Little Known Ways to Create a Hand Made Font.

Things you’ll need:

a) Pens or pencils, I used a quill for a slightly calligraphic authentic script look, of course you can use anything you can write with. You can pick up a quill in any good art shop for around ten pounds.

b) If your using a pen or quill you’ll need ink, black is ideal but not a necessity as we’ll be desaturating the letters.

c) Decent paper.

d) A font program such as High Logic Font Creator is affordable and good for this kind of font, although you’ll need a plug-in or different program to convert the font to Open Type format; however the True Type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueType format is fine.

Step 1

First step is to draw out the alphabet from A –Z , starting with a lower case h you can easily create n and u. Also the o can be the same for upper and lower case. Create both upper and lower case and 0- 9, if you plan on selling your font you will probably need to include Western European diacritics and some symbols such as currencies.

Step 2

Scan the fonts you have drawn at 300 dpi and place them into a program such as Photoshop. Alter the contrast so the white is brighter and black darker and more defined. Then desaturate the image and save them as jpegs any common format will do too.

Step 3

Bring the images into a vector program; I used Illustrator because it has live trace. Now, select all and use live trace, once done ungroup and delete and white around the font. Alternatively you can use Font labs scan font or Font creator’s Scanahand which will do this for you.

Step 4

Open a new document in Font creator, name the font and hit ok, leaving the defaults as they are. Under import image you can specify the smoothness of the font and under glyph the bounding and positioning.

Step 5

Now the longest part of making a font, once your happy with the letter copy it from AI into the font program. Do this for each corresponding letter.

You need to make sure the letter doesn’t go over the cap height line and stays within the red lines so the kerning is ok as you type. If the letter is too big simply move the red lines they are only guides so the font is consistent.

Download the Free Hand Made Script Font: Billions Created by Digital Art Empire.

Final steps and conclusion:

Once saved as TTF or OTT install it into your fonts folder. Test your font , I recommend using Photoshop to test the font as changing colours and size is fast. That was certainly a lot of fun and topped up my creative levels for this week, I will post all the fonts I create with more detailed tutorials soon.

Download from here:

Rapidshare Download (17.46 kb Zip File)

Mediafire Download (17.46 kb Zip File)