More on Sodachrome

A few people have been asking about how Sodachrome actually works, and how a user would assemble the pieces to work properly. It’s actually a lot simpler than it might seem: no crazy OpenType features, no complex setting. It’s just two simple fonts that can be set independently, or — ideally — set on top of one another, either by overprinting separate color plates, or by using transparency modes to blend the layers if you’re going all-digital.

First, let’s have a quick peek at the first font — Sodachrome Left:

And now, Sodachrome Right:

You can see that the shapes on their own are pretty odd looking. Getting them to work together was a bit of a trick, so we found it easiest to draw both outlines for each glyph at the same time, using just one Fontlab file:

After the two outlines were drawn for each glyph, we separated them into two files and then exported a font from each. After that, it’s just up to users to manipulate those two fonts as they see fit.