WE ARE (A)LIVE (Photoshop & CS6 users, we've got news for you too)
over 8 years ago – Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 02:59:22 PM

Fontself for Illustrator is dead (WTF!?)

... we now simply call it Fontself Maker (phew... for a second I thought that...) 

And it's available on www.fontself.com

Today, any creative who uses Illustrator CC can now enjoy font creation, thanks to your amazing support. Hurrah, hurrah !!! Pschhhhht !!! [this is the glittering sound of champagne - we didn’t drink any yet, but it feels great to pretend like we had…]

So, by now, every Kickstarter backer who pledged for the Illustrator extension or a Pack should have received our email invitation to download it (if not, let me know).

☞ [ delivering part of our Kickstarter promise: check ✔︎ ]

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Wanna share the news with your friends?

Spread the love & give them this promo code: 

❤︎_for_type_nuts

First, they will learn that you are one of the early adopters who brought this project to life, and second, they will thank you for getting a 20% discount on their own copy of Fontself Maker: to redeem the code, just need to follow the purchase flow on www.fontself.com and paste the offer code instead of shelling out the credit card =)

Hurry up, this coupon will expire on Valentine’s Day, so they have until Sunday evening to join the fray (yes, it’s the 14th of Feb, remember your other duties =)

☞ [ showing how cool the Kickstarter community can be: check ✔︎ ]

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So what about the Photoshop extension & CS6 ?

We failed to deliver Fontself for Photoshop on due time, and CS6 users will not be able to use Fontself. That’s the sad truth.

So...

We will send a free license of Fontself Maker (for Illustrator CC) to all the backers who ordered a single Photoshop copy, since we cannot give a better estimate for the Photoshop release date than “later this year, probably during summer”. This pledge will be delivered for sure, we just want to give Photoshop users a taste of what it will feel like to create fonts in their favorite image editor.

We also started to refund all the CS6 backers who won’t upgrade to Illustrator CC or Photoshop CC. Send us an email to [email protected] if you still need to get a refund... unless you’d consider gifting Fontself to a friend. In this case, you'd keep your existing license of Fontself Maker (until you upgrade to CC) and you'd make a happy designer. Just tell us know.

☞ [ addressing the inevitable complexities of life: your call... ]

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That's it. Tanks again for your support, and let's see how the world will use this crazy little project that you backed.

With love, from Paris.

Joël & Franz

###########

PS: our inbox keep ringing with users questions on the tool, so we'll make it short for today's PSes.

PS1: ok, just this one because it's a new milestone for Fontself: one of our early backer just published the very first public font that was created with Fontself Maker. Thank you so much Diego Bionda for sharing this font with everyone: http://diegobionda.myportfolio.com/free-lettering-font-diego-comic

Coming soon: unleashed creativity!
over 8 years ago – Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 11:29:21 PM

▧▧▧ >>> HELLO WORLD

When you backed Fontself last October, I took the oath to ship your rewards by the end of January 2016. So, technically speaking, we've until Sunday 11:59pm to deliver...

And even though Fontself for Photoshop, color font support or Catapult won't be around until later this year, I still wanted to thank you again (plus all the beta testers who helped in a big big way).

Fontself for Illustrator is just around the corner, so get ready for the real thing soon !!!

▧▧▧ >>> Now, let's share some LOVE

When we pushed the very first beta release to some early backers, it first took a couple back-and-forth bug fixes to get it up & running. Then, we received this message from one of the beta testers:

- "Hurra! It works! This is so much fun! I’m looking forward to play with it."

Cool. At least one person would enjoyed this very rough preview of the extension... And then he pinged us back:

- "I am experimenting with font creation. Its so much fun. Even my 10yr old daughter is participating and creating her own font."

Wow! Now, THIS is really warming up our mind & soul. Thanks to you, to all the Kickstarter backers, one girl - somewhere in the Switzerland - is discovering the joy of type making, with her daddy. You can't imagine how much this type of messages gives us the energy to fight all the upcoming challenges...

Anyways. I asked Patrick (the Swiss dad) whether he'd agree to share some pics of the fonts he had created with Fontself. And BOOM, this is what he sent me:

 ... I was hooked. I needed to learn more. Just a few days after starting debugging the app with him, I pinged him to see whether he'd like to share his experience with the rest of the community, and tell us a bit more about himself, his background, and how he came up with the two fonts above.

With this level of output, I expected to hear from a graphic designer who already had some solid experience in type making ✎.

- "I originally made a masters degree in materials science. But after the diploma, I had trouble to find something where I can let my creativity out. I then worked for five years as a college teacher for physics and mathematics where I also taught courses in photography, 3d-visualization and webdesign. 

Drawing, writing and other creative stuff has been my passion since my earliest years and I had a growing business aside of my job at the school. Last summer, I quit my ‘dayjob’ and I am now a fully self-employed creative. I shoot weddings, portraits, architecture and landscape and I create web- and printdesigns for small and medium businesses. It’s great!"

Then I wondered whether he had crafted both fonts on his own:

- "Yes, both designs are my own creations and were made in the last five days.

