In which I stumble upon Starlight!
Life can be funny sometimes.
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned this, but while I have a Creative Cloud subscription (which gives me access to Illustrator) and also own all of Affinity’s desktop applications, I create most of the stuff I post on the blog using Gravit Designer Pro, mainly because it’s the only one that’s compatible with my Chromebook Pixel, which is the computer I prefer using.
Gravit Designer is an amazing program, and I’m honestly puzzled by how little attention it gets. Sure, it’s not as fully-featured as the other vector graphics software I use, but it has a free version that does A LOT while also having what is probably the best UI I’ve seen in a program of this category.
But the point here is not to sing the praises of Gravit. The reason I mentioned it is because it does a horrible job handling .ai (Adobe Illustrator) files, and the typeface I was going to mention today, one called Metra, is not an actual font file, but vector letters in .ai format that you can arrange for a text composition.
Alas, Gravit Designer has made a complete mess of the file, as expected, but you know how there’s always a silver lining? In this case, the silver lining consisted of the Starlight typeface, which I stumbled upon when downloading Metra.
Here are some words I’d use to describe Starlight: display, cartoony, retro, cute, zany, mischievous and wacky.
