Creating a Font

Creating a font starts with learning the basics of typography, Serifs, kerning, leading, height, and weight among other things.

• Serifs are a slight tail on the end(s) of a letter.
• Kerning means to adjust the space between letters in a piece of text.
• leading is adjusting the amount of space between lines of text.
• height is the vertical size of the letter.
• weight is the thickness of the letter in relation to its height.

Another important aspect of fonts that you should understand is the difference between different formats. Different formats will appeal differently to different audiences. When creating a font you should have both a vector version for printing and a bitmap version for onscreen programs that don’t support vector.

Postscript font includes both of these aspects in separate files and has been a popular format for graphic designers because they print very nicely.
TrueType fonts combine the two into a single file and are designed to properly display best on-screen.
Open type puts the two formats into a wrapper that works well in most situations.

There are many great pieces of software for helping create digital fonts. One way of doing it involves some calligraphic experience, a scanner, and the ability to obtain copies of Adobe Illustrator, and Fontographer. You can write out and design the font on paper scan it in and use Illustrators Live trace and layers features to turn the letters into vector images which can be used in a program like Fontographer. This gives you almost complete freedom over the way your letters look and makes it uniquely yours. There are other font programs that allow you to create the letters right in the program either with a tablet or using the computers mouse. These may be more difficult to use and don’t allow as much freedom over the way the letters look. One of such programs is an open source program although some what not user-friendly as well as not well documented is a program called Font Forge. The upside to Fontforge is that it is free.