I love typefaces. The angles, curves, serifs, script, san-serif, and kerning, leading, it amazes me how it all comes together. A minimum recommended 186-characters is needed to create a single typeface. These glyphs combine into a cohesive piece of art that is reworked to create different weights. And yet, these masterpieces of art and conveyers of information are often overlooked and minimized. So, I thought I’d take the dive and experience the journey of font creation.
The Beginings
The journey began nearly a decade ago. I thought making a font would be fun, so I looked around at the various programs to build them & discovered the prominent font creation software was expensive and complex. And although I already worked in complex programs, learning the details of making an actual font from scratch became overwhelming. I purchased a piece of software (Type 3.2) that was affordable for non-commercial use. Unfortunately, in 2013 the tools weren’t intuitive, and the process was incredibly time intensive. I shelved my interest for a while..
A few years later, an exciting extension for Illustrator & Photoshop came to market — Fontself. The extension made getting characters into a font easier, but there was still all of the fine-tuning that needed to be done, and this is where I again became distracted by client work and put my font creation on hold.
Another Attempt
Here we are in 2022, and again, I decided to give font creation a go. I watched a great training video Making Your First Font with Dan Cederholm from Dribbble, and was excited about the recommended software (Glyphs 3), but it’s for Mac OS only, and I don’t belong to it the cult of Apple. I loved the features which made font creation a smoother process, so I started looking for Windows or cross-platform alternatives.
I found Glyphr Studio, which wasn’t bad. It didn’t match up to promise of Glyphs, but I gave it a try. Following the guidance provided by Dan Cederholm, it wasn’t long before I had the base 186 characters built and in Glyphr and set about creating kerning pairs, ligatures, and setting typefaces overall kerning. I thought I was good, but I got an error on export. So, I pulled out Type 3.2 and found it’s come a long way in the nine years since I purchased it, (including a free update which surprised and thrilled me). I imported my typeface, and I’m in the process of clearing errors and setting the kerning. I’m still struggling to find why Windows doesn’t recognize the exported font, but I am encouraged that I will figure this out.
Fingers crossed that soon NDS Fonts will have their first font accepted for release on MyFonts.com. I’ll keep you all updated as the journey continues.