Authors
I and 704.
About the Noto font
Noto was created to eliminate tofu, rectangles displayed indicating the absence of the corresponding font on your computer. It includes a very wide range of scripts.
Designing
I first thought of the subject, Noto, and I was working alone then. The initial design was characters laid out in a 6 by 7 grid, decreasing font weight in each row, and overlaid by the title and description. It was monochrome with black background, dark gray character grid, light gray description and white title. The second revision added perspective to the character grid, so it looks as if the characters were drawn on the ceiling.
I had drawn part of the initial design on paper and was pondering about a third revision in class when 704 joined. After a two-minute sketch on my tablet, he came up with an idea. The grid was then moved to the bottom, as if it was a floor, or a road. The characters in the grid were also colored. It was this very moment when inspiration struck me, and I blurted out: NOTO is to stand in the road, with all characters behind it gray and randomly replaced with tofu! In the rest of the class, we finalized this design, adding specifications to the background and making NOTO glow.
Drawing
Aware of the unpleasant fact that none of us can draw a glyph precisely with perspective, we decided to use some kind of drawing program. Also knowing font files can be converted to SVG files, I chose Inkscape. I used an online converting program to convert TTF and OTF files to SVG, and by copy-pasting XML elements into the target SVG, I got all characters I needed in one file.
The following steps should be easy for anyone who is familiar with drawing programs. Rearrange, Distribute, Align, Group, Perspective, type the caption, Color, Shadow, the poster is done.
Why did I extract glyphs instead of copy-pasting individual characters from the character map? Because of bugs in all drawing programs I use, including PowerPoint, characters from certain scripts cannot be displayed in Noto font. Knowing some technical details sometimes helps you out!
Easter eggs
The 4 colors used in the character road are extracted from the Google logo.
There are 2 emojis in the character road. Emojis are actually included in Noto.