From the course: Glyphs App Essential Training

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Building figures

Building figures - Glyphs App Tutorial

From the course: Glyphs App Essential Training

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Building figures

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- [Narrator] It may sound obvious, but the numbers are not letters. Numbers, or figures as they're properly called, have a different origin story than letters. They're Indo-Arabic, and as such, they traditionally have a horizontal stress, rather than a Latin oblique to vertical stress. Over the centuries, the stress has been tamed out, a little. But it's still evident in the number seven of most contemporary type designs. And most fonts feature heavy horizontals in the two, three, four and five. Studying figure structure in time tested fonts, will provide clues for how you can handle your design. One key to success is respecting that numbers have their own logic. Figure sets come in two basic varieties, proportional old style and tabular lining. Tabular lining figures are more common. They share their height with the capitals and all have the same width, so a one is the same width as a zero. This allows them to align vertically when set in columns. Proportional old style figures are…

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