Font Love
Have you ever wanted to make your own font? I don’t know why, but the idea has always interested me. Maybe it is just the fact that sometimes you can find that just right font, and it will bring your design to a different level. I don’t know what kind of font I would create, but I found a good write up by Alec Julien at his I Love Typography blog. His “So You Want to Create a Font” (Part One, Part Two) post go through a lot of the basics of what you will need to think about if you would like to create your own font.
Turns out it isn’t quite as easy as scribbling some letters on a page and scanning them into your computer. First thing that struck me was the cost of the software. Don’t know why, but I figured it would be a lot cheaper to get into the font making game. He recommends FontLab Studio as the industry standard, but it is $650. He also list a few others that are more in range of the hobby font maker in me. After you have the software, there are many things which you don’t really think of: do I want a closed 4 or an open one, should my lowercase ascenders be higher or lower than my caps height, and all sorts of questions about vertical and horizontal alignments. It is really an interesting start into the world of font making. And for those of you who don’t know what kerning is, or the difference between a serif and sans serif font, there are many articles to answer all of your typography questions on his website.
Another interesting tidbit that I ran across: When I was reading Alec’s about page, I saw that he also has a blog called Just Stuff I Find. It is like a scrapbook of interesting visuals from the web. All kinds of nice things to get your creativity flowing. Reminds me of my younger days when I would keep an idea folder with interesting images, words, designs, or colors that I would tear out of magazines that I came across.
Additional Information: Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, without which we wouldn’t have use for all these fonts, and speaking of Gutenberg, check out Project Gutenberg, where you can find all sorts of free public domain ebooks.