Creating the McScript Font
by Norman Biss

As a self-taught signwriter I always looked with envy at the beautiful scripts that seemed to flow from the brush of many of the signwriters around me. With the advent of computer-aided sign making I was most disappointed with the script fonts available for sign work. The vast majority of fonts came to us by way of the printing industry and were designned for print media rather than signs.

One of the signwriters whose lettering I admired the most was Ces McNamara. Ces is a great believer that good script lettering considers the shaping of the whole word -- it's not just a string of letters joined together. Because of this, Ces was of the opinion that it would be impossible to obtain good script using computer software.

As my interest in the abilities of the computer became more advanced I started to look for ways to improve the existing fonts for use on signs. While looking through a shareware catalogue, I came across a program called TypeDesigner. I was most impressed with this German-designed software and immediately saw the potential for creating a unique font.

Remembering the beautiful scripts that Ces wrote, I approached the now-retired signwriter to see if he would be interested in trying to create a script font designed for sign work. To my delight he agreed to give it a go. Such were the beginnings of McScript.

We began by having Ces paint all the characters solid black, 100mm (about 4 inches) high. Then I scanned them into Cadlink's SignLab, which is the software I use. Each character was then exported in Adobe Illustrator format to TypeDesigner. At this stage it became obvious that the scanned images had far too many nodes which needed to be deleted so as to be able to utilize the best features of TypeDesigner. We found that I got a smoother letter by digitizing each letter from an outline drawing. This made it much easier to manipulate the character in TypeDesigner.

We quickly learned that creating a script font would not be easy. The features of TypeDesigner V.3.0 (after surviving the learning curve!) make it easy as far as the mechanics go, but the real problem was getting the letters to join so that they looked natural and smooth. We found that we had most success by not kerning the letters, but by having the characters overlap with suitable joiners. This meant that sacrifices had to be made with several of the letters. Even now some combinations require manual alteration.

TypeDesigner creates the font in Adobe Type 1 format (.PFB) and has the best Type 1 to TrueType conversion available. Among its many other features are automatic and manual kerning, and automat- ic transformations of the basic font to other font styles such as Bold, Italic, or Outline.

This font was designed with the large sizes required by sign makers in mind. Although it looks okay when reduced down to 10-point size, it really needs to be much larger to look its best.

Norman's shop, Norman Biss Signs is in New Zealand. The McScript font package is available for $49 US, and includes additional characters for word ends, plus "McLinks" unique words. To order, contact Norman Biss Signs, PO Box 245, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand.

If you're interested in the TypeDesigner demo program, it is also available from Norman for $9 US. For additional information, his phone/fax number is 011-64-9-415-9346. His e-mail address is [email protected]

Article from SignCraft magazine
March/April 1997, page 100

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