Custom fonts are the epitome of branding, and web designers that can create them are in demand.
Last week, we published the first installment of a new tutorial series on creating a custom font from start to finish. In that first tutorial, we walked you through some of the basics of font creation.
In this tutorial, I’ll be picking up where I left off, showing you how to apply your new font knowledge to begin the exciting process of actually creating a font.
To begin, I’ll talk about the several different ways a custom font can be created. I’ll first discuss the method that I will be demonstrating in this tutorial, scanning a hand drawn font and then tracing it in Adobe Illustrator. I’ll also talk about creating a font based on an existing font and also starting from scratch on a font in either Illustrator or Photoshop with a tablet device or the classic mouse and keyboard.
After discussing the options available to you, I’ll move on to explaining how to go about scanning a hand drawn font and then tracing it in Illustrator. With the font completely traced, I’ll show you how to set your font up with its own set of font metrics. This is where you would pick up if you decided to create your font inside of Illustrator or Photoshop and skip the hand drawn stage.
Finally, I will show you how to place your font inside of the grid provided by YourFonts.com, the font creation website that I will be using as an alternative to purchasing some relatively expensive font software.
Next week, in the third and final part of our custom font creation tutorial, I will show you how to make the finishing touches to your font inside of the font grid and upload it to finish your font.
