CUSTOM FONT

The purpose of this project is to develop a font from scratch, I was inspired by art deco but with a modern twist.

Application(s) used: Adobe Ilustrator, FontSelf

Sketches:

The first thing I did was to sketch out some ideas, I really wanted to make a cursive font base on my cursive but then I soon realize that I would have to make a lot of letter combinations for it to work. So I threw that idea out the window and started brainstorming some ideas. 

idea 1: just letters kinda boring
idea 2: straight lines only
idea 3: rectangular
idea 4&5: letters but the lines don't touch, wide letters
ideas 6: shadows only
idea 7: letters but thicker
idea 8: make it look like you don't pick up your pen

So idea 8 was what I decided to go for, I wanted a font that looks hand written but not messy, I also want it to be approachable but not too boring. After drawing all these ideas out on my iPad, it began the tedious process of importing it into illustrator.

Step 1:

I imported my sketch into illustrator then began using the pen tool to trace out all the letters. This took a very long time because it is way different than drawing on the iPad, I had to make sure that every anchor point was correct. One small mistake can make the whole font look wonky, I made sure to use the least anchor points as possible and make sure that everything looked ~smooth~.

Step 2:

In a separate illustrator document, I created about 60 artboards, each one for each character. On each artboard, I included the cap height, x-height, baseline, and defender. Then I created a gray box for the slug area, meaning how much space is in between characters. After I set up all the artboards, I copied each character that I created in the previous document and paste it on each art board. Copy and pasting, sounds easy enough, but it was tedious work, I had to make sure they were all scaled correctly too.

Step 3:

To make this a usable font, I used an illustrator extension called font self. Basically what it does is it created the font for you. All you need to do is import your characters then assign the corresponding character for it. After that you can export your font and it is available to use. 

Step 4:

Making a spec sheet, I was bored of the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog so instead, I used desert names.

This project was fun to create, it took a very long time to make sure everything looked right. When I have the time and patience again, maybe I will try to create a cursive font. I did not know how fonts are created but this project really puts it in perspective, fonts take work, and text time you see a font, maybe you will have more appreciation to it. 

You can download this font here

Examples of the font in use, with 1 pt. outline applied: