Any good links that would show how one creates their own font?
Specifically, I am wanting to create a font of my own handwriting.
Watch Helvetica… I seem to remember one of the guys in that explaining how he starts and what letters to start with first.
Once you have certain letters down the rest of them pretty much design themselves… can’t remember what were the main ones though.
a = b = d = p = q
something like that
Sharpie had a free hand writing font deal a while back. It was pretty horrible.
Font Lab makes a handful of programs that are pretty standard for the typography industry. If you’re looking for one based on your hand writing, you’ll likely have to draw everything and scan/trace it. Then find a way to take your vectors and dump them in as a font collection. It’s only 52 characters and some punctuation…
Ya, I figured it was a buncha hand work to do that…which is fine. Its not like I don’t have anything else to do with my evenings :S
Search “font from handwriting” There are a number of places that will do it very inexpensively.
Years ago I used a free Microsoft app that did this–it was made when they came out with WinXP Tablet Edition.
You would simply draw each letter in a box on the tablet, and it would generate the font. Easiest way to go by far.
Ohhh…I’ll have to dig around for that. I still have my old tablet laying around. I could do that. Thanks for the tip.
@Dan I’ve done the Google thing which is why I am asking. Part of the exercise for me is to learn how it works. I would like to get a wee bit of guidance from someone who may have done it before so that I’m not wading through the garbage first.
Not much to wade through – $9.00 – http://www.handfont.com/main.php
Also, much more expensive, look at specialty font creation programs at http://www.fontlab.com.
Ya, kinda hard to ignore $9
Of course there’s an open source initiative, but probably not as elegant as FontLab, et al, but I can’t say - never created my own font (yet):
if you have illustrator, you can do it for free (trying to find tutorial), I remember seeing it as an assignment in an advanced Illustrator class I almost took many years ago… unless they used a 2nd program w/Illustrator I didn’t know about (which is a good possibility since I never took the class).
also just found these:
I believe illustrator would be a great tool to design the actual typeface, but for making it into font file usable anywhere, i expect you need a separate program.