Creating a Font

Over the holiday period I will be creating my first font but I was wondering if any of you had any tips or programs I should be using?

So far this is the process I have….

I will be hand drawing the font and then tracing in Illustrator but after that I’m not to sure what the best approach is to get it finalized.

Any advice is welcomed

Hi again, here is a great short article about creating fonts, showing you 3 different methods. I’d also recommend getting in touch with fellow GR author, joiaco, I’m sure she will be more than happy to share some valuable tips. Good luck.

Joiaco was the first person who popped into my head too!

Thanks guys I will have a look into this

You may also find this article useful:

Hi and thanks for the personal recommendations!!

I use FontCreator6 by HiLogic – i am NOT a professional fontographer, so others who are and read this might not agree with my way of doing things.

For me there are two basic ways of making a font, depending on whether you want a ‘hand-drawn’ look, or a clean and smooth look. The first is easier than the second because you can do everything on paper, scan the letters (glyphs in fontographer-speak) and copy/paste each one (minimum 70 for a decent font) into the correct box in the program and then tweak the vectors there until you are satisfied. There is a facility to ‘test’ and campare your letters as you go along, so you can see how they would look when typed out in different sentences.

The second way, necessary for regimented and uniform smooth letters, is to begin drawing your ‘common’ shapes in the program, duplicating them where necessary and drawing new shapes where necessary. So all the up and down strokes for instance will be the same, curves and slants will be uniform etc. Then you can combine them at the end when you are happy.

The second way is very time consuming in the beginning. It helps to work out on paper the minimum of strokes you need – you can mirror and flip and rotate shapes in the program too, easier than you can in Illustrator. But if you are good at Illustrator, then get your letters made and copy/paste straight into your Font program. FontCreator also has an option where you can have a scanned image in the background so you can effectively trace over it as you would in Illustrator.

Anything else you would like to know in particular, just contact me anytime.

I guarantee at some stage you will be wishing that the alphabet had a few letters less

Dzinc said
Hi again, here is a great short article about creating fonts, showing you 3 different methods. I’d also recommend getting in touch with fellow GR author, joiaco, I’m sure she will be more than happy to share some valuable tips. Good luck.

Thanks for this article Dzinc! I have to get myself a tablet… EVERYTHING i have drawn so far on computer is with a mouse! Tablets with pens seem to be just the thing to extend potential in drawing and font making. Believe it or not i only heard of Sakura Micron pens a few months ago… such are the advantages of living so far from civilization!