Making a Font – A sneak preview and the whole process to come

(this post contains partner links to my shop. This means I get a small amount extra if you’d purchase at the site but it will not affect you in any way)

I’m so excited! I’m actually making a font! (edit: it’s already finished and to be found here) If you know me a little then you know I love lettering, calligraphy, own too many nibs and too much ink. I don’t get to do it a lot but every week I at least whip all the supplies out to put some calligraphy on the envelopes for my clients over at DEEZ Dutch.

How to make a font

I am planning a blogpost or series of them to explain the process I went through. Making a font is a whole new area of expertise. Obviously it didn’t go smooth for me at all since I have already spent an insane amount of hours on the basics alone. It was very easy to keep going though because I ended up making a usable font within hours after uploading my letters to Illustrator.

If you use Adobe Illustrator I suggest you read this post on Creative Market. There’s a nifty plugin I bought from Fontself that made me have my font up and running (with all basic glyphs only) within an evening. All the time spent thereafter and before that I will try to elaborate on later, but if you know how to get your alphabet into Illustrator, Fontself will help you turn it into a font easily.

Then why are you still not finished?

Then why am I still not finished I hear you wonder. Well, fontself alone wasn’t enough for me. I also went into the details and noticed my glyphs were showing the simple illustrator image trace I made them suffer. Now this is all perfectly absolutely COMPLETELY fine if you want to make a quick font for personal use or maybe even personal commercial use. But I want to make this font available for others to purchase and use. So I went to a tedious process of manipulating vector points and cleaning up each glyph. Then I got more extensive software to add all the alternates for different languages and find out about glyphs I never knew existed. That is why I think a series of my process might be useful. I’m positive my next font will go a lot smoother knowing what I know now.

Can’t wait?

Can’t wait to hear more about the whole process? Well sadly it’s necessary! But I will update soon with the initial steps on paper before I went digital. You can subscribe at the bottom or on the sidebar of this post to receive my newsletter. I’m planning to send out updates more regularly and this will include blog updates.

Preview

Here’s what my font looks like so far. I hope you’re excited about it as well. Let me know what you think in the comments, and have a wonderful creative weekend!