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12 months ago
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How to create my own font
It made me
Excited to share it 
"Type in your own hand today - Your handwriting, your font, simple."
How I did it:
Back in 2007 I decided to surprise my soon-to-be wife by creating personal fonts to use on our wedding invitations and “wedsite”. After a weekend of research, design, and some trial and error, the typefaces were ready. My wife loved them and they were a big hit with the family as well. So much so that they began asking how they could make fonts of their own. The problem was that creating a personal font was anything but simple, requiring time to learn and software to buy. It still took me several hours to make each new one.
This past summer I decided to solve this problem by creating a website that would allow anyone to quickly and easily create a personal font with no need for design experience or special software. The goal was to allow friends and family to create personalized fonts from their own handwriting, and to do so in the simplest terms possible.
I came upon this posting this morning and thought anyone who has "create my own font" as a goal would like to check the site out. With it you can accomplish your goal in the next hour ;)
The website is: www.myTypeface.com. I hope it helps you!
Lessons & tips:
Tip: Don't worry about making your font perfect! Having your own font is about typing in your handwriting. It's not about good or bad writing, but yours. The fun part is when you send it to your friends and they say, "Yep, that's his/her writing. Cool."
Resources:
Everything you need to make your own font quickly and easily is at the website: www.myTypeface.com.
- Once you have your own font, I recommend using blurb.com to make a digital photo album. Their free software allows you to drop in pictures and type in your new font and then order a bound book.My wife and I have enjoyed making digital albums like this with our fonts.
- If you're getting married or recently married, your own font is great for typing up thank you notes.
Those are a few ideas to get you started.
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Entries
I still have this in the forefront of my mind, but I have to set it aside for a few weeks.
20 months ago
I have had to put the font project on hold for a time. I have too many projects on the burners right now. I also have some problems with the vector drawing program that I am using to “ruff” out the characters. The number of points that describe each glyph is enormous. The vector program that I am using was in expensive, easy to use, and has one feature that is fantastic- the ability to raster individual objects or turn rasterd objects to vector drawings. The idea was that I would sketch out each shape, but it turns out that for this font that would be more trouble than it is worth. I am headed to Texas in April. If I have something to do in the evenings, I can avoid the late night break out sessions, which inevitable are just excuses for people to complain, drink, or do both.
Elements of a Type Face - Part 1
20 months ago
As I looked through past entries on this goal I realized that I wanted to contribute some content that might help people complete this goal. These are mostly notes to myself that I thought I would share. I might even turn this whole project into a zine .
Some of these terms I made up, because they weren’t referenced in any of the typography books that I have read (which is quite a few). The TOP LINE and BOTTOM LINE are my terms for the upper most and lower most boundary of the glyphs. All glyphs share these are maximal boundaries.
The width of a glyph is also something that is hard to define. Stylistically, most fonts have uniform heights for capitals, lowercase, as well as uniform dimensions for the ascenders and descenders, but there is no special term for the width of a glyph. The average width (the sum of all glyphs/ the number of glyphs) is considered the width of a non-proportional/monospaced font. For proportional/monospaced fonts the character width is the same for all the characters. There is no special term for a characters width or on how it is calculated. For my purposes the width is distance between the furthest lateral elements of any particular glyph.
The height of the lowercase letters is called X-HEIGHT or corpus. It is calculated from the BASE LINE to the MEAN LINE. The mean line is calculated using either the mean average of maximal height of lowercase letter, or the optical center, or is arbitrarily defined.
The BASE LINE is just that, the base line for the font. The majority of glyphs will sit on this line. DESCENDERS are the elements of a glyph that pass below the BASE LINE. ASCENDERS are the elements that pass above the MEAN LINE.
What’s the middle of the characters? The TRUE CENTER LINE is the distance between the BOTTOM LINE and the TOP LINE. The OPTICAL CENTER LINE is what appears to be the horizontal center for the font. It is something that is arrived at by looking at the glyphs. We tend to perceive the horizontal center differently than it mathematically is. The weight and shape of the glyphs affect our perception of this characteristic. The vertical middle of the character is the distance between the most extreme lateral points of a glyph. I haven’t found any mention as to the optical middle of individual glyphs.
NOTE: I tried my best to color the text in this post to match the picture. The site did not like me coloring the font, so I had to remove the html coding.
This weeks picture is both a statement as to my frustration as to this goal and a hint about the font that I am working on.
20 months ago
Before I get too far into explaining this goal, I have to note a set back. I spent 5 hours working on the basic elements that are to compose the glyphs. Luckily, it was a learning process, as my skill at using vector based drawing programs is limited.
None the less, losing 5 hours of work because I failed to save is ridiculous. It is purely my fault.
The font that I am working on was not inspired by the patent drawing, but I think it gives a cryptic idea on how my font will look.
[EDIT: Pardon the duplicate post]
liquidizer is listening to Depeche Mode, after reading a post about them on 43T
Handwriting font
21 months ago
I made a handwriting font using fontifier.com and then embedded it in my website so I can have my handwriting on my site. I’ve written instructions on font embedding here (only works in Internet Explorer, though):
http://www.sean.co.uk/a/webdesign/embedding_fonts_in_webpages.shtm
indie124 is figuring stuff out.
Yatta!
2 years ago
I did this a few days ago, and couldnt be happier with the results. I even went so far as to make up a new alphabet that no ones ever seen before. It feels cool writing in a script that no one but me and a few other people can read. I feel like a spy or something.
