a component lands in an odd place on one letter, the cause is usually that letter's point tags. You can change the tag of a selected point in the glyph editor, or re-run auto-tag, which puts things right without touching the component itself.

Your own components are where a font made with sliders becomes unmistakably yours. A shape nobody else has, attached consistently across 109 characters, is the kind of detail that makes a typeface memorable.