Tips to Create your Own Font
If you are a graphic designer or a typing enthusiast, the thought of creating your own font must have come to your mind at least once. There are hundreds of fonts that you can use to match your writing style, but sometimes, you must have felt the need to create a writing style of your own. Creating your own font gives you an opportunity to be different from conventional forms of writing. Here, we are going to tell you how to create your own font, and give you a few useful tips to do that successfully.
Know the purpose of the font
While creating the font, ask yourself what you are making the font for. If you are planning to sell it worldwide, then don’t forget to include alternative scripts and accented characters. If you are creating this font only for your personal use and for playing around on a project, then you are free to build whatever characters come to your mind. Also find out where your font will be used. If you are going to use it in a science project, then it needs to be plain and sophisticated, but if you are going to print it on a greeting card, you have a whole lot of options to play with.
Be accurate
While working in a vector-based program like Illustrator, give attention to accuracy of the fonts you draw. The Maths function of Illustrator is highly helpful in getting all your characters 100% accurate. The fonts that you create should look symmetric and in sync with each other. All the characters should complement each other and the entire set should be in harmony with one another.
Creating the font grid
Creating the characters in vector format is not an easy job. Some designers longing for accuracy spend an entire day on a single character. Have a look at your grid beforehand, which will give you a good foundation to start with. Planning is extremely essential while creating a font, and a font grid created beforehand will give you a good start. If you plan carefully, you will definitely be happy with the fonts that you create.
Complete the details
Make sure that the vectors are completely polished before you take it to the font lab. If your characters are not 100% prepared, they will only come back with a number of red flag errors. The typeface will require the same amount of work in the font lab as you did in the Illustrator. Give attention to each and every detail of each character right in its Illustrator phase. This will save a lot of time and hard work when you take the vectors to the font lab.
Use your experiments
If you are enthusiastic about fonts, you must have a folder full of typographical experiments. Use them as critical pieces of artwork that prove to be more worthwhile when you set your mind to create a font of your own. You may show this folder to an expert, and ask for advice and suggestions. Give attention to what they have to say and what they feel about your creations. You may create a font, and sell others to someone who is interested.
Get professional help
If you just want to have a font of your own, but are not creative enough to create it yourself, then leave the development process to professionals. You can create a sketch that is as accurate as you can make, and then pass those designs to a professional developer. If you are serious about entering the typeface market, then getting professional help is a must.
Once you create a font of your choice, start looking at how it performs at a wide range of tasks suited to its brief. Use this font on a number of design projects by replacing the original font. You may also seek professional opinion on how it looks, and ask for his feedback.
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