• Welcome to ForumKorner!
    Join today and become a part of the community.

How to make your very own font!

yahya

Member
Reputation
0
Today I am going to show you how to create your very own font in a few challenging, yet, easy to follow steps.

Warning: this tutorial requires effort and may offend some users!

Words to know:
Dingbat - Decorative character or spacer.
Vector - Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s)

Tutorial:

Step 1: Draw out the alphabet in black marker on a sheet of white paper. It can be a dingbat font (lol) -- if you don't want to do letters, for once, you don't have to. If you are doing the regular alphabet, don't think twice about putting a couple dingbats in there for personality.

Useless information you can read, courtesy of me.
Traditionally, fontmakers start with the letters HAMBURGEVONS and adapt those to complete the alphabet. For instance, the E can be easily converted into an F. Don't forget accent characters, punctuation and numerals!
Step 2: Scan your alphabet. I recommend grayscale or bitmap, at least 300 DPI and 200% zoom. Afterwards, you can do whatever to your newly created alphabet in Photoshop or GIMP. For those Photoshop-less, google "Gimp 2" It's free and almost like Photoshop.

Step 3: Convert the shapes to vector graphics. The easiest way that I find to do this is to use Photoshop. In older versions of Photoshop, you can use the Magic Wand to create paths around your letters and Export Paths to Illustrator.

If you want your alphabet to be perfect, you can use the path option in Photoshop to draw curves around the letters using the Pen tool. This yields the crispest results. (Inexperienced users of Photoshop may have trouble. Even I do..)

Okay, now it's time to install your newly developed font in two easy steps.

Step 1: Export the typeface. Usually you have the option of selecting a few different font formats. "OpenType" is a popular choice -- older formats like TrueType work on Windows, I'm not positive about the others, such as MAC and Linux.

Step 2: Simply Install the font.. If it still does not work, open your fonts folder. It can be found in, C:>Windows>Fonts. Then, locate your font file and simply drag it into the font folder.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for reading.. If you need any help, just quote me or send me a PM anytime, I'll attempt to respond to everybody ASAP. If you want, I'm pretty sure you can put your newly created font on Da.font.

Last edited by Riau; 05-10-2011 at 09:28 PM.
 
Top