One font started with a doodle in my moleskine notebook. I made simple sketches of the letters a-z. Later I drew them in Illustrator using simple circles and lines, grouped the right elements together and hit the ‘a-z’ button of Fontself. I just had to adjusted the baselines of the letters p, q and y and the font was born."

Ok, could you please send us another screenshot of this one?

 - "The other font was written on graph paper and scanned. A simple levels adjustment in Photoshop eliminated the squares and then I traced the letters in Illustrator.

This time, the uppercase letters worked automatically with A-Z but the lowercase-letters and all the other glyphs like @;:#* had to be assigned one at a time. I adjusted some baselines and that’s it."

So you really had no previous experience in type making? You just had been doodling lettering before Fontself?

- Yes. That's it. I am quite experienced with Illustrator & Photoshop but these are the first fonts I created.

Feel free to use the screenshots below on your social media. It would be cool if you’d mention my website www.patrickitten.ch or facebook-page https://www.facebook.com/patrickitten.ch or twitter https://twitter.com/patrickitten & instagram https://www.instagram.com/patrickitten."

Thanks Patrick. One last thing: could you please just tell us how long it took you to make both fonts within Fontself for Illustrator, from concept to finish?

- "Illustrator-paths (ca. 30 min) - Font (ca. 1 min !)

Handwriting (10-15min) - Font (ca. 15 min)."

PS: Patrick, you rock. Just wanted to tell you that. Oh, and thanks to you, people will never experience the "comma" effect ;) Looking forward to see what you (and your daughter) will come up with in the upcoming months! Tschüß!

PS1: @everyone, thanks again for your patience. I know many of you were very disappointed that we couldn't keep up to support Fontself on CS6 (neither Illustrator nor the upcoming Photoshop extension), but we refunded those who told us they wouldn't upgrade to CC, and will keep refunding anyone else who can't use the extension either (unless they prefer to offer their license to a friend)...

PS2: we still have so much work to do until Sunday evening, so let's get back to work!

Almost there... except for CS6.
over 8 years ago – Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 03:07:38 PM

Hello, I hope you are doing great.
2016 will be another rollercoaster year, and we already have some bittersweet news:

• We are finally about to ship Fontself for Illustrator. The real one. Not the beta release but a final version that anyone will be able use. We said it would land in January, and it will. We are fixing last minute bugs, so stay tuned... 
• Unfortunately, we won't be able to support CS6. We just made the call that we would give up on this goal, as it still requires too much additional coding & debugging to support our basic feature set in CS6. As we have to balance our efforts between backward compatibility and supporting the newest releases of Illustrator (CC, CC2014 and CC2015), we had to make another tough choice.
• And as previously disclosed, we won't ship Fontself for Photoshop soon. Too much trouble getting the Illustrator version out, but you can count on us to bring it to your computer later on, for sure!!!

So what's next? will you ask... If you are a backer who counted on CS6 support, we don't want to give you false hope that it will come next. Realistically, as we'll keep working on both the Illustrator & Photoshop extensions, new challenges will rise and we need to be honest regarding our capability to deliver quality software across many versions.

Many of you told us why they kept working on CS6, so it feels like a personal failure that we couldn't deliver on that promise.

We tried to think about different ways to mitigate that issue, and even asked Adobe representatives whether we could get some discounts for our CS6 backers who would make the switch and migrate to CC. Without much success on that front, I guess it's up to you to decide what's next...

So, if you pre-ordered a CS6 version of Fontself,you basically have 2 choices: 

• If you still want to use Fontself and will migrate from CS6 to CC in the foreseeable future, or should you just want to keep supporting our quest to bring font creation to all creatives, you can just wait until we send you a copy of the extension later this month.
• If you will never upgrade from CS6 and don't want to keep supporting this project, you can get a refund of your pledge. No-questions-asked. Just send us a Paypal account email to [email protected] and we will pay you back within 30 days.  

That's about it.
We've got so much work ahead, so no PS today.

Talk to you soon...

It's a wrap!
over 8 years ago – Wed, Dec 30, 2015 at 10:43:04 PM

Dear Kickstarter backers,

After countless hours of dedicated hard work (I hadn't hold a pen for such a long time since college ;) we just did it: all thank-you notes & greeting cards have been sent.

Last week, we released the private beta of Fontself for Illustrator to all early backers, so today we just wanted to end this year with a backstage look at the story & printing process behind our wonderful letterpress cards, which will remain exclusives to this Kickstarter campaign.

Now, as 2015 is about to fade away and 2016 will soon arise, it also turns out that - later this year - Fontself will turn 10 years old. Yup!!! So thanks to all the dreamers & believers who helped us step another milestone on our journey to bring font creation to all creatives =)

Happy New Year to all of you!

**************************************

PS: [someone from the mailing list] -So, what about the backstage look to the print thing? Where is it? C'mon dude, where's the beef?

