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Create your own fonts
June 25, 2009 | 11:15 am
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By Paul Biba
I know that many of our readers are involved with directly creating their own ebooks, so I thought this article from the Christian Science Monitor would be of use.
Do you dot your i’s with hearts? Particularly proud of your p’s and q’s? Or perhaps you were the kind of kid who drew heavy metal flames around your name.
Such doodles work well in the corners of composition notebooks, but until recently, it cost hundreds of dollars in software fees to bring personal touches to computer fonts.
Thanks to new websites, creating custom typefaces that work with almost any computer program is now easy and in some cases, free.
Here are some of the best services for starting your own amateur font foundry.
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Comments:
There are thousands (millions?) of free fonts on the net. Some are good, most are less so.
Creating a font that really looks good is more than simply creating outlines of letters. Things like ligatures, kerning pairs, etc. make all the difference between amateur fonts and professional fonts. And italics are an entirely different font, not just some slanted version of the normal font. It’s the details that count.
My immediate reaction is, I’m afraid, a knee-jerk one: Ouch. Aren’t there enough bad fonts in the world already?
I’m glad to hear that there are tools out there for folks who are really interested in fonts and have educated themselves. (And that Fontifier tool sounds like great fun.) But I’m afraid that we live in such a typographically ignorant world that most amateur font designers won’t take the trouble to educate themselves on what makes a good font.
(The fact that the writer of the Christian Science article doesn’t appear to know the difference between fonts and typefaces hardly reassures me.)