How To Create Your Own Font

Having a website that is creative and uniquely designed is a great way to attract attention and draw visitors. One of the easiest elements to be creative with on your website it the typography. Using a font style that is unique and steps away from the traditional fonts such as sans serif that a lot people use will certainly catch a person’s eye and make them want to see more. There are some sites you can go to online where you can get non-traditional fonts to use, of course. Or you can even make your own fonts.  Creating your own fonts isn’t as hard as you might think, either. Here are some tips on how to do it.

1. Decide/ Make A Brief

This will probably be the hardest part. Your first step is to decide on what sort of typeface you will be using. What will be its purpose? Will it be for a specific project or only for personal use? Will it be for a large or something smaller, like a magazine body copy? Do you want it to have a masculine or feminine look? Should it be classy or more fun and cartoonish? There are many facets to decide. It might be best to sketch you ideas out first on paper instead of jumping right to the software program to design it. You don’t have to do the whole alphabet, only “H”, “o”, “n” and “y” are often the recommend control characters since you can reuse parts of them over and over.

2. Software

Once you have a sketch you like, choose your software. There are many applications available you can use, and many are free. There are some for basic users who just want to have some fun creating a custom font. Some good ones of these include PaintFont, FontStruct, Fontself, and Metaflop. For intermediate level use, try programs like FontForge, Birdfont, and Glyphr Studio.

3. Create

Once you have your software installed, you can start creating. Depending on your program you can either upload pictures of your drawings or upload a font file for editing. Once your control characters are ready in the program you can expand out to include more letters, numbers, and other characters. Thinking with Type has a handy diagram showing different terminology used in font creation.

4. Refine

Don’t get carried away focusing solely on individual letters. It’s important to look at the overall picture, at how the letters will look as whole when used together. So refine your font by taking a look at that. Look at things like the spacing and kerning of the letters when used together. Test out various sizes for each character. And print out test pages regularly to see how it looks in print, as it’s often easier to see mistakes on paper.

5. Upload

Once you have your font designed to your liking, you’re ready to go! You can upload it to WordPress or wherever you are wanting to use it.

6. Tools

A few applications have already been mentioned that you can use. There are other handy tools you can use to create your own font, as well. These include FontLab Studio, FontCreator, Fontographer, FontForge, Type 3.2 font editor, BitFontMaker2, Fontifier, YourFonts, iFontMaker, FontArk, and MyScriptFont.

You can even turn your own handwriting into a font if you wanted, and it’s really very easy. You can find out how on this Buzzfeed article.

Making your own font isn’t all that hard. If you follow these tips and use some of these tools, you should be able to create your own unique font easily. Have fun!

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