How To Create Your own Fonts

We love fonts here at Pixel Design Studios. They can, along with several other elements, make or break a design, be it online or in print. There are a huge variety, many based on historical lettering and scripts, and at least one for every occasion!

Whilst this used to be the preserve of specialist font enthusiasts and typesetters, the Internet opened it up to everyone. Since the first digital font, DigiGrotesk, was designed in 1968 by Hell Design Studio, people have been experimenting with digital versions of traditional typefaces. With the increasing availability and use of computers, fonts were used more and more, but the mass commercialisation of the Internet in the early 1980s really brought them to the forefront. With format standardisations, web font standards and other directives aimed at making fonts standardised across all machines, an explosion in the amount of foundries and designers began. Since then lots of programs have been designed to help you make your own fonts, and people certainly have been! Here are some of the best programs around today to help you create your own unique font:

YourFonts.com
Ever thought your handwriting would make a great font? Well, wonder no more. Yourfonts.com allows you to upload a high quality picture of the characters, then splits it up and allows you to download it in OpenType format, all for free!

Fontstruct.com
This is a nice, simple, pixel based font creator, and a great place to start. The easy to use interface gives you a set of shapes for each pixel, and you can create from there. It’s really very easy to sketch and erase, so give it a go! Another nice touch with this software is that it’s fully online, so you can use it anywhere and it’s owned by one of the largest font shops, Fontshop.com. So whilst it’s free to create, you can put it on sale and potentially make some money.

Fontlab.com Fontographer
At the higher end of the scale we have Fontographer and Font Lab studio. These are paid versions costing from $150 up to over $1000, but obviously come with a lot more functions. Whereas Fontstruct is pixel based, Fontlab works on vector information, allowing you a much greater flexibility and control over the shape of each character. As well as this you can choose what kind of format you want to export the final product in, import and edit existing fonts, and tweak all kinds of variables (kerning, glyphs etc). This is a professional product with all of the features that a pro would demand, and it’s reflected in the price.