PS1: Comme on guys, let me get back to it... I hadn't finished my email yet !!! Calm down, ok? I know I'm not writing the usual short & concise emails you'd like to receive, so please wait a sec'... Hmmm, all good now? Ok, there we go:

*** *** ***

For this one, I first need to thank Audrey Leroy, without whom none of this would have been possible.

Audrey is not only a super talented illustrator who designed & inked Fontself's Kickstarter cover with an awesome lettering artwork, but she also convinced me - two weeks before the beginning of the campaign - that I had to propose physical rewards to impersonate the DIY qualities and handcrafted aesthetics of our creative project.

It turned out I had just met with Jean-Frédéric Pouvatchy from LETTERPRESS DE PARIS, with whom Audrey works very regularly. 

LETTERPRESS is one of the finest editor of letterpress cards around, and Jean-Frédéric commissions some of the most exquisite French creatives to design a unique collection of cards and notebooks (check some of them here).

There was here so much creativity and technicality than I could eventually hope for, plus I wasn't sure whether I could afford this with the initial tight funding goal I had in mind. Yet, Jean-Frédéric - who totally got into the Fontself thing - directly proposed to help by suggesting several solutions, ideas and more contacts.

So, a couple phone calls later, I had not only enlisted an enthusiast printing partner, but also 3 other gang members from the Parisian illustration family: Sebastien Touache, Mathieu Julien and Steffie Brocoli.

With a very short notice and a very short briefing ("design anything you want around the themes covered by Fontself"), the creative task force came up with three very unique and expressive propositions. I was really psyched: our Kickstarter campaign would now feature great additional rewards, each showcasing a different facet of what DIY font creation means!

A week later, when we reached 50% of our funding goal in a couple days, we knew these cards would actually come to life. And I wasn't more happy to know that the work and energy from all these people would also take shape and be spread all around the world.

To be honest, I also felt some pride knowing we would be able to ship physical rewards, because it actually meant that Fontself would revive - for real - and in a tangible form that would reflect what we work for: personalization and raw creativity.

The fun was now beginning: let's print these cards !!!

After a warm gathering with the whole crew to pick the proper paper & colors, Jean-Frédéric & grand master Pascal (the master of a wonderful German Heidelberg machine from the 1960's) both welcomed us on their domain, where the printing magic happens (well, actually, it has more to do with craftsmanship, resourcefulness & passion that anything voodoo here :)

We wished we had had a professional photographer & a real copywriter to report the unique moment we spent at LETTERPRESS DE PARIS, but here's what we recorded from what felt like entering a theme park for design geeks...

Once you've chosen the color you want, you have to share the exact reference from a Pantone color palette with your print expert, who will easily translate the prescribed ink mix into a eye-popping cream (and don't ask Pascal whether he uses a scale to measure doses, everything is done intuitively). And a couple spoons of this colorful ink paste are sufficient to print hundreds of cards, as it is progressively distributed along the printer's rollbars.

In order to imprint both the color ink & the relief on paper, the operator needs to produce 2 types of artefacts: first, a negative film for each color of one’s design (they are printed on transparent plastic sheets at super high resolution) and then a relief plate per color (they are chemically carved by exposing a photopolymer plate - a photosensitive plastic - to the negative print).

It requires a lot of practise and mastery to place the plates on a magnetic block and to align them at a sub-millimeter precision on the press, which will put several tons of pressure on the thick 300 grams paper. The last adjustments on the plate are done with metal wedge of a typographical point size (0.007 inch).

Once everything is set, the powerful German machine gets alive and the actual printing process can start, at 60+ cards per minutes.

PS2: now that's it for today folks, I hope you enjoyed the visit.

PS3: if you still read this, you'd probably want to visit www.letterpressdeparis.com to discover more awesomeness. Their latest new-year's cards are really worth a look, specially since you have a few more weeks to send your wishes for 2016... Enjoy! 

#typocalypse will start in 3, 2, 1...
over 8 years ago – Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 08:23:54 PM

Ok, this one is quite exciting, but also a bit frightening...

The BETA version of Fontself for Illustrator just landed in the hands of all early backers. I hope they will enjoy this very first Christmas gift to create freakin' awesome fonts =)

Now, I am not sure 1/ whether our families will enjoy that we keep replying to the complaints (and hopefully praises ;) during the holidays, and 2/ if many early backers will stop playing with their other gifts to start creating new fonts over the weekend.

In any case, I really hope they will enjoy using this first incarnation of the tools you contributed to fund. We are on track for our public launch in late January, so everyone will soon have access to their own Illustrator extension.

So stay tuned, enjoy your last days of 2015, and see you in 2016.

Happy holidays!

PS: some of you already received their handwritten thank-you notes + the gorgeous letterpress cards. Others are on their way, it's just that I didn't expect it would take so much time (and hurt my hand :( to write so many words...

PS1: oh, ... no, thank you for asking, but my hand is ok. It just reminds me how much we should keep practising handwriting every now & then to survive such hardcore experiences ;)

PS2: ok, I really need to go now, family lunch will happen soon & early user requests keep popping... So... merry Xmas !!!